With less than 40 days until Election Day, the Rev. Al Sharpton's choice of a battleground state for a get-out-the-vote bus tour made sense.

New York City Councilmember Yusef Salaam, one of the members of the Exonerated 5 — known as the Central Park 5 — told a Philadelphia crowd Friday that he will “never forget” that former President Donald Trump took out full-page ads in major newspapers calling for New York to adopt the death penalty after the five Black and Latino boys were falsely accused of assaulting and raping a white woman

It was a strategic choice on Sharpton’s part to recruit speakers who many first knew as Black and Latino teenagers wrongly convicted in a case that former President Donald Trump supported so vociferously.

A few dozen New Yorkers boarded a bus in Harlem on Friday with civil rights leader the Rev. Al Sharpton and members of the group formerly known as the Central Park Five, bound for Philadelphia, where they toured the city hoping to energize the youth vote ahead of the 2024 election.