Al Sharpton and members of the Central Park 5 came to Philly with memories of Trump

New York City Councilmember Yusef Salaam, one of the members of the Exonerated 5 — known as the Central Park 5 — told a Philadelphia crowd Friday that he will “never forget” that former President Donald Trump took out full-page ads in major newspapers calling for New York to adopt the death penalty after the five Black and Latino boys were falsely accused of assaulting and raping a white woman jogging in Central Park in 1989.

”I remember what Donald Trump did to us,” Salaam said to the audience on Friday. “We can never forget.”

Salaam and Kory Wise, another one of the five exonerated men, came to Philadelphia from New York with the Rev. Al Sharpton as part of a get-out-the-vote effort hosted by Sharpton’s National Action Network. They spoke to a room of approximately 120 people at Sharon Baptist Church in Wynnefield Heights, including Black clergy from around Philadelphia and National Action Network members from New York. Sharpton said their Philadelphia visit was the first of a series of get-out-the-vote events in various cities.

“Since there is a rumor that some Black men are being persuaded another way, we’re not going to tell you who to vote for, but we want you to have the information,” Sharpton said to the crowd.

Trump’s campaign has visited Philadelphia multiple times in efforts to reach Black voters, including inviting North Philly rapper OT7 Quanny into his entourage during a campaign visit in June. One event backfired when one of his surrogates, Rep. Byron Donalds (R., Fla.) positively referenced the Jim Crow era. (The conservative congressman stood by his comments when he returned to Philly to stump for the former president.)

The significance of the wrongful conviction of the Exonerated 5 is especially poignant with Trump running for president. Trump has decided not to apologize for his ads, and has suggested in recent years that he still believes the men were responsible.

“I happen to be able to have a platform where, when we speak, people listen,” Salaam said in an interview Friday. “They understand that we were run over by the spike wheels of justice, and it was because of what Donald Trump himself did 35 years ago by taking out those full-page ads in New York City’s newspapers.”

The five teens were exonerated in 2002 after Matias Reyes, who was serving a life sentence for other rapes and murder, confessed to the crime from prison. Reyes’ DNA matched the sample found on the victim.

As Trump’s campaign works to win over Black voters, Trump continues to make comments denigrating to Black people. Most recently, he targeted Haitian immigrants in the Pennsylvania town of Charleroi and spouted false claims about Haitian immigrants in Ohio eating household pets. In July, he baselessly challenged Harris’ identity as a Black woman during a disastrous interview at a National Association of Black Journalists convention.

Whether or not these comments offend Black voters is one thing — and whether they show up to vote against Trump is another.

“The truth of the matter is that nonparticipation is participation,” Salaam said. “We have to understand that and know that.”

State Sen. Sharif Street spoke about the importance of Pennsylvania as a battleground state, saying that “everything is riding” on what voters here do.

“I got six little grandbabies and they’re going to look back in history and either we’re going to be remembered as the generation like the civil rights generation that stood up and were counted, and set history in the right direction — or we’re going to fail them and they’re asking us: ‘Why did you fail us?’” he said.