While the former president was being found guilty of 34 felonies in New York on Thursday, the Rev. Al Sharpton said his thoughts were with the Central Park Five.
The trial of Trump began in April in the same building where five Black and Brown boys were tried and found not guilty of raping and killing a white woman in 1989. In 2002, a judge threw out the sentences.
He said in a statement, “This is the same building that Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, and Korey Wise all went into every day while they were going through a show trial for a crime they didn’t commit.”
People who were angry because of a man who spent a lot of money on full-page ads asking for their execution had to say mean things about these kids. The shoe is now on the other foot. The real criminal is Donald Trump, and those five guys are found not guilty. “The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice,” Dr. King once said.
During the trial of the Central Park Five, who are now known as the Exonerated Five, Trump put up several full-page ads in New York newspapers, including The New York Times, calling for the state to bring back the death penalty. When a reporter approached Trump about what he had done in 2019, he refused to say sorry.
But in February, Trump said that Black voters would like him because he had been wrongly prosecuted, which is something that a lot of Black Americans have done.
At the end of Thursday afternoon, after less than 12 hours of discussion, 12 jurors found Trump guilty of lying in business records.
Trump has said that he is “very innocent” and that he will “keep fighting.”
The NAACP’s president and CEO, Derrick Johnson, called Thursday a “monumental step toward justice for the American people.”
“Whether he’s trying to steal an election or take down our government, one thing has been clear for a long time: Donald Trump is not fit to represent democracy in the United States,” Johnson said. “The NAACP is very sure that someone who has been found guilty of such serious crimes should not be in the Oval Office.” Because Black Americans have been denied basic human rights for less serious crimes, any effort to get Donald Trump elected would be a huge step forward for white nationalist policy.
But Sharpton also sent out a warning Thursday, telling people who are against Trump not to “gloat” about his conviction.
“What comes next is very important.” Sharpton said, “We can’t let people who are against what Trump is doing repeat the hate speech he used in 1989, 2016, and 2024.” “There will be a lot of talk about the first conviction of a former president in our country’s almost 250-year history.” It’s going to go on for weeks, months, or even years. It can’t be led by cocky winners who take pleasure in their convictions, because that would only fuel people like Donald Trump across the country who still want to go back to the time before 1964. If people who did violence on January 6th are cheered on with hatred, they will be more likely to do it again on May 31st. To celebrate, you should vote for leaders who will keep democracy alive, not ones who want to destroy it.
Trump will be given his sentence on July 11, which is only four days before the start of the GOP convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.