Yusef Salaam is greeted within seconds of stepping onto the sidewalk. “Congratulations, I wish you luck,” an elderly man says, before the door of the Frederick E. Samuel Community Democratic Club in Harlem has time to close. Less than a week prior, Salaam officially won in the competitive June 27 Democratic primary for the Harlem city council seat. Campaign fliers urging voters to “Make Yusef Your #1 Choice” still plaster the windows of the club, where Salaam keeps his office. “Thank you, thank you,” Salaam responds. “Always,” the man adds.
On this steamy Monday afternoon, West 135th Street in New York City is bustling, but Salaam, 49, dressed in a double-breasted gray suit over a crisp white shirt, is getting noticed. “Yusef, the brother!” someone shouts from a nearby athletic field. “Congratulations. You can thank Riverton for that,” another man passing in a crosswalk says, a reference to Riverton Square, a cluster of apartment buildings in Harlem. Salaam isn’t your typical local politician; he’s a folk hero, a verifiable celebrity.
As one of the five Black and Latino men exonerated in the 1989 rape and assault of a female jogger in Central Park, Salaam’s candidacy has cultivated countless “from prison to city council” headlines already. But the victory is even more remarkable by the numbers. The race against biggest rival Inez Dickens was expected to be tight. Salaam had the backing of Manhattan Democratic Party leader Keith Wright, who recruited him to run for the city council seat, but Dickens was a sitting state assemblywoman with the backing of Mayor Eric Adams, Congressman Adriano Espaillat, and former representative Charlie Rangel. Salaam’s other top rival, Al Taylor, is also a member of the New York state assembly. It turned out to be a wipeout. According to the latest tabulation by the New York City Board of Elections, Salaam won almost 64% of the vote to that of his closest, Dickens 36%. (Without a declared Republican opponent in the general election this fall, Salaam is all but expected to coast to City Hall.)
“This is more than ‘local hero makes good.’ This is ‘nonpolitician, local hero stomps tradition to create a new politics,” Hank Sheinkopf, a political consultant who worked on Bill Clinton’s presidential reelection and Michael Bloomberg’s 2009 mayoral campaign, tells Vanity Fair. “Here was a true insurgent whose campaign was being run by a non-insurgent turning out and defeating traditionalists with a life story that was entirely different from anything anybody ever came up with.”
“Oh, man, it’s humbling. It’s humbling,” Salaam says. “It’s painful, too, at the same time for me, because I understand when people want change tomorrow—and they should have gotten change already.” He is still adjusting to this new level of notoriety. “You have to be walking with the people. You got to be a part of the people,” he says. “People need [to know] that you didn’t forget who you are, where you came from.”
Not far from his campaign office, a woman named Jacqueline rushes up to Salaam. She asks if he sees his friends—a reference to the other four members of the so-called Central Park Five, now the Exonerated Five, all as she keeps trying to call her son. The conversation shifts to When They See Us, a Netflix drama miniseries created by Ava DuVernay, that depicts the story of the Central Park jogger case and the convictions of Salaam and Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, and Korey Wise. Jacqueline says she can hardly make it through the series. “I am a mother,” she says. “I would go back and forth.” Salaam responds, “You know, so many mothers have told me that same thing.”
As we walk away after snapping a photo for Jacqueline’s son, Salaam reflects on his lack of anonymity. Before his city council run, some would recognize him from the case and his exoneration. Now, the reaction feels like, “Oh, this guy is going to help us,” he says. Before it was simply, “Oh, we are happy he survived.”
Yusef Salaam enters the State Supreme Court in Manhattan with his mother Sharonne Salaam, Aug. 11, 1990.Phillip Schoultz/AP.
A former police captain, Adams ran and won on a platform of neutralizing the “bad guys” terrorizing New York City, harnessing a seemingly national panic around crime-ridden cities. Meanwhile, Salaam’s life is a cautionary tale of emboldening those narratives. “These young men were demonized beyond anything that I had seen before and beyond anything I’ve seen since,” attorney Ron Kuby, who represented Salaam on his appeal and post-conviction alongside the late William Kuntsler, tells VF. “But the lesson of that case, and many other cases like it, is when white people in New York are terrified of crime, innocent Black people pay a heavy, heavy price for that fear. And it’s a cautionary tale about not jumping too quickly and trying to align our fears with the actual facts. Crime is not at an all time high. It’s near an all time low…When we act out of our fears, especially when those fears are grounded in racism, we will do horrible things. And let’s just try not to do it again, shall we?”
When Salaam reflects on the period before he was convicted at just 16 years old, he thinks of Donald Trump, who, to be absolutely clear, is not at all interested in the lesson Kuby laid out. “I had dreams prior to going to prison that everything was going to be okay…Then all of a sudden, now I’m struck by this blow,” he says. That “blow” was the full-page advertisement in four New York City papers, including The New York Times, that Trump paid for, calling to reinstate the state’s death penalty. It didn’t reference Salaam or the four other youths in the Exonerated Five specifically, but everyone knew what Trump’s message was about. That was the moment Salaam says he was “violently awakened” to what he often describes “as the American nightmare.” Salaam spent nearly seven years in prison; he was released in 1997. In 2002, he, McCray, Richardson, Santana, and Wise were exonerated in the rape and assault of Trisha Meili. Trump has never apologized for essentially calling for their death.
The date the advertisement hit newsstands is still top of mind: May 1, 1989. “Donald Trump took out this ad that really was a firestarter to everything else that happened,” he says. “When people ask me, you know, what do you think led to your conviction? It was most certainly the color of my skin. We were convicted before we even went to trial.”