The Battle for Black Brooklyn

This Primary Day, New York City’s leftist insurgents and the borough’s Black political establishment are headed into their biggest face-off yet.

New York State Senator Jabari Brisport (third from left), with New York City Council member Chi Osse (second from right), speaks at a protest against rent increases and aggressive evictions in Brooklyn in 2022.

(Andrea Renault / AFP via Getty Images)

It was a mild June day in 2020 when the tensions simmering between Brooklyn’s Black political establishment and a group of political insurgents broke into the open. Jabari Brisport and Phara Souffrant Forrest, candidates endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America for seats in the New York State Senate and State Assembly, led approximately 200 fellow DSA members in a demonstration outside the home of then–City Council member and majority leader Laurie Cumbo. Using a bullhorn and a level of direct action that was uncommon among Central Brooklyn politicians, Brisport, Forrest, and demonstrators were calling on Cumbo to strip $3 billion from the New York City police budget.

The moment reverberated loudly through the storied political corridors of Central Brooklyn. For Cumbo and other long-established Black political leaders who claim Black Brooklyn as their turf, the protest amounted to an invasion, an act of anti-Blackness meant to intimidate Cumbo, and a warning shot across the bow of the reigning political order. Although Brisport and Forrest are themselves Black and longtime Brooklyn residents, those in their contingent, according to press accounts at the time, were not just mostly white but also new to the neighborhood. So at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests, here were people reported to be white gentrifiers making demands on a Brooklyn-born Black elected official.

Cumbo was having none of it. A week after the rally, she led a contingent of her Black supporters, including Velmanette Montgomery, the longtime incumbent retiring from the state Senate seat Brisport was vying for, on a counterdemonstration to Brisport’s house, where press accounts reported that Kirsten Foy, a former regional director for the National Action Network, Al Sharpton’s organization, hurled the epithets “coon” and the N-word at Brisport. In Foy’s eyes, Brisport, whom Cumbo publicly tagged as the original protest’s ring leader, represented “the reason Harriet [Tubman] carried a gun…. Because only someone with that character would bring a white lynch mob, and that’s what it was, a white lynch mob, to a Black queen’s home to terrorize her and to terrorize her child.”

Brisport and Forrest, now a sitting state senator and state Assembly member, respectively, told me recently that they felt that the blowback they received from Cumbo and her allies was exaggerated and that they exploited the incident to score political points. “[Prior to that demostration], there were pretty regular protests outside the home of [Senator] Chuck Schumer, which I believe is what inspired organizers to go to Cumbo’s home,” Brisport explained. “This was during Covid and organizers felt they couldn’t go to her office. It was pretty respectful outside of her apartment. I’m pretty sure I said, ‘thank you’” to Cumbo for her service on the City Council.

Almost six years later to the day, the New York State Democratic primary will represent the latest and possibly most defining chapter in this conflict. On June 23, a number of competitive races in the deep-blue districts of Central Brooklyn will feature face-offs between these rival formations.

On one side of the ledger is the legendary Black Democratic club Vanguard Independent Democrats Association, widely known as VIDA, which represents a voter constituency that identifies with a 50-year legacy in Central Brooklyn. Candidates affiliated with VIDA tend to focus their campaigns on the delivery of vital services, improving education, and supporting seniors. And in a nod to the outsize influence of homeowners in Central Brooklyn—even though the vast majority, 78 percent, of residents of the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, for instance, are renters—fighting deed theft has become a signature issue.

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On the other side is the Central Brooklyn contingent of the Democratic Socialist of America, an activist organization designed to “fight for reforms that empower working people.” DSA is the largest socialist group in the nation and the Central Brooklyn branch of the New York chapter is the political home to a membership that is largely white, relatively new to the neighborhood, and mostly under the age of 40. According to DSA’s website, the DSA is running 10 insurgent candidates in New York City this primary season. Half of these candidates are Black or brown candidates, most with little to no electoral experience, running against Black or brown Democratic establishment candidates in rapidly changing districts. All but one is under 40. DSA-endorsed incumbents and insurgents across the country almos…