Sharpton, Central Park Five members come out of the vote in Philly – NBC10 Philadelphia

A few dozen New Yorkers boarded a bus in Harlem on Friday with civil rights leader Rev. Al Sharpton and members of the group formerly known as the Central Park Five bound for Philadelphia, where they toured the city in hopes of stimulating the upcoming youth vote the 2024 election.

With less than 40 days until Election Day, choosing a battleground state for a voter turnout bus tour made sense: Whichever presidential candidate wins Pennsylvania will likely do so by a narrow margin and with a lion’s share of the Black vote. But it was a strategic decision to recruit speakers many of whom initially knew were black and Latino teenagers who were wrongly convicted in a case that former President Donald Trump so vocally supported, Sharpton said.

“Polls show some black men are leaning toward Trump,” he told The Associated Press on Friday. “I don’t know if that’s true or not. But black men need to hear some black men say, ‘Let me tell you about the Trump I know.'”

The Trump the Central Park Five know is the one who took out a newspaper ad in New York City calling for the teenagers’ execution after the 1989 attack on a white jogger. The case sparked racial tensions locally and later became a national symbol of racism in the justice system.

And more than 34 years later, the group of men now known as the “Exonerated Five” view the former president as a convicted felon who walked the same courtroom hallways when he was found guilty in a hush-money trial in June.

Yusef Salaam, one of the exonerated men, said Friday that using his voice to encourage voter turnout was consistent with lessons his mother taught him as a teenager. His message to Philadelphia voters was part condemnation of Trump, part advocacy of fulfilling his civic duties.

“We have to fight because the lives of our children and our children’s children depend on it,” said Salaam, who won a seat on the New York City Council last year. “Will we be allowed to somehow appreciate the American dream, or will we delve deeper into the American nightmare?”

The jogger case was Trump’s first foray into anti-crime politics, foreshadowing his outspoken populist political persona. Since then, dog whistles and openly racist rhetoric have been an integral part of Trump’s public life.

But the Republican presidential candidate supports reforms that highlight flaws in the criminal justice system. As president, Trump signed legislation eliminating harsh sentences for nonviolent drug crimes that had overcrowded the nation’s prisons and exacerbated racial disparities in incarceration. In 2018, he used his power to commute the sentences of people like Alice Marie Johnson, who served 21 years in federal prison for a drug trafficking conviction.

The convictions against Salaam and the other wrongfully convicted young men were overturned in 2002 after evidence emerged linking another person to the jogger’s brutal beating and rape in Central Park. Trump refused to apologize to the exonerated men in 2019 and again defended his position on the case during a debate with Vice President Kamala Harris earlier this month.

Of the exonerated five — which includes Salaam, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana and Korey Wise — only Salaam and Wise boarded the bus to Philadelphia. With Sharpton and more than 50 supporters, Salaam and Wise enlisted residents and students from Sharon Baptist Church, the University of Pennsylvania and the Community College of Philadelphia.

Wise said the message he brought to Philadelphians was simple: “Make your voice heard while we’re still here and while we’re still alive.”

Of the five people exonerated, Wise spent the most time in prison before his conviction was overturned. He wants people to vote to prevent other young people from experiencing what he did.

“I’m not doing this for me, I’m doing this for little Korey who’s not here anymore,” he said. “I represent him.”

The bus tour was sponsored by Sharpton’s National Action Network, a nonprofit civil rights group that does not endorse political candidates. But Sharpton and the exonerated men have been vocal this election year, criticizing Trump’s rhetoric in the Central Park jogger case and his record on racial issues.

In August, during the final night of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Sharpton shared the stage with members of the Exonerated Five. From the stage, Salaam lamented Trump’s failure to apologize for his damaging rhetoric in the Central Park jogger case.

Weeks later, during the debate, Harris implored the exonerated men in her own criticism of Trump’s decades-long record of stoking racial division. In the spin room after the debate, as Trump stopped by and spoke to reporters, Salaam grabbed the former president and confronted him.

Trump mistook him for a supporter, a moment Salaam found bizarre. But he still walked away proud, the councilman said.

“Those moments when you stand up for yourself, speak for yourself, speak up for other lives too,” Salaam told the AP. “It gives others a chance to see, ‘If he could stand up, I could stand up.’ If he could still be here, I could be here.”

Sharpton said Philadelphia is the first of other planned stops on his organization’s voter engagement tour. He said he will appear in the battleground states of Ohio, Wisconsin and North Carolina in the coming weeks.

The success of the effort will be measured not only by the election results, but also by the community’s turnout on Nov. 5, said Malcolm Byrd, chief operating officer of the National Action Network.

“This is not just a mobilization effort, this is just about us saying we did something,” he said. “We want to set a fire in Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia. … We move forward with a spark in the hope that there will be an inferno of justice on Election Day.”