Four members of the so-called Central Park Five were introduced at the Democratic convention by the Rev. Al Sharpton Thursday, who brought them on stage after saying that Donald Trump “a fellow New Yorker I’ve known for 40 years,” took “a position on racial issues” just once in that time.
“He spent a small fortune on full-page ads calling for the execution of five innocent young teenagers,” Sharpton said.
“Our youth was stolen from us,” one of the exonerated five, Korey Wise, said. “Every day, as we walked into the courtroom, people screamed at us and threatened us because of Donald Trump. He spent $85,000 on a full-page ad in the New York Times calling for our execution. We were innocent kids. But, we served a total of 41 years in prison.”
The Central Park Five were a group of Black and Latino teenagers arrested and charged for the rape and assault of a White female jogger, Trisha Meili, in Central Park 1989. Trump bought the ad soon after the attack — it called on New York to “bring back the death penalty.” They five teens were wrongly convicted in 1990 and exonerated when DNA evidence was matched to a different man who confessed to the attack. Their convictions were tossed out in 2002.
Yusef Salaam, now a New York City councilmember, said Trump wanted him and the other four men, who were teenagers at the time of the case, dead.
“45 wanted us unalive,” he said of Trump, the 45th president.
Despite the DNA evidence and confession, Trump has said he will not apologize for the comments he made more than 30 years ago. In 2019, while he was president, the New York Times noted that he was asked at the White House about the ads he bought.
“You have people on both sides of that,” he said. “They admitted their guilt.”
He also said, according to the Times, that “some of the prosecutors, they think that the city never should have settled that case — so we’ll leave it at that.”
“That man thinks that hate is the animating force in America. It is not,” Salaam said. “We have the constitutional right to vote, in fact, it is a human right. So, let us use it. I want you to walk with us. I want you to march with us. I want you to vote with us.”