Mary Altaffer/AP Photo
New York City Council candidate Yusef Salaam speaks during an interview with the Associated Press, May 24, 2023, in New York.
Yusef Salaam, one of the “Central Park Five” who was exonerated of criminal charges more than 20 years ago, has been projected to win a New York City Council primary race. Salaam has declared victory, and though the primary will not be certified until next week and there’s still a general election to contend with, barring any major upheavals, Salaam will take the council seat in Harlem.
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Salaam’s story with the Exonerated Five (a less presumptuous way to describe the group, coined by Oprah Winfrey) is a well-documented misappropriation of justice. In 1989, five young Black men were accused of sexually assaulting a jogger in New York City’s Central Park. The young men were harangued into bogus confessions, and subsequently sentenced to prison.
Years later, the real perpetrator confessed, and their convictions were overturned. New York City paid out over $40 million for the emotional distress and discrimination. The Five were also the subject of a four-part Netflix production called When They See Us, in addition to a Ken Burns documentary for PBS in 2012. Today, three of the men are criminal justice reform advocates. Salaam is the only one so far to seek elected office.
Salaam defeated two sitting members of the state assembly, including one, Inez Dickens, who held that city council seat previously for 12 years. He declared victory with just over 50 percent of the vote, compared to Dickens’s 25 percent. Because the landscape could change within the week of vote-counting left (up until July 5th), no winner has been officially declared. But with New York’s use of the ranked-choice voting system, a voting reform the progressive movement has been touting for years, “even if Salaam finishes just under 50 percent, he’d still easily be the best-positioned candidate to win once votes start getting redistributed,” CNN explained. There are no Republican contenders.
According to The New York Times, Salaam’s win signals a shift to “moderate” candidates among the Black voting population in New York. It’s true that the incumbent, Kristin Richardson Jordan, labeled herself a democratic socialist. (She dropped out of the race in May, though she still appeared on the ballot.) Salaam did not seek Jordan’s endorsement and took positions to her right on certain issues. Black candidates, and the Black voting bloc as a whole, are complex. But while Salaam may not call himself a socialist, his campaign was built off of the need for economic, housing, and environmental justice in NYC’s Ninth Council District.
For example, Salaam calls for the need to “rightsize” the police. Indeed, a more radical view would be to abolish law enforcement completely. But, realistically, candidates have not successfully won a “defund the police” campaign. It is especially difficult in a social climate that is incredibly worried about the potential for rising violent crime.
“Across the world, the safest communities are not those that are the most policed, but rather are those with the best resources—those that meet their residents where they are, and strengthen trust between community and government,” Salaam’s campaign wrote on criminal justice. Funding communities instead of the police is, believe it or not, extremely controversial. This is perhaps seen best in the Cop City debacle, which I previously wrote about for Based.
There’s also the point that the two candidates Salaam was actually running against, rather than the incumbent who dropped out, were longtime elected officials from the political establishment, not part of the newer wave of fresh, socialist-leaning voices in New York politics. Dickens is a landlord who evicted at least 17 people in recent years, and who had the support of moderate Mayor Eric Adams. In his endorsement, Adams said of Dickens, “It’s all right to have a city that’s friendly to businesses.” As New York reported, this was the only city council race the mayor weighed in on.
Assemblyman Al Taylor and Salaam cross-endorsed one another, encouraging voters to rank each of them 1-2, in a bid to lower Dickens’s vote share in the ranked-choice contest. Progressives like Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison, and even radicals like newbie presidential candidate Cornel West, endorsed Salaam.
The bottom line is this: Getting caught up in party labels neglects the fact that Salaam is advocating for progressive change.
Salaam’s win also exemplifies why the criminal justice system must be held accountable, even to those it seeks to punish. The Innocence Project, a nonprofit dedicated to criminal justice reform that Salaam sits on the board of, has helped free or exonerate over 200 individuals. Still, without the major push to clear the Five’s names, their fate would have remained as those of thousands who sit in the criminal justice systems illegally detained, falsely accused, or without a fair and speedy trial.
And the sweetest bit of irony: Perhaps one of Donald Trump’s most egregious acts of racism was the full-page ad he took out in 1989 seemingly calling for the Central Park Five to receive the death penalty. Now, while the former president fights various legal battles, some with criminal charges, and rages about his loss against President Biden, Salaam has the means to push for reform.
