Mayor Mamdani needs to listen to the grumbling members of the political class who are upset that he has not named a deputy mayor who is African American. Whether or not he makes such an appointment, Mamdani should understand the roots of that criticism. It is not simply about one person in one position — rather, the complaints spring from a deep worry about a decades-long mass exodus of Black families out of New York. A tectonic demographic shift is happening, one that is diluting and dissipating the Black political power base, built over the course of a century. Black political power helped Mamdani get into office. The mayor must understand that there are things he can do to help preserve it.

The numbers are stunning. “The city’s Black population has declined by nearly 200,000 people in the past two decades, or about 9 percent,” the New York Times reported in 2023. Harlem lost its Black majority in 2000 and saw nearly 11,000 Black residents depart between 2010 to 2020, gaining 18,000 white residents during the same decade. In Bedford–Stuyvesant, 30,000 white residents moved in between 2010 and 2020, while the Black population plunged by 22,000.

It’s part of a nationwide trend of Black populations shifting from northern cities to Atlanta, Houston, Charlotte, and other southern cities, in what the Washington Post describes as a reversal of the Great Migration that brought Blacks north throughout the 20th century.

“What I’m hearing from everyone is that the housing crisis that’s currently occurring has basically hollowed out many traditional African American or African diasporic communities and really represents a form of pervasive resegregation in many ways,” Professor Roger Green, who represented part of Brooklyn in the State Assembly for 26 years, told me. Greene and other older political-community leaders have formed a group, the Coalition for a Democratic and Just New York, that is pressing Mamdani to take action.

“We think that creating and........

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