Yusef Salaam, criminal justice advocate and member of the Central Park Five, will present UB’s 44th annual Martin Luther King Jr. Commemoration keynote address on Feb. 24.

His talk, part of the Distinguished Speakers Series, will take place at 7:30 p.m. in Alumni Arena, North Campus.

Salaam was one of five boys — four black and one Latino — who were tried and convicted of brutally raping a young woman and leaving her for dead in New York City’s Central Park in April 1989. The frenzied case rocked the city, and the boys became known collectively as the Central Park Five.

Their convictions were vacated in 2002 after they spent between seven and 13 years of their lives behind bars. The unidentified DNA in the Central Park jogger case, not linked to any of the five, had finally met its owner, a convicted murderer and serial rapist who confessed. The convictions of the boys — now men — were overturned and they were exonerated. Salaam was just 15 years old when his life was upended and changed forever.

Since his release, Salaam has committed himself to advocating and educating people on the issues of false confessions, police brutality and misconduct, press ethics and bias, race and law, and the disparities in America’s criminal justice system. In 2013, Ken and Sarah Burns and David McMahon released the documentary “The Central Park Five,” which told of this travesty from the perspective of Salaam and his cohorts.

In 2014, the Central Park Five received a multimillion-dollar settlement from the city of New York for its grievous injustice against them. Salaam was awarded an honorary doctorate that same year and received the President’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2016 from President Barack Obama.

In 2018, he was appointed to the board of the Innocence Project. In May 2019, Netflix released the limited series “When They See Us,” based on the true story of Salaam and the other members of the Central Park Five. The series was created and directed by Ava DuVernay; executive producers included Oprah Winfrey.

Tickets for Salaam’s lecture range from $18 to $56 and can be purchased at the Alumni Arena box office or through Ticketmaster.

Contributing series sponsors United University Professions, TIAA, the UB Alumni Association and the UB Office of Donor Relations are offering discounts that provide significant cost savings on individual lecture ticket purchases. Visit the DSS website for more information.

For more information about the series, visit the series’ website.