FLINT, MI -- The Rev. Al Sharpton and the Central Park Five are bringing their Wheels of Justice Freedom Bus Tour to Flint on Thursday, Oct. 24, hoping to energize voters with less than two weeks until the Nov. 5 presidential election.
The tour, which kicked off in September in Harlem, is scheduled to stop at the Cathedral of Faith Church on Dupont Street at noon.
National Urban League President Marc Morial is also a part of the get-out-the-vote effort, according to a news release promoting the event.
The visit comes in the same week that the men formerly known as the Central Park Five before they were exonerated filed a defamation lawsuit against Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, accusing the former president of making “false and defamatory statements” about them during last month’s presidential debate with Vice President Kamala Harris.
Yusef Salaam, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana and Korey Wise were teenagers when they were accused of the 1989 rape and beating of a white woman jogger in New York City’s Central Park. The five, who are Black and Latino, said they confessed to the crimes under duress.
They later recanted, pleading not guilty in court, and were later convicted after jury trials, but their convictions were vacated in 2002 after another person confessed to the crime.
Trump purchased a full-page ad in the New York Times after the crime, calling for reinstatement of the death penalty -- something Harris raised during the presidential debate.
Sharpton‘s National Action Network, a nonprofit civil rights group that doesn’t endorse political candidates, is sponsoring the bus tour.
Politics also caused Sharpton’s visit to Flint in 2001, campaigning against a recall campaign that successfully targeted the late Woodrow Stanley when he served as Flint’s mayor.
In 2015, the Michigan Chapter of NAN called for the state of Michigan to establish a special court to hear criminal cases against juveniles who may have been poisoned by lead in Flint water.
In 2013, the group also protested at Hurley Medical Center after a Black nurse there said the hospital discriminated against her when it refused to let her treat an infant because of her race.
The hospital later settled a lawsuit brought against it by the nurse.
(Information from The Associated Press is included in this report.)