Yusef Salaam: 'Trump would have had me hanging from a tree in Central Park'
Wrongly jailed for gang rape – which inspired Trump to call for the death penalty – Salaam has poured his experiences into a novel about hope, justice and race
~ Arwa Mahdawi
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/ ... ntral-park
If Donald Trump had got his way I wouldn’t be speaking to Yusef Salaam right now. “Had his ad taken full effect we would have been hanging from trees in Central Park,” Salaam says matter-of-factly. “People wanted our blood running in the streets.”
You’ve probably seen the ad in question: it’s infamous. In 1989, a white investment banker was raped and left for dead in Central Park. Five black and brown teenagers, including 15-year-old Salaam, were charged with her rape. Two weeks after the attack, before any of the kids had faced trial, Trump took out a full-page advert in multiple New York papers calling for the death penalty. His inflammatory stunt is credited with prejudicing public opinion and contributing to the Central Park Five – now known as the Exonerated Five – going to prison for something they didn’t do. The boys’ story was retold last year in the Emmy-winning Netflix drama When They See Us, directed by Ava DuVernay.
Salaam spent almost seven years behind bars; he had his youth ripped away from him. However there is no bitterness in the slim, softly spoken, 46-year-old man I’m talking to: you can come out of prison better, not bitter, he likes to say. Salaam, who is speaking to me from his home in Georgia, completed a college degree in prison and, when he got out, dedicated his life to educating others about what he calls the “criminal system of injustice”. He has 10 children (“It’s a blended family”), a successful career as a public speaker, a record of policy reform, and a lifetime achievement award from Barack Obama. Now he and the Haitian-American author Ibi Zoboi, a National Book award finalist, have teamed up on a young adult book partly inspired by his experience. Punching the Air, a novel-in-verse, explores institutional racism and the school-to-prison pipeline through the eyes of Amal Shahid, a 16-year-old black Muslim boy who is wrongfully incarcerated after a fight in a park leaves a white kid in a coma.
Punching the Air has been a long time in the making. Salaam first met Zoboi, who has joined our video call from her New Jersey home, in 1999; they were both taking classes at Manhattan’s Hunter College. Salaam had been out of prison for two years and was grappling with how to get back into the world: “I would tell anybody and everybody about what happened to me and how Trump rushed to judge us.”
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Trump hate cult has fomented racial hate for many years. He profits from the hate as do the cops who committed these crimes who are now retired on fat, taxpayers financed pensions. All of those criminals should have been forced to spend a long stretch in jail for their crimes.
