Yusef Salaam: ‘It's a Wonder We are Only Asking for Fair Treatment and Not Revenge’
Prison reform advocate Yusef Salaam wants to talk to kids. After spending over six years in prison for a crime he did not commit, he’s co-written a new YA novel that explores the inner life of a kid who has to survive the racist projects of the outside world.
Salaam was one of the Central Park Five — a group of boys aged 14-16 who were prosecuted and imprisoned for a 1989 rape that they did not commit. After the real rapist confessed in 2002, the men’s names were officially cleared. By that time, they had all served their sentences and spent years of their childhood behind bars.
Many have compared the group (now called the Exonerated Five) to Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy who was murdered for allegedly whistling at a white woman. None of these boys were seen as the children they were, but as monsters, built up by a warped culture’s racist fantasies about Blackness, masculinity, white purity and crime.
Salaam’s new novel is written in verse with writer Ibi Zoboi. It’s called Punching the Air and tells the story of a boy who is wrongly incarcerated. AJ+ senior producer Raji Ramanathan (@raji47ram) interviewed Salaam about his book, and about the notorious trial.
Damage done
Salaam spent over six years in prison before being released in 1997. After the convictions were vacated and a financial settlement reached with the city, it didn’t erase the past, Salaam said, though on some level he hoped it would. “You just stole [a] person's childhood, damaged a community,” he said. “By God's grace, we are moving forward and getting [on] with our life as we piece everything back together. But the system damaged us for sure.”
The lynch mobs then are the lynch mobs now
In 1989, after the attack, Donald Trump famously ran ads in several New York papers calling for the state to adopt the death penalty.
“He did what he did two weeks after we were accused of this crime,” Salaam said. “When you look at the American criminal justice system … it's vigilante mob mentality,” and the same mentality is in effect today, Salaam said. After Trump ran his ad, Pat Buchanan wrote that the eldest boy should be hung from a tree, and that the others should be horsewhipped, Salaam said. He hasn’t forgotten this.
“We are the ones who are in need. Those most pushed to the margins of society. Those who have been relegated to the experiments called the projects of the world,” he said. “You know, somebody said the other day – and I said, wow, that's a really powerful statement – it's a wonder that we are only asking for fair treatment and not revenge.”
The novel is Salaam’s story and more
Salaam describes his book as a fictional story based on his life, and hopes it will have wide appeal.
“We wanted [the book] to really have the power to tell the story of America: of marginalized America, Black America and Brown America,” he said. “We created a character and we gave him the name Amal, which means ‘hope’ in Arabic. We wanted him to be able to really explain what is going on in the mind of a young person. But we also wanted the people who are looking at Amal to understand first and foremost, that this is a child.”
In the American criminal justice system, Salaam said, “Children are automatically adultified when they want to vilify them.” He referenced how Michael Brown was portrayed as older and more menacing by the press.
Two futures
Salaam knows the cruel messages that American society sends to Black children, and is determined to counter them.
“If you think about a George Floyd, you think about Ahmaud Arbery, you think about Breonna Taylor … we wanted to really paint the picture of what Black America experiences in the hopes that we can change [that],” Salaam said. “If you tell a young person that they matter, that they are needed and they are valuable and necessary, that young person is going to begin to respond in a manner that speaks to that. If you tell a person that they aren't worth nothing … they begin to move throughout their life as if they're a mistake.”
On hope in the dark
“The biggest message that I want to send with my book is to never give up hope. The great philosopher Cardi B said, ‘fall down nine times, get up 10.’ And it's the truth, right?” Salaam said.
“We want all people and especially young people to never give up hope. Because once you give up hope you become your own worst enemy. You begin to have a self-defeatist mentality, and we need you to be as powerful and as bright as you must be in order to eliminate the darkness around us.”
Now known as the Exonerated Five, Yusef Salaam and four others were wrongfully arrested in the 1989 Central Park jogger case.
— AJ+ (@ajplus) October 4, 2020
Now, @dr_yusefsalaam has poured his life experiences and lessons about race and humanity into his new novel, "Punching the Air." pic.twitter.com/0cNVMCYScI