Wrongfully jailed in 1995, he takes a seat on NYC council

NEW YORK — Yusef Salaam stood at the front of the City Council Chamber in Lower Manhattan with his right hand raised and his left hand on the Koran held by his wife. It was the one that his mother gave him when he was 15 years old and standing trial for a crime he did not commit. Its pages, filled with notes and bookmarks, were kept intact by a cloth cover that Salaam made during nearly seven years in prison.

Surrounded by relatives including his mother, sister, and some of his children, Salaam was asked by Michael McSweeney, the city clerk, to repeat an oath.

With each passage that McSweeney recited and Salaam repeated, their voices took on volume and urgency: “I will support the Constitution of the United States and the constitution of the state of New York,” Salaam said. “I will faithfully discharge the duties of the office of council member of the ninth district, in the borough and county of New York, in the city of New York, according to the best of my ability.”

“Council member Salaam,” McSweeney said, “Congratulations.”

Salaam’s family broke into cheers. He placed his hand over his heart.

It was one day and 21 years after his exoneration from a first-degree rape conviction in a case so brutal that it had stunned a crime-weary city and aligned New York’s political, law enforcement, and media establishment squarely against him and his co-defendants.

In 1990, Salaam was sent to prison as one of the Central Park Five. This summer, he beat two incumbent state Assembly members in a Democratic primary and officially won the council seat in an uncontested election in November. He took office on New Year’s Day.

Salaam is a political neophyte whose skill as an operator within the byzantine universe of the city’s municipal government is completely untested. “I’m not a part of that world,” he acknowledged. “It takes time.”

His value to his constituents in Harlem is not measured, at least not yet, by a talent for weighing policy matters or solving neighborhood problems.

He brings to his community the power and the symbolism of his own life story. “Everything — every single thing — that I experienced has prepared me for this,” Salaam said before being sworn in on Dec. 20. “I needed to be in the belly of the beast, because now I can see that those who are closest to the pain need to have a seat at the table.”

Those who have followed the story closely, watching Salaam’s rise from a powerless member of the Central Park Five to an elected official in the very city that wronged him so terribly, appreciate the astonishing arc of his life.

“This is what justice looks like,” said Ken Burns, one of the directors of the 2012 “Central Park Five” documentary that told the hard-to-stomach story of the arrest, conviction, and exoneration, weaving together interviews with the five men and details about the conduct of the police and the press.

“It is a testament to the resilience of the man who is about to take this position, and I think we can only just stand in awe,” Burns said.