From a June 2020 protest outside Laurie Cumbo’s home to a set of Democratic primary showdowns on June 23, Black Brooklyn is once again deciding who gets to define the future of Central Brooklyn’s politics—whether through the long-entrenched VIDA network or the
On a mild day in June 2020. a message that had been simmering under Central Brooklyn politics finally broke open in public. 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 about 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 Brisport and Forrest critics say was unfamiliar to Central Brooklyn’s older guard, the group called for Cumbo to strip $3 billion from the New York City police budget.
For Cumbo and other long-established Black political leaders who described “Black Brooklyn” as their turf. the protest landed as something darker than policy disagreement. In press accounts at the time. the rally was portrayed as an invasion—anti-Black intimidation meant to warn Cumbo and challenge the reigning political order. Even though Brisport and Forrest are Black and longtime Brooklyn residents. reports from that moment said many in their contingent were mostly white and new to the neighborhood—an added controversy during the height of Black Lives Matter protests.
Brisport and Forrest, in conversation for this story, said the blowback they received from Cumbo and her allies was exaggerated and that they used the incident to score political points.
A week after the rally, Cumbo countered. She led a contingent of her Black supporters—including Velmanette Montgomery. the longtime incumbent retiring from the state Senate seat Brisport was vying for—to Brisport’s house. Press accounts at the time said 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 view, as Cumbo publicly tagged Brisport as the original protest’s ring leader, Brisport embodied why Harriet Tubman carried a gun—because only someone with that character would bring “a white lynch mob,” to “a Black queen’s home to terrorize her and to terrorize her child.”
Brisport later framed it differently, describing the setup and the timing. “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. ” he 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 after that June 2020 confrontation. the conflict is not just memorialized—it’s being replayed in Democratic primaries that. in Central Brooklyn. function as something more than party contests. On June 23. competitive races in the deep-blue districts of Central Brooklyn will feature face-offs between two rival formations: the veteran Black Democratic club Vanguard Independent Democrats Association. widely known as VIDA. and the Central Brooklyn contingent of the Democratic Socialists of America.
One side of the ledger is VIDA. described as having a voter constituency tied to a 50-year legacy in Central Brooklyn. Candidates affiliated with VIDA. the account of the group’s platform says. focus on delivering vital services. improving education. and supporting seniors. Fighting deed theft has also become a signature issue. tied to the outsize influence of homeowners—even though. as the neighborhood-level fact is laid out. the vast majority of residents in Bedford-Stuyvesant. including 78 percent in that neighborhood. are renters.
On the other side is DSA. an activist organization described as “designed to ‘fight for reforms that empower working people.’” The DSA is described as the largest socialist group in the nation. and the Central Brooklyn branch of the New York chapter is depicted as the political home to a membership largely white. relatively new to the neighborhood. and mostly under the age of 40.
DSA’s website. as cited in the reporting. says the organization 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. challenging Black or brown Democratic establishment candidates in rapidly changing districts. All but one is under 40.
DSA’s insurgent candidates, the account says, emphasize universalist principles—protecting tenant rights, taxing the rich, and providing universal childcare—while highlighting that they take no money from corporations, the real estate lobby, or any outside interests.
In the 25th Senate District, DSA’s 38-year-old Jabari Brisport—who defeated former New York State Assembly member and establishment candidate Tremaine Wright in 2020 to become state senator—will face Marlon Rice, a 51-year-old focused on community-based work in Central Brooklyn and backed by VIDA.
A debate described in the reporting captures the central political fault line. Rice interpreted any policy deemed hostile to homeowners—like Mamdani’s flirtation with a reduction in the state’s estate tax threshold—as an attack on Central Brooklyn’s long-standing Black population.
In the overlapping New York State 56th Assembly District. VIDA’s candidate and incumbent. 61-year-old Stefani Zinerman. is being challenged by DSA’s Eon Huntley. 41-year-old PTA president and fashion retail specialist who “barely lost” to Zinerman in 2024. A third candidate, Michael Bailey, is also on the ballot.
There are also races for Democratic Party representation at the county and state levels as District Leaders, where DSA-affiliated and VIDA candidates will compete.
The stakes extend well beyond Brooklyn’s ballot boxes. Central Brooklyn is described as one of the nation’s largest and most iconic clusters of neighborhoods with historically substantial concentrations of Black residents. spanning Fort Greene through Clinton Hill. Prospect Heights. Bed-Stuy. Crown Heights. Ocean Hill. Brownsville. and then south into East Flatbush.
Prominent Black elected officials—including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jefferies, Representative Yvette Clarke, New York Attorney General Tish James, and New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams—have lined up for VIDA candidates.
Mayor Mamdani, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Senator Bernie Sanders, and former representative Jamal Bowman are described as endorsing the DSA candidates.
Yet the argument about “who belongs” in Black Brooklyn has always been bigger than endorsements. It’s also about who can claim the neighborhood as theirs at a time when Bed-Stuy has been reshaped by displacement and demographic change.
Tiffanie Burt, VIDA’s current president, does not match the archetype of a long-standing, homeowning Bedford-Stuyvesant resident. She is 38, a transplant from Cincinnati who arrived in New York in 2013, lived in Harlem, and settled in a rented apartment in Bed-Stuy in 2018.
But Burt is positioned as the kind of new blood VIDA may need. The reporting describes VIDA as rooted in Bed-Stuy and frames its battle against obsolescence in terms of the existential threat surrounding the historically Black population that has defined New York since the 1830s.
Bed-Stuy, the report says, has been transformed by an exodus of Black homeowners and renters. Some have cashed out of wildly appreciated homes and moved to retirement-friendly cities like Atlanta and Durham. Others have been pushed out by predatory lending and title transfer practices and rising unaffordability.
The shift in demographics is quantified: according to the Furman Center. Bed-Stuy was 75 percent Black in 2000; by 2024. that share dropped to 38 percent. Households making under $20,000 per year were the largest share in 2000, at 30.4 percent. By 2024. households making between $100. 000 and $250. 000 represented the largest share at 31.4 percent. and households with children 18 years and younger fell from 45 percent to 20 percent.
Burt put her own arrival in personal terms. “I went to school at City College for my master’s. I graduated, turned 30, and moved to Brooklyn, all in the same month,” she said. “I was honestly just looking for a safe haven. I knew somebody who knew someone else. And that’s what brought me here.”
Her communications background and civic interests led her into judiciary campaigns supported by VIDA, where she rose quickly into leadership. The reporting describes VIDA as one of hundreds of neighborhood improvement organizations in Bed-Stuy—economic and housing development corporations. block associations. churches. cultural centers. and political formations—that helped make Bed-Stuy a stable community for Black working- and middle-class folks.
But with the decline of the Black population, the “glory days” of those institutions are described as behind them. Burt. with millennial and first-generation Bed-Stuy sensibilities. is described as a bridge between older and newer versions of the neighborhood. including her personal investment in legacy institutions like Mount Lebanon Baptist Church and Community Board 3.
For Burt, involvement in VIDA is tied to feeling rooted. “A lot of us are not paying attention. They’re taking away our reproductive and voting rights. We’re losing our voice. ” she told the reporter. adding that she has been mentored by VIDA members who are Generation X. baby boomers. and pre–baby boomers. “As a transplant from Ohio. I get family. people who defend me. a body of elders and a sense of belonging. ” she said.
The story of VIDA’s rise is told through a longer arc of Black political organizing. It begins with the 1975 election of Al Vann. who later became prominent as leader of a movement for Black community control of schools in Ocean–Hill Brownsville. The reporting describes how a younger generation of left-leaning local Black activists and civic leaders. steeped in civil rights and Black power traditions. challenged the white political structure in their own backyards.
By the late 1970s and early ’80s. they launched successful campaigns for city. state. and federal offices against what the report calls the formidable Brooklyn Democratic Party machine. The report names Major Owens. Ed Towns. Roger Green. Annette Robinson. Velmanette Montgomery. Clarence Norman Jr. Thomas and Frank Boyland. John Flateau. Esmeralda Simmons. and Paul Wooten as part of that insurgent energy.
Vann consolidated power in Bed-Stuy through the creation of his own political club, VIDA, and is described as central to organizing elected officials and operatives into a loose federation called the Coalition for Community Empowerment.
For much of the 1980s, ’90s, and early aughts, the report says VIDA and the Coalition for Community Empowerment dominated Central Brooklyn’s political ecosystem—directing public money, establishing patronage mills, coordinating field operations, and gatekeeping candidacies.
The Coalition is described as breaking the Brooklyn Democratic Party machine’s hold and replacing it with its own machine. The report also credits CCE with expanding voting rights in New York City and says Vann. VIDA. and CCE claimed a legacy that includes founding community anchor institutions like the Center for Law and Social Justice and Medgar Evers College.
The journalist Ron Howell is cited as recounting that CCE’s legal team filed lawsuits arguing that district lines should be redrawn to allow for more minority representation. including a case that went to the US Supreme Court and was decided in their favor—actions that resulted in the creation of a dozen new minority legislative seats in New York state.
But even as the coalition succeeded, the report describes the moment when insurgency became establishment. The peak of VIDA and CCE’s ambitions is placed in the mid-1980s, when they unsuccessfully tried to run Herman Badillo for mayor and Vann unsuccessfully ran for Brooklyn Borough president.
Then, the reporting says, time did what it always does in politics: the challengers became the managers. VIDA began relying on the name recognition of incumbency. Some founding leaders. the report says. admit they held onto leadership too long without updating mission and social-change strategies for a new era.
Esmeralda Simmons. described as the founding executive director of the Center for Law and Social Justice. marks the Coalition’s transition from insurgency to establishment when Coalition member Assemblyman Clarence Norman Jr. became the Democratic Party boss in Kings County in 1990. By 1997, City Limits published a piece titled “Al Vann and the Revolution. Unplugged. ” lamenting that Vann had left revolutionary rhetoric behind—speaking more about business enterprises as Bed-Stuy’s salvation and focusing attention on “finessing contracts and grants.”.
After the founding generation of elected officials retired, the Coalition faded. VIDA continued. the report says. supporting candidates. assigning poll workers. running field operations. giving out awards to local leaders. and organizing community programs. Burt says VIDA maintains a modest but active membership of over 150 people.
Simmons regrets that younger activists aren’t more aware of CCE and VIDA’s roots. “The old guard had a presumption that everybody knew what VIDA was. and we handed it over to younger people and didn’t give them any direction or didn’t tell them any history. ” she said. “There was very little political education about Pan-Africanism and the whole radical side of VIDA. That’s on us.”.
That gap is where DSA says it is stepping in. Maya Meredith. now a leader in DSA’s New York City Afrosocialists and Socialists of Color Caucus. is described as someone who came to New York for college and stayed—first in Crown Heights. then in Clinton Hill. and now in Bed-Stuy. She grew up in mostly white suburban neighborhoods in Massachusetts and Florida.
Meredith is described as familiar with DSA internal struggles about race, quoting that the left has argued over class reductionism versus identity politics “for like 100 years.” She says she is working to help DSA evolve.
In a candid 2024 self-published article, Meredith wrote that perspectives of people of color within the organization are often marginalized and that NYC-DSA has struggled “to recruit and retain working class people of color because we’ve failed to build trust with these communities.”
Even so. Meredith argues DSA offers something she sees as rare for young people of color: an opportunity to be involved in electoral politics. She cites ideological grounding, political education, and infrastructure for impact across a wide range of issues and campaigns. The reporting also says she pointed to DSA’s “highly functioning democracy,” self-funded and responsive to its base.
Meredith is described as proof of that possibility. She was part of a team that drafted and won adoption by DSA of the “Socialism Is the People” resolution presented at DSA’s City Convention. The proposal calls for “community solidarity committees” within each branch—mapping community-based organizations. building relationships. and developing opportunities for collaboration and partnership.
But Meredith says it still stings when critics call DSA “colonizers” and Black DSA candidates “puppets.” The reporting frames the sting as ironic because it echoes the kind of accusations Black Democrats directed at the Republican Party and Black Republican candidates for office. It also says that DSA candidates are often grassroots organizers—PTA presidents. tenant leaders. community organizers—but without a membership pipeline that recruits and retains working-class people of color. Black candidates drafted from DSA’s mostly white ranks can be accused of tokenism.
To supporters, DSA functions as an alternative to mainstream political machinery. The report says DSA members “cut their teeth” on movements like Occupy or Black Lives Matter and on high-energy, low-dollar-donor campaigns tied to Bernie, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
It also describes the way DSA pursues electoral campaigns built “to win. ” and places Central Brooklyn’s importance in demographic shifts and political momentum. naming two pivotal growth spurts for NYC DSA: one in 2016 after Bernie’s candidacy and Trump’s win gave DSA national exposure. and a second tied to the Zohran Mamdami campaign that helped build a new voter base in Central Brooklyn.
Austin Dilley. described as the branch representative for Central Brooklyn DSA and Assembly member Phara Souffrant Forrest’s campaign manager. is cited for membership numbers: New York’s DSA has approximately 14. 400 dues-paying members. with about 4. 000 in Central Brooklyn—making Central Brooklyn NYC DSA’s largest branch.
The report describes them not as passive card holders but as an activated reservoir of volunteers—flooding the zone with social media, door-knocking, and mobilizing across administrative and campaign levels.
In the long view, the reporting suggests, the political struggle in Central Brooklyn is also about generational memory. At the time of this story. the report says many DSA organizers knew names like Al Vann and Annette Robinson but knew little about the Coalition for Community Empowerment. the history of VIDA. or how these formations made DSA’s electoral victories possible—especially among people under 40 in Central Brooklyn.
For all the distance between the groups on taxes. renters versus homeowners. and the value of capitalism. the report argues that DSA and VIDA share something about power-building and community organizing—each finding ways to enfranchise their constituencies and build political apparatuses. It says DSA’s disciplined campaign field ethic and spirit of radicalism. even if it “may lack a robust race analysis” and doesn’t define itself around Black self-determination. resembles VIDA’s earlier days.
Whether that resemblance soothes or inflames the neighborhood’s political fights is what’s on the line. The reporting notes that some local community members are turned off by Black insurgent candidates seeking endorsement from a political group with mostly white membership. while also arguing that DSA’s process may be more democratic than crony systems used by party machines to decide who is “worthy” of running.
The counterargument presented is stark: if DSA is a midwife to gentrification by building power among white newcomers. then the Black political establishment in Central Brooklyn is described as gentrification’s “deadbeat dad.” The report says high housing costs and displacement happened on the watch of the CCE generation and their heirs. and it adds that many received campaign contributions over the years from the real estate industry and developers.
The report points to Darlene Mealy, describing her as a longtime City Council representative and Democratic Party official in Central Brooklyn who has received thousands in real-estate and special-interest dollars, and whose relatives have been accused of running a deed theft ring in Harlem.
The broader question the report puts at the center is whether these dynamics exist beyond Central Brooklyn and what they say about American urban politics.
When the reporter asked Ashik Siddique. a DSA national co-chair. if Black DSA candidates were taking on Black establishment figures outside the New York bubble. he said. “This is absolutely a definitive trend.” Siddique pointed to recent election results in Atlanta. where DSA scored major wins for Black candidates against the Black establishment in DC and Atlanta.
Siddique referred to Janeese Lewis George. a 38-year-old Black DSA-endorsed member of the Council of the District of Columbia. who beat fellow Council member Kenyan McDuffie in Washington. DC’s Democratic mayoral primary. The reporting says George won predominately Black wards like the seventh and eighth. and lost in more predominately white. affluent areas like Georgetown.
In Atlanta, the report says Mathewos Samson won the Democratic primary to represent the majority-Black district 58 in the Georgia House. Samson is described as a political newcomer who joined the DSA in 2025 and was drafted to run by the DSA literally a day before the primary filing deadline in March. If Samson wins the general election in November. the report says he would be joining white City Council member Kelsea Bond as the second DSA representative in Martin Luther King Jr.’s old neighborhood. according to New York DSA co-chair Gustavo Gordillo.
Siddique is quoted saying the competitiveness of DSA candidates in urban areas with significant Black populations “been decades in the making. ” and that a strong universalist message from Democratic Socialist candidates resonates in increasingly immigrant and Black and working-class racialized communities where the political establishment has been out of touch.
Back inside New York, the report says the same dynamics show up in Democratic Party primaries across the city. It says the replacement of New York’s second Black mayor. Eric Adams. by Zohran Mamdani—at the hands of an emboldened left flank—has raised existential fears among mainstream Black and brown Democratic politicians in gentrifying districts across the boroughs.
The report lists races where DSA challengers are set against establishment figures: in Bushwick. DSA’s Christian Celeste Tate against Assembly member Erik Dilan; in Manhattan’s Washington Heights and Harlem. DSA’s Darializa Avila Chevalier challenging US Representative Adriano Espaillat; DSA’s Conrad Blackburn challenging Assembly member Jordan Wright. representing Harlem. It adds that former Mamdami ally Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso is being challenged by DSA Assembly member Claire Valdez in western Queens and northern Brooklyn.
The June 23 primaries in Central Brooklyn will decide not just who wins a seat. They will decide which political story wins the neighborhood’s next chapter—whether it’s the long-established VIDA network rooted in Bed-Stuy’s home-and-service politics. or the DSA insurgency betting that universalist promises and insurgent infrastructure can take control.
In Central Brooklyn, the question has never been abstract. It’s been about who gets to knock on doors. who gets to define “community. ” who gets to claim urgency. and who gets blamed when neighborhoods change. And this time. the argument—begun with a bullhorn outside Laurie Cumbo’s home—winds forward into a new set of ballot fights that will feel. to many. like the same fight wearing a different outfit.
Central Brooklyn Black politics VIDA Democratic Socialists of America DSA Jabari Brisport Phara Souffrant Forrest Laurie Cumbo New York State Senate primary New York Assembly primary Marlon Rice Stefani Zinerman Eon Huntley June 23 primary