A national black advocacy group has launched a $2 million campaign against mayoral front-runner Zohran Mamdani’s Democratic Socialists of America, claiming their agenda is bad for African-Americans.
“This is not just about policy — it’s about principle,” said Darius Jones, founder and executive director of the National Black Empowerment Action Fund — which will be spending $1.3 million just through Election Day on Nov. 4 to warn against Mamdani and his DSA comrades.
“What the DSA is pushing would hollow out everything generations of black New Yorkers fought to build: safe streets, strong schools, and ownership of our futures,” Jones told The Post. “They speak the language of progress while dismantling the foundations of progress itself.”
Black New Yorkers and Americans “refuse to be the laboratory for failed ideology” and will defend their “right to safety, to excellence, and to advancement on our own terms,” Jones said.
Jones previously served as the deputy national political director for former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s 2020 presidential campaign, and was the African American constituency director for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
The NBEAF is spending the millions on ads and mailers while urging African-Americans at churches and mosques to reject the DSA and its candidates, including Mamdani.
“THE DSA: Dangerous. Senseless. All wrong for Black America,” one of the flyers says.
The leaflet warns DSA members “Have an Extreme Agenda and it’s threatening the Black community,” adding the far-left group backs releasing prisoners, even violent criminals, dismantling the NYPD gang database and decriminalizing all drugs, including heroin and fentanyl.
Faith-based leaders have joined the anti-DSA, anti-Mamdani campaign.
“We’ve seen what drugs do to families and what crack did to our neighborhoods – and what opioids like fentanyl are doing now,” said Imam Qazi Qayyoom, founder of the Muhammadi Community & Interfaith Center in Jackson Heights, Queens. “The DSA’s idea of justice would bring that destruction back to our doorsteps – and park it there.”
Qayyoom has endorsed Mamdani’s election rival, ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo, for mayor.
Pastor Zidde Hamatheite of the Wayside Baptist Church in Brooklyn said, “The DSA wants to defund the police and decriminalize hard drugs. That’s not progress, that’s surrender. And it’s wrong for black communities in New York.”
The DSA is against school choice and opportunity for parents and children of color, said the Rev. James Kilgore of the Friendship Baptist Church in Harlem.
Democratic socialist Mamdani opposes charter school expansion and wants to phase out gifted and talented programs in the lower grades.
“The DSA wants to defund some of the only high-quality public schools we have access to and evict more than 130,000 black and brown children from those few high-quality public schools. How is that even remotely progressive?” Kilgore said.
Most black voters are mainstream Democrats not affiliated with the left-wing DSA.
During the Democratic primary for mayor, more black New Yorkers voted for Cuomo than Mamdani.
But Mamdani won the primary and Cuomo is now running on an independent ballot line in the general election. Black voters are also loyal Democrats, and recent polling shows a majority of them have abandoned Cuomo and shifted to Mamdani as the Democratic nominee running on the party’s ballot line .
Jones said the anti-DSA initiative will be a long-term project extending beyond Tuesday’s election.
The Mamdani campaign and the DSA had no immediate comment.
