The Significance Of Exonerated 5 Member Yusef Salaam Speaking At The DNC

Councilmember Yusef Salaam speaks during a rally at City Hall on June 20, 2024, in New York City. | Source: Michael M. Santiago / Getty

Nobody tell Donald Trump or any of his MAGA white nationalist cultists like Charle Kirk, but Exonerated Five member Yusef Salaam is expected to speak at the Democratic National Convention.

Salaam is now a member of the city council of NYC, but in 1989, he was one of five Black and Latino teenagers who was accused, convicted and later exonerated of the rape and assault of a white woman who was attacked in Central Park. At the time of their conviction, Donald Trump took out full-page ads in four different newspapers calling for the execution of the Central Park Five. After Salaam, Antron McCray, Raymond Santana, Korey Wise and Kevin Richardson were exonerated, Trump doubled down on insinuations that they were guilty and refused to apologize for his lynch-happy ad campaign calling for their deaths.

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Now, Salaam is scheduled to take the DNC stage Thursday evening in support of the woman who might just ensure that Trump is denied a second term as president for the second time, Vice President Kamala Harris.

“Something very special is happening in America right now — a Black woman is going to be the president of these United States,” Salaam said Saturday as he walked through Central Harlem during the Harlem Week festival, according to the New York Times. “It’s also a very dangerous time. Democracy itself is on the ballot.”

From the Times:

The news website Semafor  first reported last week that Mr. Salaam had been invited to speak at the convention, but it said that plans had not been locked in. He is expected to be introduced after remarks by the Rev. Al Sharpton and to be joined onstage by three of the four men who were wrongly convicted with him as teenagers and who together came to be known as the Central Park Five — Korey Wise, Raymond Santana and Kevin Richardson, according to the people familiar with the plans.

Last year, after Salaam had won his Democratic primary in an election for a seat on the city council in NYC, Salaam took time during his victory party to address Trump’s past animus towards the Exonerated Five just after Trump had been indicted on 37 felony charges, 34 of which he was later convicted of.

“There were large ads bought in 1989. A whisper for the state to kill us. A whisper, in fact, into the darkest enclaves of society for them to do to us what they had done to Emmitt Till,” Salaam said.

Now, we wait to see what Salaam and possibly other members of the Exonerated Five will have to say Thursday night.

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