Thou shalt not raise a false report: put not thine hand with the wicked to be an unrighteous witness. Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil…. Exodus, 23:1–2
“I’M DEDICATING MY LIFE TO BEING USE-full,” he says. “To my community, to my neighborhood, to my city. And to do that means letting go of some burdens of the past. Never forgetting, but forgiving. There is power in forgiving.”
Spare a thought for the falsely accused. For the man sent to prison as a boy for something he didn’t do. Does anyone ever allow the reality of a false accusation to sink in and upset the equilibrium for even a moment, or is it just in and out and on to the next, like everything else? That accusation, after all, was leveled on our behalf. State power is derived from us. Justice is meant to make us whole. But what does an injustice do to us? When an innocent person serves a full prison sentence, gets out carrying the excruciating knowledge that justice is for other people and facts and innocence don’t matter when you’re a kid raised by your mom in an apartment on Fifth Avenue, uptown—Harlem, U. S. A. Spare a thought for the falsely accused.
He can’t walk down the street for getting stopped by people who have never met him but to whom he is famous. In this neighborhood, the man who was falsely accused is well-known. The elders have known him for decades, since he was a tall, skinny kid with a flattop, on the front page of all the papers. The city was coming apart in 1989—you could’ve lit the air with a match, the racial tension was that combustible. And the crime that he was accused of committing was so terrible that once he and his co-defendants were identified to the public on the word of the police, the case was over before it even began. White victim, a young professional out for a jog in Central Park, raped and beaten nearly to death with a tree branch, three quarters of the blood in her body soaked into the ground. The accused were Black and brown, five of them, aged fourteen to sixteen, four confessing on videotape. What more is there to know? New York in the aftermath was a tinderbox, braying for justice, instead finding vengeance, which is supposed to belong only to God, according to God Himself.
A local man who had inherited a real estate fortune even took out full-page ads in all the local papers calling for the state to bring back the death penalty, writing: “What has happened to the respect for authority, the fear of retribution by the courts, society and the police for those who break the law … ?”
But that was a lifetime ago, and he will greet old friends and new. As a politician, he is a complete novice, but for the retail politicking that is the bedrock of democracy—hearing from people on the street where they live—he has a natural gift. He is inexperienced enough at the game that he will stay and talk until you’re done with him. And a city-council district may be democracy in its purest form—big enough to require a proper campaign in order to prove your worth, small enough that an officeholder, especially a rookie, might legitimately feel responsible for every soul and pothole in it.
