One crucial factor in Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York City mayoral election last month was a huge shift in the Black vote. According to The City, Mamdani won 64 percent of the vote in neighborhoods with a plurality of Black residents — a 25 percentage point jump from the June primary. In our feature “Will Zohran Mamdani Win Over Black New Yorkers?” Maya Meredith interviewed volunteer organizers who pushed the Mamdani field operation deeper into Black working-class communities. Meanwhile, the campaign was making its own moves.

Afua Atta-Mensah was hired as political director after the primary with an explicit mission to build Mamdani’s multiracial base of support, including deepening relationships with Black voters by implementing a political strategy grounded in a community organizing framework.

Meredith talked to Atta-Mensah about how she and her team brought the candidate and his message into Black communities and named how his agenda would meet their unique material needs. At the same time, she worked to ensure the campaign was ready to address skepticism about a political program intended to benefit working New Yorkers of all races whose message was often delivered by white canvassers perceived as transplants or gentrifiers before they were seen as neighbors.

You were brought on to Zohran’s campaign team as political director after the primary election. What did you see as your mandate and your goals in the lead-up to the general election?

I saw my role as helping expand the coalition from the primary to ensure a win. First and foremost, my goal was to help build a political operation that was both parallel to and ran with a field operation that would cement a coalition that could win — but that could also see Zohran through a first year where he could move forward his agenda and platform.

What background and experience did you bring to the project?

I come to politics as an organizer. I served as the head of Community Voices Heard in New York, which is a base-building institution that started as a welfare rights organization. After leaving CVH, I went to Community Change, an institution that supports organizing across the country, where I served as the chief of programs, overseeing their electoral, policy, and organizing work. And so my mind coming into Zohran’s campaign was that mixing organizing with politics was a necessary output to move forward.

I was excited by what I heard about their orientation toward organizing, but I also had questions. For me, any class analysis that is devoid of a race analysis is not one that is practical or transformational for America. And so I wanted to make sure that we were unapologetic about engaging communities — not just because Oh, this policy will help everybody. No, to make the case directly to Latino, to Asian, to Black New Yorkers about what Mamdani’s agenda could look like and what it would mean to have folks seeing themselves as part of this — not just thinking that it will help their pocketbooks, but that it will help them live in dignity and safety. What it means to have a true multiracial Democratic coalition.

How did you approach the shift in the campaign’s strategy for reaching Black communities from the primary going into the general election?

I think one of the first pieces was making sure that the campaign saw the strategy as a necessity not just for winning but also for governing. The first thing I did was build a team that had a similar vision and understanding. I want to ground in that, because there’s been a lot of conversation about a lack of diversity within the team. The political team, which I oversaw and grew to 13 people at the end, was almost all people of color. Majority Black. Seven Black folks, two Latinos, one Indo-Caribbean staffer, and we had one member of the team doing Jewish outreach. We were clear that Black communities and Latino communities and Asian communities are not a monolith.

We took our message to elected, faith, and community leaders and had conversations. We had Zohran sit with people in all of those different leadership configurations, so that he could speak to what the agenda meant to him and what it could mean for New York City.

Some of the shifts you may have seen were moving from the general idea of how this helps everyone — which is true — to the specific. Deed theft is about Black communities. You should say the word “Black”; if it’s for them, say it. Don’t just mention the “disproportionate impact.” When we’re talking about maternal mortality, clearly you have to talk about Black women. So say it. And let’s go to Central Brooklyn and talk about it.

That was the strategy: Naming the thing. Creating a structure of talking to folks within Black and Latino and Asian communities. They might or might not necessarily agree with you, but you need to come and make the case. And you need to be unafraid to go to any neighborhood in this great city to make that case, again and again and again.

What challenges did you face in developing and implementing that strategy? Were there any particularly tough relationships or narratives or competing priorities in the Black community that you needed to crack open?

Listen, I’m not a part of DSA. There are real tensions in New York City about DSA and gentrification. When it’s either your perception or the reality that the very people who are talking to you about class consciousness are the same people who don’t say hi to you in the morning and push you out of your apartment, we have to hold the complexity of that. Just like Black communities are not a monolith, neither are DSA members. Since we had a candidate who proudly claimed DSA as his political home, how do we hold all of that?

We didn’t shy away from it. We had those conversations about what it means and looks like. And an important piece was that Zohran’s big tent also included organizations that supported him from day one that weren’t just DSA: New York Communities for Change, CAAAV Voice, DRUM Beats. These are organizations that are also unapologetic about taking that message into their communities and holding all of the complexities.

And then of course there are other tensions. In politics, there’s no tie; someone won and someone lost. Some folks either feel left behind or are asking themselves, What does this mean? Politics everywhere are local. A lot of the time it’s who looks like you, who do you know, who’s been around. We had to deal with those concerns about I don’t know this person or My only engagement around the place he calls his political home has not been something that has been helpful to me.

There were tensions with a field apparatus that did amazing work but didn’t always reflect the communities of the doors they were knocking on. We had to answer all that. What we did, again and again, was not shy away from hard questions but to come and make the case everywhere.

What would you say was the answer to those hard questions? I once had the opportunity to door-knock with Assemblymember Phara Souffrant Forrest as part of her constituent organizing. She was speaking to another Haitian woman at the door, and the woman was talking about all the white kids moving into the building and pushing people out. And Phara was able to communicate, in a chill way, that it’s really the landlord raising the rents — it’s not the white kids coming in who are pushing people out. But that message hits different when it’s from one immigrant woman to another. So I’m curious: What answers were you sharing in those kinds of conversations?

Part of the importance of having this multiracial coalition with all types of partners that usually wouldn’t be a part of this was that there are multiple messengers to lift it up. You lift up Assemblymember Forrest. Usually there’s not a collaboration between DSA and the assembly member and Brooklyn Democratic Party chair Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn. But she was a strong supporter and was also able to lift up the message with language accessibility, talking directly in Kreyòl to say it’s both. It’s both the landlords and the whites moving in.

The Black diaspora and journey is a real one, which in New York City is beautiful to see, because it brings you from places like Haiti, Panama, Jamaica, Ghana, and Virginia. And the one universal piece is the treatment that we receive here. You come into these neighborhoods in Bed-Stuy, in Harlem — global destinations — only to be pushed out.

But there’s an answer here: a rent freeze that could provide some type of solace while we work out these larger inequalities. It’s important to be able to hold nuance. Having faith, community, and elected leaders as messengers, along with a political operation that can speak to people in different ways because the vast majority of our team has lived those experiences, helped us do that.

What would you call the biggest successes that y’all had with shifting Black community relationships?

I’m a Bronx girl. It didn’t go so well in the primary with the Bronx, and we successfully flipped the Bronx. I’d say, the 26 percent lead with Black voters. I’d say, flipping Brownsville was beautiful. And there’s so much more work to do. It’s one thing to win an election, but to have a multiracial coalition that is serious not just about the messenger but the platform is what’s imperative.

I’ll just say that on a personal level, it’s beautiful to go across the city I love, all over, and see people excited about what is possible. Folks were starting to believe in what it could look like and what could be different. They were willing to take steps on faith sometimes, even when others were spending millions of dollars to say, This will ruin the city. That was beautiful to see. And to see people across the city knocking on doors, taking a leap of faith, and talking to their neighbors.

When we would do roundtables and sessions in Black communities across the city, many older Black New Yorkers told the story of how their kid, grandkid, nephew, classmate, neighbor, was telling them, “You have to rank Zohran” in the primary. Many people would come and say, “My grandson told me I had to come and hear you, so that’s why I’m here.” This isn’t often talked about, but family members were trusted messengers — the most important people pushing and saying, “Give this person a chance. Give this movement a chance.” The organizing that was done within families and within social circles is something that is extremely important.

What are you envisioning now, going into the transition and the work of the new administration? What do you see as your project moving forward?

I see it as holding that coalition together, which will be a Herculean feat. It came together because of a host of different things: ideological belief; being sick and tired of the status quo; fear, hope, love, and everything in between. From there, folks will come into different portions of the sausage-making that is governing. We’re making sure that we continue to lift up the message and continue to provide on-ramps for new partners to come in. I want them to support a mayor-elect who I believe in, but I think what will keep people in this fight for the long term is a belief that the things that were championed in the campaign should be a part of every New Yorker’s life.

What do you see as the spadework to keep the coalition together? What are some of those on-ramps to bring in more people and more supporters?

Ensuring that the administration reflects the amazingly diverse tapestry of the city, so people can continue to see themselves. Ensuring community leaders are engaged in an ongoing way as thought partners to figure out the strategy that can enact these things. It’s equally important for there to be ongoing direct communication from the transition team and the administration. I think Zohran and the communications team have taken speaking directly to folks to a level of art. That has to keep happening so folks continue to feel and understand what we’re doing.

When thinking about the other projects inspired by Zohran’s campaign that are going to be arising in the coming years, are there things that you would want people to have in mind when they’re thinking about how to build a multiracial coalition around a socialist message?

I would just lift up the term “multiracial,” because too often that gets left out. It’s okay, from my vantage point, to talk about identity, and not to erase it as if policy itself will save you. Policy doesn’t save folks. Power does. Building power with folks who have both a shared framework and a shared culture is important. If folks are trying to build solidarity, I’d say a key portion is to ensure that it is multiracial — to ensure that it holds and cares for and sees the culture and value of folks within those communities as important.