On April 18, 1989, then 15-year-old Dr. Yusef Salaam went to sleep living the “American dream.” The next morning, he awakened to the “American nightmare.”
That night, a 28-year-old woman was brutally raped and left for dead in New York City’s Central Park. Five teenagers—four Black and one Latino—including Salaam, were tried and wrongly convicted of a crime they did not commit. They became known as “The Central Park Five.”
Salaam shared his story—one of systemic failures and disparities, and personal triumphs—during an hour-long keynote address Friday, January 20, for the sold-out Illinois State University Martin Luther King Jr. Cultural Dinner in the Bone Student Center’s Brown Ballroom.
“Almost 34 years ago, I was run over by the spike wheels of justice,” Salaam said. “They say God doesn’t place more on you than you can bear. And even though I may have said, ‘Why me?’ A good friend of mine, Les Brown said, ‘Why not you?’”
After serving six years and eight months in prison, Salaam and the other four members of the “Central Park Five” had their convictions vacated in 2002 when previously unidentified DNA evidence in the “Central Park Jogger Case” was matched to a convicted murder and serial rapist who confessed to the crime. They became the “Exonerated Five.”
“Even if you’re struggling with anything right now, know that you were born on purpose. And know that you have a purpose.”
Dr. Yusef Salaam
“I represent the microcosm of the macrocosm of cases just like ours,” Salaam said. “The Central Park Jogger Case is not an anomaly. It is not until you go into the womb of America, the place many call the belly of the beast. But I call it the womb because it’s not what happens to you, but what happens inside of you, that makes all the difference. You see, at 15 years of age, they looked at the color of my skin and judged me by it—and not the content of my character.”
When he was convicted, Salaam said the “guilty” verdict echoed so many times across the courtroom, he lost count. As he was handcuffed and led to the back, Salaam remembers watching a tear roll down the court reporter’s face. “She was a Black woman who had probably seen far too many cases just like this,” Salaam said.
During his wrongful imprisonment, Salaam said he heeded advice from his mother. From the moment when he was first interrogated by police, she told him, “Stop talking to them. They need you to participate.”
“In prison, hearing those words, it disallowed me from allowing time to do me—but rather—it allowed me to do the time even though it was unjust time,” Salaam said. “Because if I allowed the time to do me, I would turn into the monster that would make it so that they would have to build more cages to put more monsters in.”
Salaam wrote poetry while incarcerated and later published many of his works in the book Words of a Man, My Right to Be.
“I’ve always called this body of work “Words of a Man,” because the social injustice systems weren’t treating me like a man,” Salaam said.
After he was released from prison, Salaam had to remind himself that he was born on purpose—and with a purpose.
“Even if you’re struggling with anything right now, know that you were born on purpose. And know that you have a purpose,” Salaam told the audience of 680 students, faculty, staff, and community members.
In the two decades that have followed his exoneration, Salaam has utilized his platform to share his story while advocating for criminal justice reform, prison reform, and the abolition of juvenile solitary confinement and capital punishment. He is also a family man—married with kids—and he continues to write poetry and deliver inspirational talks grounded in his personal experiences.
“This journey has taught me that in your DNA, wrapped in the deoxyribonucleic acid of your being, is everything that you need,” Salaam said. “It is what you can pass back to the generations to come as a baton to thwart generational curses. It is the legacy with which you allow yourself to live on because of what you have left.
“It is the dream of Dr. King, as we dream with our eyes wide open. It gives us the audacity to believe in ourselves—to have hope for a better tomorrow than that which we lived through today.”
The Martin Luther King Jr. Cultural Dinner was presented by the Office of the President, University Housing, University Police, the Office of General Counsel, the Office of Equity and Inclusion, and the Association of Residence Halls. Ahead of Friday’s dinner, a free showing of the award-winning documentary The Central Park Five took place Wednesday, January 18, in Braden Auditorium.
