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| - Although many social media posts claimed the photo was from 1988, it actually dated to 1989. Also, although Nation of Islam members may have participated in the rally, we did not find demonstrable proof that the group was formally involved in organizing it.
For years, internet users have shared a black-and-white image of a boy holding a handmade sign reading "TRUMP IS A CHUMP!" A caption included in multiple social media posts identified the image's setting as an "anti-Trump rally by the Nation of Islam in front of Trump Towers in 1988."
The image and caption appeared in posts on social media platforms including X (archived), Reddit (archived), and Instagram.
In short, the image was an authentic photograph, meaning it showed no signs of the use of artificial intelligence software or other digital manipulation. It also depicted a real protest at Trump Tower in Manhattan. However, that protest took place in May 1989, not in 1988 as the captions claimed.
Also, while the boy's apparel — specifically, his bow tie and skullcap — strongly suggested that he was a member of the Nation of Islam, the Black nationalist political and religious movement, the group's level of official involvement in organizing the rally was unclear.
As a result, we've rated the claims included in the caption as mostly true.
The photographer who captured the image, Ricky Flores, said over email that the rally in question was a response to a full-page ad Donald Trump, now the U.S. president, took out in four New York City newspapers on May 1, 1989. The ad called for the return of the death penalty, which New York's Court of Appeals had effectively abolished several years earlier.
The context for Trump's death penalty ads was the Central Park jogger case, in which a group of Black and Hispanic teenagers were tried for — and wrongfully convicted of — the rape of a white woman in New York City's Central Park. After DNA evidence proved in the early 2000s that the real rapist was an entirely different individual, courts eventually vacated the convictions and ordered the releases of the "Central Park Five."
As evidence for the photo's date, Flores provided other photos from the same shoot that showed demonstrators carrying signs explicitly mentioning Trump's death-penalty ad. Flores also said that, according to his recollection, it was civil rights leader Al Sharpton who organized the rally.
A rally matching the details Flores shared, including Sharpton's involvement, occurred at Trump Tower the weekend of May 5, 1989, according to articles that appeared in The New York Times and the New York Daily News.
Sharpton, a Pentecostal minister who converted to the Baptist faith in the 1990s, has never been a member of the Nation of Islam. However, he worked with the group on multiple occasions. Notably, in the months leading up to the Central Park jogger case, Sharpton collaborated with Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam's leader, to bring attention to a controversial 1988 case in which a Black teenager accused multiple white men of rape. A grand jury found that those allegations were fabricated.
In other words, although we found no hard proof that the Nation of Islam was officially involved in organizing the May 1989 rally at Trump Tower, Sharpton had at the time recently teamed up with Nation of Islam leadership to publicly denounce perceived racial injustice in the investigation and prosecution of sex crimes. Even if Sharpton planned the protest alone, it's feasible that individual members of the Nation of Islam chose to participate in it.
Trump Tower was not visible in the photo, but features of the building in the background behind the protesters confirmed Flores' identification of the location. One such feature was the Salvatore Ferragamo sign visible on the right side of the image. Multiple New York City guidebooks from the late 1980s listed a menswear-focused location of the Italian luxury brand at 730 Fifth Ave. — directly across the street from Trump Tower.
The three statues visible above the building's main entrance in the photo also appeared in Google Street View images of 730 Fifth Ave. until late 2015, as the collage below shows. (Because of renovations of the building, the statues were not visible in later Street View images.)
(Ricky Flores/Google Street View)
The name of the boy holding the sign remained unknown, as did those of the other people in the photo.
We previously looked into the history of Trump's 1989 death-penalty ad.
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