A few dozen New Yorkers boarded a bus in Harlem on Friday with civil rights leader the Rev. Al Sharpton and members of the group formerly known as the Central Park Five, bound for Philadelphia, where they toured the city hoping to energize the youth vote ahead of the 2024 election.

With less than 40 days until Election Day, the choice of a battleground state for a get-out-the-vote bus tour made sense: whichever presidential candidate wins Pennsylvania is likely to do so by a slim margin and with a lion’s share of the Black vote. But it was a strategic choice to recruit speakers who many first knew as Black and Latino teenagers wrongly convicted in a case that former President Donald Trump supported so vociferously, Sharpton said.

“There are polls saying that some Black men are moving toward Trump,” he told The Associated Press on Friday. “I don’t know if that’s true or not. But Black men need to hear some Black men saying, ‘Let me tell you about the Trump I know.’”