Former mayor Richard Thomas, upon his arrest in 2018. He pled guilty to two misdemeanor charges of misuse of campaign funds. Photo: Yonkers Times
A majority Black city in Westchester County, a northern suburb of New York City, suffers from years of Black political misleadership and is now under threat by real estate developers who envision the replacement of the Black working class population.
I. The Blueprint of Extraction Today, Mount Vernon, New York, faces a 21st-century plan for colonization implemented by backroom deal-making where developers, politicians, and the Black misleadership class join forces to plot how to divide our city. Their tools aren’t the treaties and the weapons of old, but of rezoning maps and austerity budgets. Their targets aren’t the ivory and rubber that European colonists sought in Africa, but Black neighborhoods, Latino labor, and the political autonomy of working-class people.
Mount Vernon, a majority Black and Latino community, is often called the “Jewel of Westchester”. The title rings hollow when held against its reality-television brand of chaos and shenanigans. It boasts a robust transit system built to shuttle residents to New York City and a vibrant generational community of homeowners . Yet, these are just set pieces for the city’s grotesque spectacle: A former comptroller who held the city under siege, a ex-mayor tried and convicted on corruption charges , decades of lawsuits that put the city into so much debt that it couldn't afford basic necessities, and years of city council meetings devolving into hours of excruciating arguments about everything but legislation. It is a government so notoriously inept that vendors who typically do business with cities won’t touch Mount Vernon with a ten-foot pole. Mount Vernon has the most structure fires in the county, sewers that flood homes with raw waste, and has seen the closure of two recreational centers and three elementary schools.
Even mild attempts to fix these conditions collapse into a three-ring circus. Politicians block each other not with policy, but with shameless, performative sabotage. This isn’t neglect. It’s an orchestrated collapse, the harbinger of a takeover.
A long history of betrayal by Black misleaders has brought us to today, where another crop has decided to take up the mantle of further destabilization and transfer of power to white elites by proposing a massive overhaul of the governmental structure of the city—the City Manager System. It comes out of the Mount Vernon Charter Review Commission, tasked with updating a charter that is over 100 years old. The proposal calls for a ballot referendum that would lead to the destruction of the balance of power by the reduction of Mayoral duties, elimination of what is already a skeleton staff, and hiring a “professional” who is an unelected bureaucrat with the power to run the administrative duties of the city, which constantly complains of budgetary difficulties. This shift typically requires at least five years to implement and comes with a high price tag. Still, this change was set to be implemented within two years without considering the price, process, potential impact on the city residents, or any other key logistical details. They constructed this idea with negligible communication and outreach to the public, most notably a survey that received only 314 responses in a city of over 70,000 people, where over 60% of the responses came from one zip code.
The charge for this power grab was fronted by some of the Black members on the commission who allegedly bullied others to gather the votes needed to move on this proposal. Questions about the details of the Community Manager duties were met with comparisons to other Westchester County cities, such as New Rochelle, well into its own process of gentrification , over-development , cost of living increases, and expansion of police power , and Yonkers which got rid of its City Manager decades ago over power struggles and a deepening economic crisis in the city.
Nationally and in New York state specifically, cities that implemented this system, especially ones with a sizeable community of people of color, often saw an imbalance of power shifted to the city manager, the fast-tracking of “urban development” (otherwise known as gentrification), a reduction of public services, and cost-cutting that endangers the municipality, as seen in the case of the Flint Water Crisis.
Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa wasn’t just history but prophecy. Colonialism doesn’t just steal resources; it distorts economies to serve outsiders. This remains true for Black people who are colonized throughout the diaspora.
Mount Vernon follows the same script of destabilization through manufactured dysfunction, theft, and power-grabbing. The city closed public schools to fund school board administrative salaries, lured developers with PILOTs (Payments in Lieu of Taxes), increased the police and surveillance state, and called it “progress.”
Rodney warned that underdevelopment is a process, not a natural condition. The Bronx wasn’t “poor” until Robert Moses bulldozed it for highways. Mount Vernon isn’t broken; it was intentionally abandoned and for decades became the Joke of Westchester. Out of this destabilization grew a common sentiment in Mount Vernon:
“This city was better when the Italians were running things.”
II. The Black Compradors: From the CBC to Mount Vernon City Hall
Every colonial project needs local collaborators. In the U.S., the Congressional Black Caucus functions as the managers of the internal colony. They cozy up with Silicon Valley donors and aid the expansion of police power, turning our suffering into political capital as our neighborhoods are mined for data and profit. As a result, Black families are forced out of their neighborhoods or live in communities with polluted air and water, and 30% of Black men can expect to experience incarceration. This system traps Black communities in a cycle of extraction, where our neighborhoods are patrolled like occupied territory, our labor is exploited for poverty wages, and our votes are used to legitimize the same machines that displace us. The CBC maintains this arrangement by trading grassroots demands for flashy corporate campaigns and empty symbolic appointments.
In Mount Vernon, it’s the Democratic machine that treats Black voters like a captive audience, delivering nothing but photo ops and #blackexcellence. At the same time, mentally ill people are abandoned on the streets, employment options are few, the police stalk children after school, and the Black and Brown working class community struggles to keep their rent paid as gentrification slowly creeps into the city.
Bourgeois Blacks in Westchester County throw gala dinners in the ballrooms of White Plains and New Rochelle and grandstand about the police violence against Black and brown communities, as we’ve seen with the 2023 murder of Jarrel Garris in New Rochelle and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) reports detailing police civil rights violations in Yonkers and recently in Mount Vernon as well. They’ll cry “Black Lives Matter” and then support bloated police budgets and increased surveillance. They’ll push for the development of luxury apartments that attract upper-middle-class renters and cry “what a tragedy!” when a building housing poor and working class people burns . Their class allegiance is clear. They are upwardly mobile, reactionary liberal, and financially wedded to the very systems that impoverish their constituents.
Moral posturing by the Democrats has accusations of “behaving like the republicans” or “moving like Donald Trump” flying around, as if decades of Democratic control didn’t deliver the very crises they now exploit to justify takeover. It’s all a smokescreen for their treachery.
Their role mirrors Leopold II’s “Force Publique,” Black soldiers enforcing Belgian terror in the Congo. Mount Vernon’s Force Publique keeps us invested in this internal colonial system that is waging war against us, while they wear Christian Louboutin designer shoes and position themselves as the voice of Black Mount Vernon.
III. Austerity as the New Structural Adjustment
The IMF’s 1980s structural adjustment programs (SAPs) forced Africa to slash education and healthcare to pay foreign debt. The West, led by the U.S., created the conditions that justified the further domination of the continent. Incapacitate a nation by forcing it to privatize public infrastructure and eliminate public services, among other nefarious tactics, to destroy the economy and social order.
Walter Rodney’s ever-relevant question, Underdeveloped for whom? , exposed colonialism not as mere neglect, but as an active process of stripping resources from the global poor to enrich foreign powers. The unfolding situation in Mount Vernon exemplifies how this process is reflected domestically and illuminates the conditions Black people in this country are subjected to.
Taxes on homeowners regularly increase, yet residents have to navigate crumbling streets and sidewalks and watch as their money is wasted on repeated lawsuits rather than quality public services. “Affordable” apartments in the wealthiest county in the state cost upwards of $2500 a month. There are limited employment options, the majority being low-wage and exploitative industries. Most Black Mount Vernon working class residents live on the south side, where the income is lower and the infrastructure is more degraded. City Hall is now funneling millions of local and state taxpayer dollars into police and surveillance—including doorbell camera networks, ShotSpotter, and the so-called “Aware Room”, a real-time monitoring center to track our movements. This is despite publicly admitting the decrease in violent crime, thus requiring them to fabricate the excuse of “quality of life crimes.” These conditions testify to a system designed to fail working-class Black and Brown residents.
Mount Vernon is segregated by race. Black residents largely reside on the southern side, close to the Bronx. Most white residents live in northern neighborhoods, close to Bronxville, one of the wealthiest communities in Westchester. (DOJ)
The Black middlemen for the white elite in Westchester and up to the state level create these conditions to justify the theft of the city. So-called fiscal management and city-wide administrative disarray demand that we shutter schools, eliminate our YMCA/YWCA, ignore environmental and infrastructural decay, and offer tax breaks to corporations. All of this may eventually lead to what could be the complete collapse of the city, which will then be “saved” by a City Manager of their liking.
SAPs didn’t “save” Africa; they auctioned it. A City Manager won’t “save” Mount Vernon; they’ll sell it.
Rodney warned that colonial powers built infrastructure to control, not to serve. When developers and their political allies speak of “progress,” they mean the progress of capital, not community. This is underdevelopment by design—a transfer of what should be our power into their hands, where every camera pointed at our stoops is a silent declaration, “Your neighborhood belongs to us now.”
IV. The Resistance Playbook
Africa’s liberation didn’t come from the masses secretly complaining with their friends and family at dinner. It came from armed revolt, mass strikes, and international shaming and divestment. Mount Vernon’s playbook must be just as unrelenting.
Name the collaborators: Expose every politician, pastor, and “leader” colluding with capitalist elites and developers.
Sabotage the machine: Flood city and Democratic Committee meetings, sue for FOIL documents, occupy vacant lots.
Build parallel power: Panther-style clinics, tenant unions, community land trusts.
This is the blueprint. This is the path forward.
The local political establishment and its Black bourgeois buddies bank on the city's low political engagement and voter turnout. Only a small fraction of registered voters show up at the polls each election. City Council meetings are often lightly attended. Community organizing is nonexistent. There is no mechanism to apply pressure or create the parallel systems so desperately needed. However, this doesn’t have to be a permanent condition. Momentum is building. We must seize it.
V. Conclusion
On July 16, 2025, the attempt to put the question of the City Manager on the ballot failed in the midnight hour, because of the community’s impressive response. If history is a teacher, we can be sure we will not see the end of the movement to capture this city. The urgent push to transition into the new system suggests a larger plan in the works. However, with an organized resistance, it can be foiled as it was recently.
Colonialism’s greatest lie was that Africans needed saving from themselves. It is a lie that has been maintained for centuries to run cover for imperialist dominance. Here in Mount Vernon, this lie manifests by cultivating the idea that a Democratic Party stronghold where Black residents outnumber white residents 3-to-1 and Black voters outnumber white voters 2-to-1, needs “competent management” from unelected bureaucrats. As I’ve written before, these politicians are playing in our faces . Since they, like their ilk in Congress, have no interest in serving the people of Mount Vernon, the people of Mount Vernon must serve ourselves.
A city manager won’t “fix” Mount Vernon. Only the people will.
Imani Nile is the assistant to BAR's Executive Editor, a proud member of the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) NYC/NJ, and the BAP Communications Team Lead. She works in movement communications and media.
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