JACKSON, Miss.—Yusef Salaam, who served nearly seven years in prison after a false conviction for rape in New York City, told Black men in Mississippi that he first understood the meaning of the 13th Amendment when he was arrested at 15 years old.
He and four other teenagers—Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana and Korey Wise—were falsely imprisoned for the high-profile beating and rape of a woman jogging in New York City’s Central Park in 1989, also known as “The Central Park Jogger Case.”
“I looked around … I couldn’t believe that slavery was alive and sick in America,” Salaam said at the Black Men’s Health Equity conference in Mississippi’s capital city on June 29. “Here I was, as Malcolm X would say, ‘up south.’ But I thought I was up north. I thought I was in a progressive, modern reality. Yet, when I was 15, I was run over by the spiked wheels of justice.”
He survived the ordeal by learning, thinking and expressing himself, he told the crowd. “In the best of times, when I felt my strongest, I wrote. In the worst of times, when I felt my weakest, I read,” he said.
“Constitution of the United States of America, 13th Amendment, Section 1: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted shall exist within the United States of America or any place subject to its jurisdiction,” Salaam said, reciting an excerpt from “Punching The Air,” his first published book.
Salaam, now a 50-year-old New York City District 9 city councilman, was the morning keynote speaker at the conference that featured a full day of conversations around Black men’s physical and mental health. The Institute for the Advancement of Minority Health, the Black Men’s Health Equity Council and the Mississippi State Conference of the NAACP all sponsored the event themed “Black Men Matter: Uplifting, Educating and Healing Black Men In Mississippi.”
Throughout his speech, Salaam weaved in and out of stories about his life and his own mental health, encouraging Black men to talk to each other more and express themselves through creative pursuits like drawing and poetry.
“Do something. Don’t just sit in your room and close the curtains because that very light that is coming from the sun is producing life on earth,” Salaam said. “If you shut the sun out, what’s going to happen to your life?”
Donald Trump Asked NYC to “Bring Back the Death Penalty”
At the Jackson conference, Yusef Salaam joked about the 34 felony convictions of then-NYC businessman Donald Trump who, after Salaam and the other teens were arrested, placed full-page ads in several New York newspapers calling for the state to “bring back the death penalty.”
In a post-speech interview with the Mississippi Free Press on June 29, Salaam spoke candidly about the possibility of the man who once openly condemned him being again elected president of the United States.
“That nightmare could happen again. We’ve already experienced it,” Salaam said about Trump. “The challenge is, do we want to do something that’s not going to just affect the next four years of our lives but the whole rest of our lives and therefore lives that are yet to be born?”
Trump has repeatedly claimed that his criminal indictments and felony status will make him more appealing to Black voters. “I got indicted for nothing, for something that is nothing,” Trump said at an event for Black conservatives in February. “And a lot of people said that’s why the Black people like me, because they have been hurt so badly and discriminated against, and they actually viewed me as I’m being discriminated against.”
In his remarks, Salaam implored voters to consider the long-term consequences of the upcoming presidential election.
“Most certainly, if we choose the wrong way, we will be paying for it,” Salaam continued in the Mississippi Free Press interview. “And our children’s, children’s children will be paying for it. We can’t choose just because we feel like this person looks cool and he tells us he’s just like us.
“Not every Black person is a criminal.”
Salaam made those comments before President Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race. Since then, as Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee, Trump has hurled racist invective at her.
On Wednesday, Trump told a panel of Black journalists in Chicago that Harris previously identified as Indian and only recently “made a turn and she became a Black person”—falsely implying she had misled voters about her race. Harris, whose immigrant parents include an Indian mother and Black Jamaican father, has always publicly identified as both a Black and Indian woman.
‘They Used Our Trust in Them Against Us’
Family members of the five teenagers, whom some in the media accused of “wilding” leading to a gang rape that they did not commit in 1989, would later say they were coerced into confessing to the crime.
“They were telling us that Kevin was coming home with us, that he was a good boy and they knew he didn’t do anything,” Kevin Richardson’s sister, Angela Cuffee, told ABC News in 2002. “They used our lack of knowledge in the justice system against us. They used our trust in them against us.” Director Ava DuVernay told the story of the men and their families’ treatment by New York prosecutors in her 2019 Netflix documentary series, “When They See Us.”
In 2002, another man who was already incarcerated by then for other crimes, Mataias Reyes, stepped forward taking sole responsibility for the crime, and DNA positively placed him at the crime scene.
In 2014, the City of New York settled a lawsuit with the five men for $41 million.
Of the five wrongly convicted teens, Wise, who had been arrested after going to the police precinct to support his friend Salaam, served 13 years in prison. Salaam, Richardson, McCray and Santana Jr., each served about seven years.
“This settlement is an act of justice for those five men that is long overdue,” then-New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said at the time. “We can finally put this case behind us, and these five men and their families can begin to heal these wounds and move forward.”
A sixth teen arrested at the time, Steven Lopez, who pleaded guilty to robbery to avoid the rape charge, also had his conviction overturned in 2022.
