'Almost Like Poetic Justice': Yusef Salaam Wins
One of the 'Central Park Five' is on his way to the New York City Council
Vernell Walker remembers Yusef Salaam’s mom pacing the streets of Harlem, advocating for her son’s freedom after he and four other teens were arrested and accused of brutally attacking a jogger in Central Park in 1989.
Roughly two decades after the eventual exoneration of the group once known as the Central Park Five, Walker watched the son striding down the same blocks, campaigning for a City Council seat he is likely to occupy after winning the Democratic primary last week.
“There’s tears from my eye because he lost a lot of young years,” Walker, who is 74 years old, told my colleague Erin Ailworth. Walker was referring to the nearly seven years he spent wrongfully imprisoned for a crime that DNA evidence later linked to another person. “I’m happy that he won. God bless him and his mother. His mother was right there.”
In an article for The Wall Street Journal, Erin and I reported how Salaam’s personal story powered his political rise, as many voters felt his run-in with the criminal-justice system’s failings made the 49-year-old fit to overhaul it. Erin went up to Harlem, accompanied by photographers Thalia Juarez and Bea Oyster, to interview Salaam and people who voted for him.
Salaam bested Inez Dickens, a longtime politician who currently represents parts of Harlem in the state Assembly. Her campaign had the support of unions and established elected officials, including Mayor Eric Adams.
His platform—whether talking about affordable housing, investments in economic development and the workforce, or public safety—almost always includes the word justice.
“This guy is Harlem’s version of Nelson Mandela,” Manhattan Democratic Party Chairman Keith Wright, a Salaam supporter, told me. “He was wrongly incarcerated, he took the bullets, he took the bows and arrows, and he took them for us—for this community.”
The story of unjust incarceration resonated in one of the nation’s most prominent historically Black neighborhoods. Older voters said Salaam’s candidacy forced them to recall the heavy-handed policing tactics of the 1990s. Some younger voters said they learned about the Central Park Five from a more recent documentary and limited Netflix series—and that they saw a connection between Salaam’s experience in 1989 and the murder of George Floyd in 2020.
“In a post-George Floyd environment where criminal-justice reform is first and foremost on the mind of so many voters, in addition to other injustices, Yusef is a person who has been a face of the need to reform multiple aspects of our government,” said Basil Smikle, who directs the public-policy program at the City University of New York’s Hunter College and once ran for office in the neighborhood.
Salaam spent nearly seven years in prison in connection with the 1989 rape, which was front-page news in New York and galvanized white fears about Black and Hispanic teenagers “wilding” in Central Park. Donald Trump, then a local real-estate developer, paid for a full-page ad calling for the state to bring back the death penalty as a response to the attack.
DNA evidence eventually linked a serial rapist, Matias Reyes, to the crime. He then confessed that he alone was responsible for the rape. A state judge vacated the Central Park Five’s convictions in 2002, and the five men won a roughly $40 million settlement in 2014. Law enforcement and city officials admitted no wrongdoing in their handling of the case.
“It’s almost like poetic justice,” Salaam said as he sat in his campaign office, surrounded by posters, a map of the district on the table in front of him. “What happened in Harlem is a clear indication that Harlem wants something different, needs something different, desires something different.”
THE QUESTION: I recently walked past the birthplace of a New Yorker who served as governor, U.S. secretary of state, U.S. Supreme Court chief justice and a Republican presidential candidate. Who was this person, and in what city was I walking?
Know the answer? Drop me a line at jimmy.vielkind@gmail.com. Or just write with thoughts, feedback or to say hi.
THE LAST ANSWER: Alexander Hamilton was the only New Yorker who signed the Constitution, after the other two delegates left. The four New Yorkers who signed the Declaration of Independence were William Floyd, Philip Livingston (who has an avenue in Albany), Lewis Morris and Francis Lewis.