By Mary Alice Miller
The National Association of Kawaida Organizations (NAKO) in conjunction with the International African Arts Festival hosted its monthly forum entitled ‘Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Black New York: Expectation and Possibilities’ at Restoration Plaza.
The guest speakers were Dr. Esmeralda Simmons, Esq., founding Executive Director of the Center for Law and Social Justice at Medgar Evers College and Dr. Roger Greene, former NY State Assemblyman and current professor at CUNY Law School.
Both Attorney Simmons and Professor Greene worked with Mayor Mamdani’s campaign to bring his message to the Black community throughout New York City. Their efforts helped get Mayor Mamdani elected as the first Muslim and Indian mayor based on a progressive agenda, not one that bowed or caved to the powers that be.
Dr. Esmeralda Simmons and Dr. Richard Greene are founding members of a new coalition called Coalition for a Democratic and Just New York.
“We challenged then candidate Mamdani to come to the Black community in Brooklyn, meet with savvy community activists. We presented him with a full agenda for Black people in Brooklyn and the rest of the city,” said Simmons.
“To someone coming from a Democratic Socialist background, none of this should have been shocking. In fact, we felt we were just informing and building out some of the rhetoric being tossed around,” said Simmons. “We all heard about the city-owned grocery stores and the free buses and housing limits on rent, some of which we knew he could do and some he would have a hard time doing – not because it is not doable, but because there is major opposition.”
Simmons said, “We presented him with our agenda at the Major Owens Wellness Center. Dr. Greene dialoged with Mamdani and got him to promise that he was going to come back to the Black community and say what he was going to do. “
Simmons issued a warning: “I want you to understand that you have three years and nine months to get some change in New York City government because in the next election the powers that be are going to throw every thing they have to make sure he is not re-elected.
The chances of him being re-elected in very, very slim.”
She continued, “It is up to us to come up with the agenda. Why? Because it is very clear talking with members of his administration and him that them came in without a plan. They knew how to campaign and run an election, but they knew nothing about governing the City of New York.”
Simmons added, “For those of us who have been in city government, or state government, we know it is not for a lack of ideas or good intentions. It is the fact that there is a permanent government that is aligned to the wealthy in this city that stops anything progressive from happening, and particularly around two things: real estate in any form (rent, mortgages, property taxes), anything that has to do with real estate gets sidestepped. And the second thing they want to do is to keep labor, workers at bay. Even though there are powerful unions in this city, those unions have been tamed. No offense, I am a proud union member.”
“We are asking you to become community activist,” said Simmons. “Either you are a community activist or a victim. Either you are fighting for your life, or you are waiting for them to push you out.”
“Dr. Simmons is talking about purging us from our communities via displacement,” said Dr. Segun Shabaka. “This government, unlike European governments, feel that they made a mistake that Europe did not make. They did not let the poor people control and dominate the cities by population and otherwise.
So now the city’s gentrification is spurned by whites knowing that they want to control cities because cities are still the centers of power in this country. That is why you see people being forced out of our communities. They are vulcanizing and breaking up our political power, our economic power and our cultural power.”
Dr. Greene explained the impetus for the new coalition.
“When we decided to create the Coalition for a Democratic and Just New York, we were thinking about the Coalition for a Just New York that was organized around Jesse’s first presidential campaign in 1984 that served as a basis to get David Dinkins elected.”
He said, “When this election was coming up and we had our brother in office who I feel had some serious contradictions in terms of how he was approaching governance, particularly as related to our communities, and he began to topple. I began to get phone calls from other elected officials about what should we do.
I said we should organize. Where is our agenda.? You didn’t have an agenda when Eric Adams was running. They didn’t put a Black agenda together. There was no criteria for leadership. There was no definition of a public policy framework that would respond to the crisis that we are in as a community.”
Greene continued, “So, I said who is the candidate, win or lose, that the Black community can organize around with an agenda to force the powers that be to address the crisis that we are confronting. Crickets. I looked around and said what are we leaving for our children? There was not succession planning, no intergenerational strategy.”
Greene explained, “The crisis we are facing is related to last stage capitalism, how it is configured in the economy and how it is impacting us.”
Greene’s solution is “a concept of African socialism that was grounded in the family. You would have a form of socialism that was not based upon command economy of Marxism, but was based upon something that was decentralized down to the local level within the family and community.”
“We began thinking about how do we do this in Brooklyn and New York City?,” said Greene.
“The healthcare sector in New York City (both voluntary and public health system) is valued around $40 billion in purchases that they make, from laundry to pharmaceuticals, food, detergents, light bulbs, etc.,” Greene said. “None of that is being recirculated in our communities via contracts. All of those products and services are primarily being developed in the global south as unregulated corporations attempt to exploit labor in the global South and Right to Work for Less states.”
Greene continued, “We went to Governor Cuomo reform the deformed supply chain to redirect opportunities back in the local economy. And we wanted to do it with a new definition of what an enterprise should look like in production of those products.
The ability in our communities to co-create enterprises that would build furniture for the health care sector, do laundry for the health care sector, produce food for the health care sector organized as unionized worker coops, a concept called economic democracy with the boards of those corporations a strong percentage of the board should be comprised of the workers themselves.”
“They got promises from Cuomo, with laws signed and budgets,” said Simmons. “They delivered on nothing and blamed COVID.”
The Coalition for a Democratic and Just New York has developed a detailed Public Policy Platform that can be obtained at cdjny2025@gmail.com.
