African American

The Rise of Eric Adams and Black New York
By Mara Gay
Ms. Gay is a member of the editorial board.

It was winter in Black New York, and the last thing Eric Leroy Adams wanted to do was join the New York Police Department.

It was the early 1980s and waves of joblessness and crime were sweeping over working-class areas of the city. In Black neighborhoods, the Police Department, still overwhelmingly white, had become an occupying force, deepening the misery and the injustice.

Inside a Brooklyn church, the Rev. Herbert Daughtry, a veteran of the civil rights movement, told a young Mr. Adams, then a local college student, that it was time to join the N.Y.P.D. The Black community, Mr. Daughtry said, needed someone to make change from the inside. “You got to be out of your mind,” Mr. Adams recalls telling Mr. Daughtry.

On Jan. 1, when Mr. Adams, 61, is sworn in as mayor, Mr. Daughtry’s vision will be realized. Working-class Black New York, which makes up the heart of the Democratic base but has long been shut out of City Hall, will finally have its moment.

What exactly Mr. Adams intends to do once at City Hall is unclear. What is certain for now is that Mr. Adams knows who sent him there.

New York’s Black Democratic base had endured a plague and marched for Black lives. They had kept the city going, along with municipal workers of all backgrounds, while wealthier New Yorkers remained safely at home. They had felt the rise in violence in their neighborhoods, and seen the resurgence of white supremacy under President Donald Trump. Their choice for mayor was Eric Adams.

In his victory speech in November, Mr. Adams said his election belonged to the city’s working poor. “I am you. I am you. After years of praying and hoping and struggling and working, we are headed to City Hall,” Mr. Adams boomed. “It is proof that people of this city will love you if you love them.”

[David] Dinkins [first Black mayor of NYC] was part of a storied tradition of Black politicians from Harlem that included Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Charles Rangel, Percy Sutton, and Basil Paterson. The political club swung Black votes in the city for more than a generation.

Mr. Adams’s pathway to Gracie Mansion runs through a different New York.

He was born in the Brownsville area of Brooklyn, among the poorest neighborhoods in the city. Later, the family moved to South Jamaica, a largely Black enclave in Queens. Like many of his neighbors, Mr. Adams grew up poor, the fourth of six children of Dorothy Mae Adams, a single mother who worked cleaning houses, and later, at a day care center. At 15, Mr. Adams was arrested on a criminal trespass charge for entering the home of an acquaintance. He has said he was beaten so severely by police officers that his urine was filled with blood for a week.

Several years later, Mr. Adams met Mr. Daughtry. The pastor was recruiting young Black New Yorkers to organize Brooklyn’s struggling communities as part of the National Black United Front, a Black empowerment group

Mr. Adams joined the Police Department in 1984 and served 22 years there. He co-founded 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, a group that protested police brutality. He also served as president of the Grand Council of Guardians, a statewide group of Black law enforcement officials.

He was protesting police brutality in the late 1980s when he met the Rev. Al Sharpton. Both were the sons of single mothers who had arrived in New York from Alabama.

And both men said they reveled in eschewing the snobbishness exuded by the Black elite: a small but dazzling world of the powerful — if not always wealthy — shaped by historic college fraternities and sororities, and exclusive societies like the Sigma Pi Phi fraternity and the Links. The groups were created in the depths of segregation to help members network and uplift the Black community. Some of the organizations are over a century old.

“Me and Eric used to tease each other,” Mr. Sharpton told me recently. “I used to say, ‘You’re the guy with the patrolman’s hat and I’m the guy with the conked hair style like James Brown, and we do not care if the bougies don’t like us,’” he said. “We used to laugh about that.”

By 2006, Mr. Adams had risen to the rank of captain, but his public advocacy had made him a thorn in the side of the Police Department’s clubby, white male brass. He left the department and was quickly elected to the State Senate. In 2013, he was elected Brooklyn borough president, a largely ceremonial role — but a good launching pad for a campaign for mayor.

Then, in early 2020, the pandemic hit New York City, claiming tens of thousands of lives. It killed people from all walks of life, but hit especially hard in the minority and immigrant communities in the Democratic base. Every level of government, including City Hall, had failed them.

A year later, the Democratic primary included three major Black candidates. One of them, Maya Wiley, a progressive, garnered significant support. But working-class Black New York went with Mr. Adams, handing him a narrow victory. Basil Smikle, director of the public policy program at Hunter College, said they wanted someone who understood their everyday lives.

Outside a public school in Brooklyn recently, Mr. Adams stood with David Banks, a veteran Black educator he tapped to serve as schools chancellor. “If 65 percent of white children were not reaching proficiency in this city, they would burn the city down,” Mr. Adams said to the enthusiastic, largely nonwhite crowd.

From the moneyed corners of Manhattan to the gracious brownstones of Cobble Hill, there is a creeping sense of shock: The new mayor is not necessarily speaking to them. Power in America’s largest city has changed hands.