Yusef Salaam, one of the Central Park Five — a group of teens who were wrongfully convicted of raping a young investment banker on a jog in the park and spent between six and 13 years in prison — said on Saturday’s “AMJoy” that he is “very fearful” of the violent crowds at Donald Trump rallies who “came out of the darkness.”
“These people came out of the darkness and are showing their ugly heads.” Salaam told host Joy-Ann Reid.
He was also scared of “this kind of anger” emerging in a potential Trump presidency.
“When we look at him going around the country and we look in the crowds and we see the people who are there enamored by this man,” Salaam said. “We see the people who are there also protesting Donald Trump’s candidacy, and we see the supporters responding to those individuals, punching them in the face, pushing them, some of them being women and elderly people.”
“So as I see that, and then I hear Donald Trump still continue to be on this platform, it overwhelmingly causes me to be very fearful,” he continued.
Salaam was 16 years old in 1989 when he and four others were accused of the violent rape of Trisha Meili, which left her in a coma for 12 days. The five defendants — four African-American and one Latino — were convicted of multiple charges in two trials and spent years incarcerated. The convictions were vacated in 2002 when Matias Reyes confessed to the crime, and the five received $41 million from the city.
At the time of the incident, a younger Donald Trump fanned the flames by purchasing newspaper ads calling for the five to receive the death penalty. And despite the overturned convictions, he hasn’t changed his tune.
“They admitted they were guilty,” Trump said in a statement to CNN earlier this month. “The police doing the original investigation say they were guilty. The fact that that case was settled with so much evidence against them is outrageous. And the woman, so badly injured, will never be the same.”
5 Historic Elections Crazier Than This One (Photos)
The 2016 election will be over in just a few hours. But if you think the Donald Trump-Hillary Clinton race is the craziest in our history, you'll be relieved or horrified to learn that we've survived even crazier ones... as the following examples show.
The 1824 presidential election was a four-way race (are you kidding me) between members of the same party (no, seriously). Andrew Jackson won the most Electoral College and popular votes, but because no one had a plurality, the House of Representatives got to choose the president. Ridiculous.
In what Jackson supporters called the "corrupt bargain," the House chose John Quincy Adams, the first son of a president to become president himself. History would repeat itself in 2000, when another mess of a vote would result in a presidential son becoming president. Jackson's supporters' rage helped fuel his 1828 victory and 1832 re-election.
In the 1912 election, the incumbent, William Howard Taft, got fewer Electoral College votes than former president-turned-third-party candidate Teddy Roosevelt. Taft had been Roosevelt's War Secretary, and Roosevelt supported Taft as his successor in 1908, but he quickly regretted that and ran against Taft as the leader of the "Bull Moose" party. One more twist: They both lost to Woodrow Wilson. I'm not bull moose-ing you.
In 1940, Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt did something no one had done before when he ran for a third term. (He won, and died in office during his fourth.)
Before you get any ideas, President Obama can't run again, because after Roosevelt, we passed the Twenty-Second Amendment, which sets presidential term limits. That means Roosevelt will be the first and last president to serve more than two terms.
In 1972, just four years after Kennedy, segregationist Democratic candidate George Wallace was shot and paralyzed. Wallace survived and later made peace with some of the Civil Rights leaders he bedeviled in the 1960s, but too late, alas, to change his historic reputation as a champion of racism.
The 1972 election was bananas. Like Banana Republic bananas. Thomas Eagleton had to step down as George McGovern's veep nominee after it was revealed he had been hospitalized for depression. McGovern went on to lose, badly, to President Nixon, who would go on to resign in the Watergate scandal in 1974.
A positive aside: 1972 also included an African-American woman candidate, Shirley Chisholm. She was the first black candidate for a major party's nomination, and the first woman to run for the Democratic nod. A progressive hero, she paved the way for both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
Dishonorable mention: Let's not forget that for more than a month after the 2000 election, we had no idea who the next president would be, thanks to the farcical Florida recount. Embarrassing.
George W. Bush only got the nomination after a whispering campaign that his Republican rival, John McCain, had fathered a black love child. I know that sounds like something that would happen in an election in the 1850s, but no, it was just 16 years ago. You can read all about it here.
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Whatever happens at the polls today, it won’t be crazier than what happened in 1824
The 2016 election will be over in just a few hours. But if you think the Donald Trump-Hillary Clinton race is the craziest in our history, you'll be relieved or horrified to learn that we've survived even crazier ones... as the following examples show.
