Yusef Salaam, acquitted member of ‘Central Park Five’, wins council race

Yusef Salaam, one of five black and Latino teenagers convicted in 1989 of raping a jogger in Central Park and acquitted decades later, was elected Tuesday night to represent Harlem on the New York City Council.

Mr. Salaam, who was unopposed, had won a commanding victory in a contested Democratic primary in June, when he defeated two incumbent members of the New York State Assembly. The Democratic incumbent currently holding the Council seat, Kristin Richardson Jordan, dropped out of the race before the primaries.

Mr. Salaam, 49, spoke frequently during his campaign about his conviction, exoneration and prosecution by former President Donald J. Trump, who took out full-page ads in The New York Times and other newspapers calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty in response to the case of the Central Park jogger.

Mr. Salaam said Tuesday night that it was ironic that when Mr. Trump was elected to the Council he faced multiple criminal charges.

“Karma is real, and we have to remember that,” he said in an interview.

As the city struggled with racial conflict and division in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the case exposed the shortcomings of the criminal justice system. The confessions of Mr Salaam and the four others convicted with him were coerced. There was no DNA evidence linking the teenagers – Mr Salaam, Korey Wise, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana and Antron McCray – to the brutal attack.

Mr. Trump’s racist tirades have only fueled these tensions.

Mr. Salaam said he harbored no ill feelings toward the former president as he faces his own lawsuits — only a desire for justice.

“I hope he is treated the same way we are,” Mr Salaam said. “They found us guilty before we got a fair trial.”

Speaking from his busy victory party, Mr. Salaam said the story of his wrongful conviction, the nearly seven years he spent in prison, his acquittal and his efforts to reform the criminal justice system were why the people of Harlem joined him came into contact.

That life experience, he said, “guides me and informs me and enables me to be a humble servant to the people.”

He added: “Our participation in the greater good can move us to be a community that works together, organizes together and has a vision that is inclusive rather than exclusive.”

Mr Salaam is a moderate democrat, unlike his predecessor, Ms Jordan, a democratic socialist and one of the most left-wing members of the Council. She took strong left-wing positions on housing and the war in Ukraine, but did not receive the support of many progressive organizations and did not show up to more than half of her committee meetings.

Mr. Salaam supports the construction of a housing project on 145th Street that Ms. Jordan opposed because she feared it would lead to more gentrification. He has also said he does not want to reduce funding for police, despite his experiences with the criminal justice system as a teenager.

He didn’t get the support of local progressives during the primaries, but Cornel West, the professor and activist running for president, and Keith Ellison, Minnesota’s progressive attorney general, both endorsed him. During his campaign he appeared regularly in the national media.

Observers see his election as a ray of hope for Harlem, once the black political capital of New York. That mantle now belongs to Central Brooklyn.

The neighborhood is grappling with the effects of gentrification, including the loss of black residents, the proliferation of drug treatment facilities and a lack of affordable housing.

Keith LT Wright, chairman of the Manhattan Democratic Party and a former councilman, recruited Mr. Salaam, who was living in Georgia at the time, to run for the seat in a conversation in which he referred to him as “Harlem’s Nelson Mandela.”

“He was a political prisoner. He was wrongfully imprisoned and kidnapped as a child,” said Mr. Wright, who had sharper words for Mr. Trump’s role in Mr. Salaam’s plight.

“Yusef called it karma,” Mr. Wright said. “I’m going to come up with another sentence: What goes around, comes around.”