Eric Adams and Yusef Salaam and how they diverged politically

On the night in November 2021 when he was elected mayor, Eric Adams gave an impassioned speech calling his victory an affirmation for all those who had been scorned while scuffling against adversity in their lives that brighter days awaited them if they continued pushing forward.

He touched on his youth growing up in a single-parent household and sometimes carrying his possessions with him as a hedge against eviction, and being brutalized by police in a Queens stationhouse as a teenager, reminding New Yorkers of what made his candidacy resonate. Beyond his understanding of crime honed over 22 years as a city cop, Adams’ narrative of overcoming hardship, racism and a learning disability was particularly compelling.

While the facts were different, there were distinct parallels in Yusef Salaam’s rise from being demonized in 1989 as one of five teenagers arrested and convicted for allegedly raping and brutally beating a female jogger in Central Park to their exoneration 13 years later. His journey culminated with his gaining the Democratic nomination for a City Council seat in the June 27 primary.

Unlike Adams, whose childhood struggles occurred in anonymity, Salaam in his early teens became the target of public fury highlighted by the overheated condemnation of him and the four other accused youths by the tabloids, and newspaper ads run by Donald Trump calling for restoration of the death penalty. It didn’t matter to the blowhard developer and future president that a restored capital punishment could not be applied retroactively, and that anyway the accused five were too young to face it. Or that the jogger had survived her grievous injuries, making that penalty a moot issue.

In 2002, after Matias Reyes confessed that he alone had raped and beaten the jogger and his DNA matched some found on her clothing, Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau had the convictions of the Central Park 5 vacated. He had no choice: besides the confession, the confirming physical evidence against Reyes served as a glaring reminder that no DNA from any of the five youths was found at the scene. It seemed impossible that five teens could have been involved in a violent sexual assault and left no traces of their presence behind.

Adams over the 13 years between arrests and exoneration made a name for himself within the NYPD by spotlighting abuses by cops against minority communities and the department’s mistreatment of officers of color. He figured to have been particularly attuned to an incident for which five Black and Latino youths were wrongfully convicted because both detectives and prosecutors were so intent on clearing the case that they ignored troubling details that should have steered them elsewhere in looking for suspects.

Yet however much he might have identified with Salaam’s travails at the hands of a system that in its haste allowed Reyes to remain free to rape and murder a pregnant woman before he was finally locked up for another rape in August 1989, Adams did not endorse him in the three-way primary. Instead he backed Assemblywoman Inez Dickens, a former councilwoman.

His reasons for making that choice may boil down to the late Mario Cuomo’s remark that you campaign in poetry but govern in prose. It was one thing to offer ringing oratory about being a voice for the dispossessed on the night Adams was elected mayor, quite another to choose a candidate — the only Council primary in which he made an endorsement — who might side with the left wing of the Council, with which he is often clashing. Dickens is the kind of old-school Harlem pol — both her father and uncle were assemblymen — likely to align with Adams in battles over the budget and other key legislation.

Salaam is a first-time candidate who left his home in Georgia to run at the urging of Keith Wright, a longtime Harlem power broker whose father, Judge Bruce Wright, was a caustic critic of police abuses during the 1970s. Salaam’s own painful brushes with the flaws in the city’s justice system make him far more likely to chart an independent course in the Council, rather than serving as a reliable ally for the mayor despite their shared adolescent difficulties.

Most particularly, he is unlikely to blithely accept the mayor’s assurances and explanations when controversies involving the NYPD arise.

And where Salaam’s victory speech made clear that his memories of what he came through remain fresh, Adams has shown over his first 18 months in office that he’s not always guided by the ideals that shaped him.

Steier is the former editor of the civil-service newspaper The Chief.