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    The Rise of Eric Adams and Black New York

    It was winter in Black New York, and the last thing Eric Leroy Adams wanted to do was join the New York City Police Department.It was the early 1980s and waves of joblessness and crime were sweeping over working-class swaths 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 community, Mr. Daughtry said, needed someone to make change from the inside.“You gotta 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.To many, the future mayor is still an enigma. The Black Democrat talks of law and order, but also Black Lives Matter. He courts Wall Street, then travels to Ghana to be spiritually cleansed. He parties late into the night alongside the rapper Ja Rule and the former Google C.E.O. Eric Schmidt. His talent and intellect are obvious. But he sounds nothing like Barack Obama.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.”New York’s first Black mayor, David Dinkins, died last year at the age of 93. A soft-spoken Marine, in his signature bow tie, he made plain he intended to serve the entire city, which he famously called a “gorgeous mosaic.” Mr. Dinkins served just one term in office after he was ousted by Rudy Giuliani in 1993 in an election fraught with racist backlash. It was a bitter defeat Black New York would never forget.Mr. Dinkins 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 the Rev. Herbert 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.“It was a tough time,” Mr. Daughtry, now 90 years old, said in a phone interview. Mr. Adams stood out. “He was rather precocious,” Mr. Daughtry said. “He didn’t just want a job. He was concerned about the lack of progress, the gang violence, the addiction.”Mr. Adams joined the N.Y.P.D. in 1984 and served in the Police Department for 22 years. 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 Boulé (boo-lay) 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.”Mr. Dinkins was a member of Sigma Pi Phi, known as the Boulé. That fraternity, among the most exclusive of the bunch, counted Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as a member. Percy Sutton, once the highest ranking Black elected official in New York, belonged to Kappa Alpha Psi — one of the “Divine Nine” historically Black fraternities and sororities. Representative Hakeem Jeffries is also a member of Kappa Alpha Psi. Former Representative Charles Rangel is a member of Alpha Phi Alpha but only joined Boulé several years ago (“They never invited me” before that, he said). Vice President Kamala Harris is a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha.“I’m not part of any of those things, you know what I’m saying?” Mr. Adams told me. “But the energy and spirit they bring, we need 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 N.Y.P.D.’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.In the decades since David Dinkins had left office, the center of Black life and political power had shifted firmly from Harlem to Brooklyn. Letitia James, the state attorney general, is from Brooklyn. Jumaane Williams, the city’s public advocate, is also from Brooklyn. Representative Hakeem Jeffries represents part of the borough, as well as a part of Queens.Making the rise of these Black politicians possible was a decades-long shift to an increasingly diverse electorate from one that had once been dominated by white voters. Some white Democrats have proven more willing to vote for Black candidates. The changes have turned Brooklyn into a political powerhouse.In 2013, that Brooklyn coalition, led by Black voters, sent Mayor Bill de Blasio to Gracie Mansion.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. “The Dinkinses and the Obamas of the world, yes it’s aspirational, we’d all like our children to grow up to be them,” said Mr. Smikle, who is Black. “But to what extent do you know how people are living?”Mr. Adams’s political showmanship doesn’t hurt.In 2016, when Mr. Adams became a vegan, reversing a diabetes diagnosis, he touted the diet as a way to liberate Black Americans from the history of slavery and published a cookbook.Years earlier, in the State Senate, Mr. Adams produced a dramatized video from his office encouraging parents to search their children’s belongings for contraband. “You don’t know what your child may be hiding,” Mr. Adams tells the camera, pulling a gun out of a jewelry box. The political stunt left political insiders giggling. But it demonstrated how deeply connected Mr. Adams was to the voters he represented.“It is comical, but let me tell you, my mom would probably be nodding her head for the entire video,” said Zellnor Myrie, 35, who holds Mr. Adams’s former Senate seat, and was raised in the district by his mother.Much of what appears to be paradoxical about Mr. Adams is, to Black Americans, just familiar.“All of us have been at dinner with some uncle who talks about ‘Black on Black’ crime,” said Christina Greer, associate professor of political science at Fordham University. “We know Eric Adams.”Yet, Mr. Adams is familiar to New Yorkers of many backgrounds. They recognize the swagger of the beat cop; the blunt cadence of southeast Queens, with its languorous vowels; the hustle and ambition found all over New York.Starting Jan. 1, he will be mayor for the entire city. His support is expansive and includes large numbers of Asian, Latino and Orthodox Jewish voters. If he can cement this coalition, he may become a formidable force nationally in a Democratic Party hungry for stars.Mr. Adams has also shown a savvy for courting The New York Post, announcing his pick for police commissioner — Nassau County chief of detectives Keechant Sewell, a Black Queens native — in the right-wing tabloid. Better to feed the beast, Mr. Adams understands, than let it maul you.At his inner circle, though, is a tight-knit group of Black New Yorkers who have waited a generation for their shot to run City Hall.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.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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    Reform New York City’s Board of Elections Now

    If you built a laboratory solely to concoct the most inept, opaque and self-dealing election board imaginable, you would have a hard time outdoing the real-life specimen currently functioning — or more often malfunctioning — in New York City. From massive and illegal voter purges to broken-down voting machines and misaddressed ballots, the fiascoes of the city’s 10-member Board of Elections, which serves an electorate larger than that of most states, have been the stuff of national disgrace for decades.The latest debacle, still raw in voters’ minds, came on Primary Day in June, when the board mistakenly included about 135,000 test ballots in its first full tally of mayoral votes. The error was caught and corrected, but only after hours of confusion and chaos that reminded New Yorkers once again just how decrepit and unreliable their electoral system is.City investigations going back more than 80 years have repeatedly found the agency rife with waste, neglect and incompetence. But the complaints don’t come only from the outside. As one former staffer described it, working for the elections board is like “working in an insane asylum.”If the board somehow survives the Nov. 2 general election without any major screw-ups, it will be thanks to the fact that the outcome in the mayor’s race is all but preordained, and so any errors are likely to be of little consequence.Alas, just as predictable as the board’s chronic incompetence is the refusal of elected officials to do anything about it. Why would they? Many of them are complicit in protecting the city’s twisted political machine that values insiders over voters and incumbency over democracy.The result is an election board that operates like a mafia without the guns. It is staffed with the friends, family members and other unqualified cronies of party bosses. It flouts city laws and actively resists serving the needs of voters in favor of a handful of political power brokers. Worst of all, it operates in an accountability-free zone where even the biggest bungles carry no consequences.Most other large cities and jurisdictions don’t have these problems. As detailed in a new report by the Brennan Center for Justice, they take elections seriously by hiring professionals who know what they’re doing and training those who don’t. Their boards are much smaller and their commissioners can be removed by the same people who appointed them. They provide sufficient funds to run elections smoothly, and they make voting data easily available to the public. All of this is good government 101.It’s not like New York doesn’t know how to do these things. Many of the city’s largest and most important agencies — from education to law enforcement — conduct national searches for their leaders. By contrast, elections commissioners are appointed with virtually no public notice or process. This may please back-room politicians, but it makes New York City a national laughingstock.Maddeningly, the city can’t truly reform this system without state action. Good, then, that New York State has at long last started to drag itself out of the electoral Dark Ages. In 2019, the state adopted an early voting period more than a week long, as well as other measures to encourage turnout and make voting easier. This year, the voters can get in on the action themselves by approving two ballot measures, Proposals 3 and 4, that would allow the state to implement two popular voter-friendly reforms: same-day voter registration and no-excuse absentee balloting.When it comes to the city election board itself, the good news is that most of the board’s dysfunction can be fixed right now, through state law, and without having to resort to the cumbersome process of amending New York’s Constitution.Topping the list of reforms is the need for professionalism and accountability: The commissioners should have résumés that show real experience in administering elections, and they should be appointed, and removable, by local officials who directly answer to the voters. There’s nothing like the threat of real consequences to encourage the hiring of competent people.Reducing the size of the board would help too, by investing more responsibility in each individual commissioner. Dumping the requirement that Democrats and Republicans be equally represented at nearly every level of the agency, not just among commissioners, would allow for staff hires based on actual ability rather than partisan bean counting.Why hasn’t all this happened already? Ask New York State lawmakers, many of whom have long been happy to maintain a status quo that works great for them and their friends, even as it disenfranchises everyone else. But that is starting to change. State Senator Zellnor Myrie, who heads the Elections Committee, has spent months touring the state holding public hearings on election administration reform; he hopes to propose legislation before the end of the year. The Assembly and Gov. Kathy Hochul need to get on board with these efforts and enact major reforms without delay. New Yorkers have waited long enough for functional elections.The bottom line is that the elections board, entrenched in a perpetual culture of self-dealing, cannot fix itself. And while its incompetence has been part of the New York political landscape for generations, this year’s primary calamity should be the final straw. At a moment when the legitimacy of the democratic process is under assault across the country, the nation’s biggest city — home to more than 5.5 million registered voters — must be leading the charge by modeling how an election should be run. At the very least, it should not be bringing up the rear.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More