NEW YORK — The Rev. Al Sharpton had never seen anything quite like it at his Harlem headquarters.
Adrienne Adams, who became the city’s first Black City Council speaker in January, had just finished an emotional speech on Martin Luther King Jr. Day when she took half a beat. Scanning the room, she slowly pounded her right fist into her left hand, and said, “I leave you with this.”
Then, in what she later described as an unplanned flourish, she began to sing, surprising the crowd at the National Action Network with a soaring rendition of “I Want Jesus to Walk With Me,” an African American spiritual.
The room roared. Sharpton shook his head, a gleeful smile stretching across his face.
“I’ve had everyone from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama there. Nobody ever broke into song,” Sharpton said last week of his three-decade-old civil rights group. “It was something that really moved the audience. And it made it feel like one of us really was in a position of power.”
After centuries of being shut out of political perches in the nation’s largest city, Black politicians have been elected in an unprecedented wave, presenting them with a rare opportunity to deliver for communities of color.
“The last thing many of us expect is a speaker of the City Council who almost sings like you’re in church,” said Brian Benjamin, a son of Harlem who became lieutenant governor last year. “She really represented how far we have come.”
Many of the new leaders find roots in a hotbed of church-linked activism that blossomed over the past half-century. They are the beneficiaries of crucial court rulings that have created more representative political districts.
And they say they intend to deliver a safer, fairer city for the people of color who pushed them to the summit, and for all New Yorkers.
“For so, so long, residents from our communities have worked really hard to get into these halls of power,” Speaker Adams said. “So many of us stand on the shoulders of giants. And now that we’ve achieved leadership at the highest levels, there’s a huge opportunity to ensure that our communities are served.”
Over the past year, Eric Adams, a former police officer and a onetime Bayside High School classmate of the speaker, became the city’s second African American mayor. Alvin Bragg, a Harvard-educated lawyer from Harlem, was elected the first Black Manhattan district attorney.
Standing alone, the two achievements would represent potent victories for the city’s Black community.
But the list goes on: Damian Williams was appointed the first Black U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. Breon Peace became the fourth Black U.S. attorney for the Eastern District.
Three of the five boroughs now have Black borough presidents, including Donovan Richards in Queens and Vanessa Gibson in the Bronx. During the COVID crisis, both became the first Black politicians to reach their posts.
More than a quarter of the Council is represented by Black members.
“I think we are going to reach a day when it’s going to go from a rarity to a normality,” Mayor Adams said of Black representation in leadership. “Now that we have it, we have to do something with it.”
Despite accounting for 1 in 4 New Yorkers, according to census figures, African Americans have until recently been outliers in government, the political reflection of a segregated city gripped by wide racial gaps in incomes and education.
At the start of the pandemic, before enormous racial justice protests churned through the city’s streets in the wake of brutal police killings of Black Americans, the city had a white mayor and a white Council speaker.
Black faces in lofty places do not, on their own, guarantee a swift leveling of deep-seated inequities, a point Black leaders are quick to emphasize.
“People assume that once you are there, everything can happen in the twinkling of an eye,” Sharpton said. “And it doesn’t.”
New York City is, after all, a place where Stuyvesant Town in Manhattan opened only to white residents in 1947, where a 1973 police shooting of a defenseless Black 10-year-old boy named Clifford Glover was not deemed a crime.
It is a city where, to this day, only tiny tallies of Black students are admitted to the city’s best public high schools and where Black people have died of COVID-19 at higher rates than other racial groups.
“People are still struggling,” Speaker Adams said. “But that’s been our story. So my hope is that we can break these inequitable barriers.”
Mayor Adams, who grew up in poverty in Brooklyn and Queens, has made clear what he most wants to change: low educational attainment rates in Black and brown pupils, and high crime rates in low-income neighborhoods.
“If I’m a Black mayor, and still 65% of Black and brown children don’t reach proficiency, then what good is that?” the mayor said, referring to reading proficiency marks. “If I’m a Black mayor, and that’s all I did was to say, ‘OK, I’m the second Black mayor,’ that’s a failure.”
Naturally, the new leaders do not always agree on policy, and they are especially roiled by debates about policing.
Keechant Sewell, the new Black police commissioner, was instantly at odds with Bragg over a lawyerly memo he issued calling for more lenient approaches to some low-level offenses.
Mayor Adams and Jumaane Williams, the city’s second Black public advocate, disagreed about keeping schools open during the omicron coronavirus wave. (The first Black public advocate, Letitia James, is now the state’s first Black attorney general. Williams is running for governor.)
A bail reform battle is brewing, too, between the law-and-order mayor and leadership in Albany, where the Senate majority leader, Andrea Stewart-Cousins, and the Assembly speaker, Carl Heastie, are both Black.
New York City’s new leadership comprises a range of Black voices and perspectives. Whether they agree or disagree, the days of lily-white rooms making the critical decisions for a diverse city and state appear over.
“People have to expect that although we are in leadership, it doesn’t mean that we don’t engage other people,” said Gibson, the Bronx borough president. “African Americans don’t always have the same points of view. And we have to involve all the elected officials, all the stakeholders.”
Benjamin described an invigorating shift in which African American politicians can bring their whole selves to the public square, pointing to leaders like the mayor and the Council speaker.
Describing Mayor Adams, Benjamin said: “He’s not trying to present himself to be something he’s not because he feels he needs to do that in order to lead the city.”
“He leads based on who he is,” Benjamin added.
The power surge results from decades of hard work, planning and oft-forgotten court battles.
In one key case that winded its way through the federal courts, the 1981 Democratic primary elections were delayed by a challenge to the Council’s carefully drawn district lines. The lines were ultimately rejected as discriminating against voters of color.
Today, Black representation in the Council roughly mirrors the population in the city. Black representation in the state Legislature nearly matches the statewide population.
“We’ve made a vast amount of progress and historic gains,” said Assemblywoman Alicia Hyndman, D-Queens. “But that cannot be the ceiling, and we cannot get comfortable.”
Rising Black leaders have frequently been followed by white backlash. After one term in office, New York City’s first Black mayor, David Dinkins, was unseated by Rudy Giuliani.
According to exit polls, Dinkins, a gentle and generous leader who led the city through a period of high crime and race riots, lost his reelection bid in 1993 despite carrying more than 90% of the Black vote.
Giuliani later served as the personal lawyer for Donald Trump. The latter’s victory in the 2016 presidential election has been held up as a reaction to Obama’s historic ascension to the White House.
And while New York has taken leaps forward in terms of equity, the Democratic mayoral primary was still sometimes fought on unmistakable racial battle lines. In the end, Mayor Adams was carried by low-income people of color, even as wealthy white voters often rejected him.
Lupe Todd-Medina, who served during the race as a campaign spokeswoman for Ray McGuire, another Black candidate, said Adams should be mindful of racist stereotypes.
“After David Dinkins, you were wondering when we’d get there again,” she said. “You want Eric Adams to succeed. You don’t want to see what happened to David Dinkins.”
She said the new mayor may need to avoid losing his temper publicly to avoid being caricatured as an angry Black man.
Adams is, to date, not known as hot-headed.
But the city’s 110th mayor is a confident public presence. And he suggested he will not allow any tropes around Black hubris to influence him as he blazes a trail for New Yorkers to come.
“Black men must not portray a sense of strength — because people say it’s arrogance,” Adams said, rejecting such a premise. “I’m respectful, I’m kind, but I’m clear: I’m the mayor. And I’m not going to allow anyone to dictate to me.
“I’m a proud person,” he added. “I’m not afraid to be proud.”
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