Thou shalt not raise a false report: put not thine hand with the wicked to be an unrighteous witness. Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil. . . . Exodus, 23:1–2
“I’m dedicating my life to being useful,” he says. “To my community, to my neighborhood, to my city. And to do that means letting go of some burdens of the past. Never forgetting, but forgiving. There is power in forgiving.”
Spare a thought for the falsely accused. For the man sent to prison as a boy for something he didn’t do. Does anyone ever allow the reality of a false accusation to sink in and upset the equilibrium for even a moment, or is it just in and out and on to the next, like everything else? That accusation, after all, was leveled on our behalf. State power is derived from us. Justice is meant to make us whole. But what does an injustice do to us? When an innocent person serves a full prison sentence, gets out carrying the excruciating knowledge that justice is for other people and facts and innocence don’t matter when you’re a kid raised by your mom in an apartment on Fifth Avenue, uptown—Harlem, U. S. A. Spare a thought for the falsely accused.
He can’t walk down the street for getting stopped by people who have never met him but to whom he is famous. In this neighborhood, the man who was falsely accused is well-known. The elders have known him for decades, since he was a tall, skinny kid with a flattop, on the front page of all the papers. The city was coming apart in 1989—you could’ve lit the air with a match, the racial tension was that combustible. And the crime that he was accused of committing was so terrible that once he and his codefendants were identified to the public on the word of the police, the case was over before it even began. White victim, a young professional out for a jog in Central Park, raped and beaten nearly to death with a tree branch, three quarters of the blood in her body soaked into the ground. The accused were Black and brown, five of them, aged fourteen to sixteen, four confessing on videotape. What more is there to know? New York in the aftermath was a tinderbox, braying for justice, instead finding vengeance, which is supposed to belong only to God, according to God Himself.
A local man who had inherited a real estate fortune even took out full-page ads in all the local papers calling for the state to bring back the death penalty, writing: “What has happened to the respect for authority, the fear of retribution by the courts, society and the police for those who break the law . . . ?”
But that was a lifetime ago, and so some others here in Harlem seem to recognize the falsely accused man not as Yusef Salaam of the Central Park Five but as Yusef Salaam, current candidate for public office, running to represent Harlem on the New York City Council. He’s not yet even in office, but the expectation invested in him is daunting. On the street, Harlemites are taking him in, greeting him with broad smiles and queuing up for selfies, bumping elbows and shaking hands, happy that this gracious man of forty- nine has not only come through the time the state stole from him without bitterness but has agreed to be a voice for the ambitions, grievances, and despair of this beautiful, historic, and desperate neighborhood in America’s largest city. He has a ready smile and a welcoming face. “Blessings, blessings, blessings!” he will greet old friends and new. As a politician, he is a complete novice, but for the retail politicking that is the bedrock of democracy—hearing from people on the street where they live—he has a natural gift. He is inexperienced enough at the game that he will stay and talk until you’re done with him. And a city-council district may be democracy in its purest form—big enough to require a proper campaign in order to prove your worth, small enough that an officeholder, especially a rookie, might legitimately feel responsible for every soul and pothole in it.
Salaam likens any neighborhood to a human body, and each of us to cells in the body—if you put healthy, nutritious food into a body and take care to educate the mind, do things in moderation and get good rest, the body will be functioning, flourishing, and happy. If you eat badly or partake in unhealthy habits, do drugs or sleep irregularly, then the body gets sick. Dies. It’s not a bad metaphor for how society works, and it allows for just how interdependent we actually are much more than our current politics does. If some of us are left out or are doing poorly, the health of all of society is put at risk.
The needs of this body, of Salaam’s neighborhood, are intense. And as he makes his way up and down its streets, from all sides, his fellow Harlemites come to him:
“You know how long it’s been since the senior center had a coat of paint?” says a man holding a cue stick at the Lieutenant Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Center. “And we sure could use another pool table—gives people a place to gather in the evenings. . . .”
This article appeared in the 90th Anniversary issue of Esquire
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A woman buttonholes him at a community meeting at Graham Court, a Gilded Age gem on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard that has seen better days: “What are you going to do about the defecation and the urination that goes on outside my front door?!”
“I applied for affordable housing, but affordable housing ain’t affordable!” says a man who stops him on 135th Street and comes in for a hug. “We need a two-bedroom, and they’ve had us in a studio for twenty years! . . . I sound Black, right?” He is Asian, and points this out by circling his face with his index finger. “People here don’t look like me, but they sure live like me.” He complains to Salaam about the conduct of corrections officers. “But they just scared. I don’t talk from no textbook—I did fifteen years.” As Salaam begins to walk away to his next appointment, the man reaches out for his hand and issues a plea: “You’ve come too far. Don’t sell yourself out.”
An older woman on 110th Street stops short of asking for his attention, instead holding back as he speaks to a small cluster of people. Her eyes brimming with tears, she clutches your arm and shakes it gently. “I just can’t get over how much time he lost,” she says. “They are so hard on our men.”
You point to him and say that Salaam somehow seems unbroken by an experience that might well have destroyed him—publicly vilified at fifteen, wrongfully convicted at sixteen, imprisoned for almost seven years in appalling conditions upstate, on parole for three years, required to register as a sex offender for another three. She dabs her eyes with a tissue and shakes her head hopefully.
Every concern, every conceivable “issue” that a human life encounters finds its way to Salaam on these streets—hunger, housing security, economic insecurity, public safety, public health, lousy landlords, race discrimination, the human capacity to produce trash, the human tendency to triple- park, for starters.
Spare a thought for the city-council candidate. We drive from Central Harlem down toward his old neighborhood at the northeast corner of Central Park, and Salaam is careful not to go a tick over the speed limit. He’s been pulled over during the campaign and is very mindful not to give anyone any excuse to interrupt his peaceful movements. He pulls into a parking space on 110th Street across from Central Park, not a hundred yards from the building he lived in growing up, just a few hundred yards from the spot in the park where the state said he had committed the crime that altered the course of his life. Salaam hops out of the car and walks around to the passenger side, opens the door for his mother, a soft-spoken woman of regal bearing with shoulder-length salt-and-pepper dreadlocks, who steps out onto the sidewalk, into the neighborhood that her son will soon represent on the New York City Council. Yusef starts to walk his mother in the direction of home when a young man, slight and intense and wearing a backpack, approaches him.
“Excuse me,” the young man says. “You’re running for office?”
“Yes,” Salaam says. “I recently won the Democratic primary.” He smiles. “And my opponent in November is apathy.”
“His opponent in November is Write In,” his mother corrects.
“Okay, great,” says the young man. “Let me ask you—what’s the . . . what’s the point?”
Salaam hesitates for just a moment, uncomprehending. “The point of . . .” He leans forward toward the man, as if trying to better pick up his signal. “. . . running for office?
“No,” the young man answers. “I’m out here every two and four years, and I listen to all of you, and I just need to know What’s the point?” He flashes a brilliant smile and projects a crackling energy. There’s a touch of violence in his eyes. In this moment, though, he is intently waiting for an answer.
“Well,” Salaam says, “I believe that in this neighborhood we hold great power that we have never fully exercised. We are too busy dividing ourselves, going after each other—”
The young man interrupts. “We play by their rules—they play by no rules,” he says. “Oh, they go on about their rules and their Constitution, but when it comes to keeping n***ers down, they just make it up as they go!”
“Okay, okay,” Salaam says. “Now, I know something about them keeping us down.”
It is pretty clear that the young man doesn’t know who Salaam is. He looks to be about thirty, and although he grew up in Harlem, he likely wasn’t yet born when Salaam was sent to prison. He interrupts again.
“I’m sure you’ve been through some things,” he says. “Well, I’ve experienced some things, too.”
The air between them bristles.
“Tell me about your life, brother,” Salaam says.
The young man has a wide view and is well versed in politics, local and national—and he speaks urgently. He also has a specific issue. He sells weed, is an “entrepreneur,” and has been paying keen attention to the city’s pronouncements and actions, as over the past two years, Harlem has steadily filled with smoke shops that are killing his business. “I’m trying to figure out why outsiders are now selling legal marijuana on our streets. These shops aren’t licensed and could be a danger to the public. I want to participate in the legit economy, but these motherfuckers . . .”
Salaam has been watching the young man closely as he flashes rage with his eyes and immediately takes it back with his smile. An astonishing dynamic is emerging on this sidewalk in Harlem. Yusef Salaam, who had every reason to give up on society, or “the system,” or America, is straining to prevent the young man from doing the same. And the young man, well, he is desperate for a reason to believe and is not yet sure that he is finding it.
“Brother, we are trapped inside of someone else’s hundred-year plan,” Salaam says. “The only way to break out of it and make our own plan is together. The only thing I know is that we as a community have never used our power—”
“Is there a we?!” the young man snaps. “Am I a we?” He flashes that smile as he looks inward, momentarily amused by the wordplay. “Who are we?”
And then he drops the smile and levels his gaze. “Because I’m not playing—I’m ready to burn this motherfucker down. What is the strategy, and why should I give a shit in the first place? Why be involved?”
Salaam: Because I know enough from when the spike wheels of “justice” ran over me and my family thirty-four years ago that if we are not involved and in numbers, and using our voice to change the world, then they will use our voices against us. Brother, you have to trust me when I say that divided, we won’t stand a chance.
Young man [more urgently this time]: Hear me out. Do we have to burn it down, or what kind of political changes you talking about?
Salaam: I’m not a politician, brother.
Young man: Then what are you?
Salaam: I’m you.
There were twenty boys rampaging in the park that night.
There were thirty-two. There were forty.
It was the Central Park Ten.
The Central Park Six.
The Central Park Five.
There was “plenty of physical evidence” linking the five to the attack.
There was no physical evidence linking any of the five to the attack.
The police interrogations were conducted by the book.
The defendants were coached, their confessions were coerced, and they were told that if they just admitted involvement in the jogger attack, they could go home.
For a case that has now been closed twice, there remains a lot in dispute. Well, maybe better to say that some very powerful people cling to a version of events that has since been abandoned as untrue. What is now clear is that the convictions of the Central Park Five were won in spite of grievous flaws in the evidence—perhaps it’s better to say in spite of a grievous lack of evidence. Because what is also now clear is that there was physical or biological evidence connecting only one person to the assault on the jogger that night—a person not among the five defendants. For that night in April 1989, there is no reliable accounting for exactly where those five teenagers were and when, nor exactly what they may or may not have been doing. Maybe better just to say that the Central Park Five didn’t commit the terrible crime for which they were convicted.
What is not disputed is that on the night of April 19, 1989, a young investment banker named Trisha Meili was out for a run in Central Park when she was attacked, raped, viciously beaten, and left for dead in the bushes three hundred feet from the park’s 102nd Street crossover. Unconscious and near death, she would be found by passersby at 1:30 a.m.
Earlier that evening, witnesses would tell police that some kids had been assaulting pedestrians near the Central Park reservoir, several blocks south. In response, cops had flooded the park and hauled a large group of teen–agers to the precinct located at the center of Central Park. Among them were fourteen-year-old Raymond Santana and fourteen-year-old Kevin Richardson, who did not know each other. The boys were expecting to be sent home when Meili’s near-lifeless body was found. A call from a detective at Metropolitan Hospital would stop their release and mark the beginning of a legal and social nightmare that would come to be recognized as one of the most shameful failures in the history of American justice.
The next day, April 20, based on descriptions from the boys already in custody, fifteen-year-old Antron McCray was also questioned by police. No one seems to know for sure how the police came to be looking for Yusef Salaam, but it seems that the cops had a description of another boy—tall kid with a flattop—that sounded like Yusef.
Salaam’s brother Shareef had heard that the police were looking for his brother and begged him not to go outside that afternoon. Salaam’s sister, Aisha, remembers that Shareef, who was bigger than his older brother, wrestled Yusef to the floor to keep him from leaving the apartment. “Aisha!” Yusef yelled. “Get him off of me!” Shareef finally let go of his brother, and Aisha and Yusef took the elevator down to the lobby, where they ran into Yusef’s friend Korey Wise, sixteen, who also lived in the building. The building security guard told them that at least three police officers had just taken the elevator up to the Salaam apartment.
Aisha is the oldest of the siblings and says she thought that if she could just talk to the police, they’d understand their mistake. Her brother was a placid young man, averse to physical confrontations, she says. When a mugger once demanded his money, he emptied his pockets without hesitation. Another time, when Yusef was on his bike and a thief approached him and said, “Get off,” Yusef got off.
“Let’s go up and talk to them,” Aisha Salaam remembers telling her brother. Korey Wise went upstairs with his friend and offered to go with Yusef to the precinct to keep him company. Those five—Santana, Richardson, McCray, Salaam, and Wise —would become the Central Park Five.
When the police came for Yusef on the evening following the rape and beating of Trisha Meili, they knocked on his apartment door on the twenty- first floor of 1309 Fifth Avenue. Shareef Salaam answered the door in his underwear. Get dressed, you’re coming with us, they told him. What? Why? the confused teenager asked the cops. Are you Yusef Salaam? they asked. That’s my brother, he said. And that, Yusef Salaam says, is how close his brother came to also being a member of the Central Park Five.
“There was a saying in my neighborhood,” Salaam tells me. “When the cops come looking for you, any n-i-g-g-e-r will do,” taking care to spell the word rather than say it.
Sharonne Salaam was a single mother who taught fashion design at Parsons School of Design in Greenwich Village. When she got home from work that evening, Aisha and Shareef were both hysterical that the police had taken Yusef in for questioning in connection with the crime that was exploding in the news across the city that day. Sharonne at first thought they were joking. She walked through the apartment, looking in closets and under beds. Okay, that’s enough—you can come out now. When she realized that her oldest son really wasn’t there, Sharonne sat Aisha and Shareef down and said, Calm down and tell me the full story again, from the beginning.
“I was a pariah. They said I was born a mistake. I’m not a mistake,” Salaam tells me. “And I think that what I have been through gives me perspective on what people go through in life. I never thought about politics or holding elective office until recently, but I feel that this—I guess you might call it empathy—will be helpful to me as I serve my community. If, as Nietzsche says, you can find the why, then you can live any how. We all need a reason to live. This is mine. I was supposed to go through what I went through.”
We are sitting alone in a cluttered little office on 135th Street—a local Democratic club that doubles as his campaign office. There are mismatched photographs of past club officers on the wall, the flooring is peeling, and campaign literature is piled haphazardly on every surface. It was from here that Salaam took on and defeated two establishment candidates in the primary for his council seat. He now has a fully germinated idea of how his story fits into the larger story of loss and struggle and perseverance that defines the Black experience in this town and in this country, and he speaks it in full paragraphs, only occasionally lapsing into the rote poetry of the motivational speaker he now is. “For Black Americans, robbed of our names, our culture, our God, it is just a short step further to lose your mind, too,” he says. “But what if a person doesn’t lose his mind? What if a person instead taps back into the memory in Sankofa, which is the sacred knowledge from your past that enables you to live in your present?”
He takes special meaning and great comfort from this African concept—Sankofa—of looking back to live forward. With meaning comes purpose, with purpose comes acceptance. So that in part explains how he came through the fire, as his uncle Frank describes the experience. Many people never come through it but instead are consumed by it. The other part was the unstinting support of his mother, his grandmother, his siblings, and his uncle, who is a father figure. Without their belief, he says, he may well have lost his own.
It was Salaam’s grandmother who told him to find meaning in the tribulation. She told him, “Yusef, I don’t know why they’re doing this to you, but be still and listen.” When he was in prison, she wrote to him every week, addressing the letters to “Master Yusef Salaam,” because she wanted whoever processed the letters to know that her grandson was somebody.
It was Salaam’s mother who made sure that he did not confess on videotape, and he was the only one of the five who didn’t. It was Salaam’s mother who repeatedly refused consent for police to question Yusef. It was Salaam’s mother who insisted instead that her son be given an attorney and who told him to stop talking to investigators immediately. “She told me: ‘You will not participate in your own destruction,’ ” Salaam says. “They were breaking us down. They would have broken me, too, without my mother.”
After his conviction, his mother would keep vigil at the prison, making the trip upstate from the city once or twice a week for the entire six years and eight months that he was incarcerated—to Dannemora, Harlem Valley, wherever they moved him to. She would often switch the days of the week so as to disrupt routine—a sort of surprise inspection, so that prison staff would never know for sure when she might show up. “It was the only way to make sure he stayed alive,” she says. “I had to keep Yusef alive.”
It was his mother who would call him in 2002 to tell him that the person who had actually committed the crime for which he was convicted—a serial rapist and killer named Matias Reyes—had confessed to the rape and assault of Trisha Meili. By then, Salaam was living in Stone Mountain, Georgia, trying with difficulty to put together some kind of life. Reyes had found Jesus, she told her son. Knew details only a crime’s perpetrator would know. The swabs taken from the victim that night so long ago had immediately matched Reyes’s DNA. Sharonne Salaam delivered this news, and then they both sat in stunned silence on the phone for what seemed like a long time.
Spare a thought for the mother of the falsely accused.
The young man’s eyes narrow as he processes what Salaam has just said: “The spike wheels of justice ran over your family?” His eyes widen as the identity of the man he’s talking to dawns on him. Not fifty yards from where we stand there is now an entrance to Central Park called the Gate of the Exonerated, dedicated last year as a monument to the falsely accused men, and as an admonition to the unwritten future to do better than we have done. It also stands in stone as a reminder that even in a time defined by our seeming inability to acknowledge error, extend grace, apologize to each other, and correct course, lost truths can still be found and long-delayed justice is not always justice denied. The young man’s shoulders soften, the brilliant smile takes over his face, and he offers Salaam his hand but instead comes in for a hug. If Salaam has reason for hope, the young man seems to concede, how insurmountable could his grievances be?
The young man walks into the afternoon, and Salaam stands on the street in his old neighborhood, thinking of the exchange and of the challenge of persuading others to believe in a system from which they feel estranged. If anyone understands that, it is Salaam. No one in a position of power and direct responsibility for his indictment, conviction, and imprisonment has apologized or even acknowledged error. When the prosecutor who oversaw the case against the Central Park Five heard of Reyes’s confession and the conclusive evidence of his guilt, she said, “I think Reyes ran with that pack of kids. He stayed longer when the others moved on. He completed the assault. I don’t think there is a question in the minds of anyone present during the interrogation process that these five men were participants not only in the other attacks that night, but in the attack on the jogger.”
The New York police commissioner ordered a review of the investigation, and the resulting report found the department blameless, asserting despite a paucity of evidence that “it is more likely than not that the defendants participated in an attack upon the jogger.” As if “more likely than not” were an acceptable standard of criminal justice anywhere anyone would want to live.
When asked if he regretted placing the ads in all the local papers calling for the death penalty in the wake of the attack, ads that contributed to the toxic atmosphere in New York City and potentially compromised the defendants’ ability to receive fair trials, that real estate heir, Donald Trump, who by then was president of the United States, declined to apologize, saying, “They admitted their guilt.”
Speaking about this ignominious record, Salaam is encyclopedic. The people who are vested in the false accusation are, he thinks, also the people who remain vested in the notion that it is simply inevitable that people who look like him must eventually wind up in the system. The deference to prison is still that powerful. And it is that matrix that he believes must be broken. Yusef Salaam’s time on earth puts him at the nexus of many things that have come to define American life—our never-healing racial wound, our deeply ingrained antipathy between police and communities of color, and, in the most promising instance, our response to the revanchism of the Trump-led reversion to our worst impulses—in the stubborn hope that we can be and do better by participation in public life.
Salaam is surprisingly light and free of rancor. Appreciates complexity and nuance in an era not known for either. As a budding public servant, for instance, he believes in the police. “We can all be victims of crime,” he says. “Some of us are also victims of the police. That doesn’t mean all policing is bad. It means that we need better policing. I know in an intimate way the cops who get away with doing bad things by saying that they were just doing their job—they were not just doing their job.”
He doesn’t seem to relish obvious opportunities to settle scores. When asked for a reaction earlier this year after former president Trump was criminally indicted in New York City, Salaam offered a simple one-word response: “Karma.”
As he stands here on his mother’s street, he contemplates what it might mean to absolve those who resist responsibility for their actions. What does an injustice do to us? The state has the power to condemn, to absolve, to forgive on behalf of society, the people, us. But whose power is it to forgive a recalcitrant state when the state doesn’t possess the grace or wisdom to even seek forgiveness?
It is a supreme irony of our time that that power belongs to the powerless, to the wronged, to the falsely accused and imprisoned. It belongs to the victims of misused state power. It belongs to Yusef Salaam. It is the most aggrieved who must, it seems, also be the most gracious.
Salaam raises his arms and opens his hands, as if releasing something into the New York sky. “I have had to learn how to forgive. It is the only way I know to repair myself. I have to forgive Donald Trump,” he says, gesturing down Fifth Avenue. “I forgive the prosecutors . . . I forgive the police . . . I forgive those who have threatened me and who told me to watch my back forever. I forgive. I forgive. I forgive.”
Story: Mark Warren
Photos: Norman Jean Roy
Styling: Bill Mullen
Production: Danelle Manthey at Somersault Productions
Production Design: Michael Sturgeon
Tailoring: Joseph Ting
Creative Direction: Nick Sullivan
Design Direction: Rockwell Harwood
Visuals Direction: Justin O'Neill
Executive Producer, Video: Dorenna Newton
