For much of the past year, I have sat in meetings with leaders wrestling with what recent electoral shifts in New York mean for Black political power. There is real concern. Candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have defeated longtime incumbents. A democratic socialist is now New York City Mayor. Political coalitions many believed were durable are shifting. And some Black leaders understandably see warning signs about what these changes could mean for the representation and influence our communities fought generations to achieve.
Those concerns should not be dismissed. Neither should legitimate questions about anti-Blackness within progressive spaces or a class-first politic that too often fails to account for theparticular ways race and anti-Blackness have structured American life.
But after all of the emergency meetings, strategy sessions and worried conversations, I believe we are spending too much time asking what the rise of these “insurgents” means for us and not enough time asking what our response reveals about us. While we have been watching and criticizing those gaining political power, we must also ask what happened to the organizing that built ours.
There is no shortage of reasons to be defensive at this moment. There is a barrage of incoming from a federal administration using every tool possible to challenge civil rights protections, our institutions, voting access, public education and efforts designed to address persistent racial inequity. Black communities in New York are navigating an affordability crisis, housing instability, unequal educational opportunities and economic pressures that are very real in their everyday lives. The threats are real. The mistake would be allowing those threats to determine the limits of our political imagination.
As usual, the common rallying cry would be to “fight back.” But fighting back allows someone else to determine the battlefield and leaves us perpetually organizing to protect what previous generations have won. Our history demands more of us. We must fight forward.
That is the premise behind what I am calling Black New York Forward. It’s not a retreat from the political power we have built, but a recommitment to the organizing that built it.
Black political power in New York did not begin in the legislative halls of Albany, City Hall, a county legislature or a political party headquarters. We were mostly shut out of those spaces. Instead, our power was built in our neighborhoods, amongst our people.
It was built in Black communities across this state like Buffalo, Mount Vernon, Rochester and Brooklyn. It was built with churches, civil rights organizations, political clubs, tenant associations, union halls and NAACP branches where Black people organized around the conditions of their lives.
And we should remember something else about that history: many of the leaders we now regard as pillars of the Black political establishment were the insurgents of their day. Their power did not originate inside the established political party infrastructure. Black communities organized outside of it, developed their own leadership and priorities, and then made political institutions contend with the power they had built.
In Buffalo, Arthur Eve emerged from civil rights and community organizing and helped build an ecosystem that developed generations of political leadership. In Central Brooklyn, Albert Vann helped build community and political infrastructure whose influence can still be seen in Black elected leadership today. Shirley Chisholm challenged established political structures rather than waiting for them to make room for her. And as Brooklyn’s Black community changed, Una Clarke organized among Caribbean New Yorkers and helped translate the growing presence of that community into political participation and representation.
These were not identical movements, leaders or political philosophies. But they reflected a tradition worth remembering: Black political power was built by organizing Black people, not by asking a political party to build it for us.
Over time, that organizing succeeded. Black New Yorkers entered institutions that once excluded us. Some of thepolitical descendants of those insurgent movements now lead the very institutions their predecessors challenged.
That is progress worth celebrating. But it also presents a danger. We cannot confuse Black advancement within a political party with Black political power itself.
Political parties are vehicles through which power can be exercised. They are not the source of our power. Our power must come from an organized constituency capable of developing its own demands, choosing its own strategies and making every party, candidate and institution seeking our support contend with them.
The promise of representation was never simply that Black faces would occupy seats from which we had historically been excluded. The promise was that the people our communities organized to send into those rooms would carry with them our demands, our grievances and our priorities and that they would be able to use the leverage of an organized constituency to back them up to hold systems accountable.
They got into the room because Black people organized and they were expected to bring resources and information back home. They were sent to disrupt inequitable systems at the table, not to replace the hands operating the tools of inequality and exclusion.
Yet there is another reality we must confront. The Black New York that built much of this political infrastructure is itself changing. Historic centers of Black political power have experienced significant demographic change even as Black representation in government has continued to grow.
At the same time, Black New York is not simply shrinking. It is changing. Our communities increasingly include Black immigrants, Afro-Latinos and multiracial Black New Yorkers. Black families are moving between communities within our state as others leave New York altogether. The geography and composition of Black New York today are not identical to those that produced the political institutions and coalitions of previous generations. That matters for political power as well.
Population shapes districts, constituencies and electoral coalitions. If our numbers and communities are changing, we cannot assume that thepolitical power built by previous generations will simply sustain itself.
If we are serious about building Black political power for the next generation, our organizing must find Black New Yorkers where they are now. We must listen across geography, generation, income and background and identify the interests that bind us together.
We should not be trying to recreate theBlack political infrastructure of 50 years ago. We should recover its organizing principles and use them to build the infrastructure Black New Yorkers need today and in the near future. And we begin that work from a remarkable position.
Today, Black New Yorkers occupy positions of political authority our predecessors fought for generations to make possible. We chair committees, lead legislative bodies and govern communities from city councils and county legislatures to mayoral administrations, the State Legislature and Congress. The question is no longer whether Black New Yorkers can get into the rooms where decisions are made.
We are there. We have more presence. We have more access. We have more representation. But have we built more power?
That is not an indictment of Black elected officials, nor is it a denial of theconsequential work Black elected leaders continue to do. It is a question for all of us who occupy positions of Black leadership, including those of us who lead civil rights organizations.
Too much of Black politics has become a conversation among those of us already in the room. We meet with one another. We convene strategy sessions. We issue statements. We negotiate legislation. We endorse candidates. We mobilize when an election approaches or when a crisis demands an immediate response.
Too often, we mistake access for expertise and dismiss those outside these rooms with some version of, “They just don’t understand how things work.”
But perhaps the problem is not that people don’t understand how our politics works. Perhaps too many no longer see how it works for them. Maintaining access is not the same thing as building power. Representation cannot substitute for organization.
That is the lesson I believe we should take from this political moment. And our homework is not simply to defend the power previous generations built, but to organize the power the next generation will need.
We can — and must — challenge anti-Blackness wherever it exists. We should reject political analysis that asks us to treat race as merely a byproduct of class when our history and our lived experience tell us otherwise. And those critiques cannot become an excuse for avoiding our own examination.
Whatever disagreements we may have with the politics of DSA, we should be intellectually honest enough to recognize organizing when we see it. They knocked on doors, talked to voters and organized volunteers. They spoke repeatedly about material conditions people could identify in their own lives — housing, affordability, transportation, child care and the basic cost of living. They talked to people whom much of the political establishment had already decided were apathetic. Perhaps that is where our examination should begin.
When voter turnout is low in a Black neighborhood, why is our first instinct to blame and shame them for not voting? When was the last time we knocked on those doors when no candidate was asking us to?
When was the last time we asked Black New Yorkers – not the same collection of elected officials, advocates, political professionals, clergy and organizational leaders — but the grandmother in Buffalo, the renter in Mount Vernon, the struggling small business owner in Brooklyn, the parent of school-age children in Spring Valley and the 19-year-old on Long Island:
What do you need? What is the government failing to do? What would materially change your life? And what are you prepared to organize with your neighbors to demand? That is not a new political strategy. It is one of our oldest.
For generations, Black Americans have gathered in conventions, churches, union halls, living rooms and neighborhood meetings to define for ourselves what freedom and full citizenship required. We developed demands. We conducted political education. We organized our neighbors. We built institutions. And then we made political parties, candidates and governments contend with us.
That is what I mean when I say Black New York must return to our radical political roots. I am not talking about moving Black politics further left or further right. Radical means going to the root. And the root of Black political power has always been organized Black people. That is the work before us now.
As the NAACP New York State Conference celebrates 90 years of advocacy and organizing, we are advancing Black New York Forward as a vision for building independent Black civic power for the New York that exists today and the New York that is still taking shape.
We will not begin by deciding in a conference room what Black New Yorkers should want. We will begin by listening.
Across our communities, we must create opportunities for Black New Yorkers to identify the conditions affecting their lives, understand which institutions have the power to change them, develop demands together and organize around an agenda that belongs to them.
That agenda should not belong to a political party. It should not be constructed around the ambitions of a candidate. And it should not disappear when an election ends. It should belong to Black New Yorkers.
The next chapter of Black political power will require elected officials, civil rights organizations, clergy, labor, neighborhood organizations and everyday Black New Yorkers to rebuild the relationship between the people outside the halls of government and those we send inside them.
This year, as America marks 250 years since its founding, the NAACP New York State Conference celebrates 90 years of organizing, and New York approaches 200 years since the abolition of slavery in our state, we find ourselves at a historical checkpoint.
Our task cannot simply be to protect the seats we have won. The measure of Black political power cannot be how many of us are in the room. It must be what our communities have the organized power to make happen once we get there.
The sky is not falling. But the ground is shifting. Our response should not be fear. It should not be to retreat. And it should not be a rally around any political party or faction.
It should be Black community organization.
We fought too hard for presence to confuse it with power.
Now, we must fight forward.
L. Joy Williams is the President of the NAACP New York State Conference and the Host of #SundayCivics on SiriusXM Urban View.
