NYC cultural affairs commish Cumbo obliquely defends embattled mayor

Without mentioning New York City Mayor Eric Adams – or directly referencing the federal indictment unsealed last week charging the mayor with fraud and corruption – City Cultural Affairs Commissioner Laurie Cumbo seemed to defend the mayor who appointed her.

“We are going through some really turbulent times here in New York City. We are going through a really challenging time in terms of where our future lies,” she said on Tuesday at City & State’s Arts & Culture Power 100 event. Cumbo is on the cover of the magazine featuring the power list, and she joked about straying from the script, shouting out the presence of her staff and chief counsel.

She implored the room to quiet down, and she appealed to New York’s example for how to live in a diverse society.

“We are in a watershed moment in New York City and in this country on so many levels, we're either in a place where we are going to evolve, or we're in a place where we are going to become extinct,” she said. “As a Black woman in New York City right now, it's a bit of a painful time in terms of what you're seeing on the news.”

The mayor, who has pleaded not guilty, has assembled allies in the Black clergy. He convened faith leaders for a press conference the day the indictment was unsealed, visited churches in the Bronx, Staten Island and in Queens over the weekend and appeared at a religious rally in support of him on the City Hall steps on Tuesday.

Adams has had less luck with elected officials. His political allies have been measured in their responses, calling for due process. On Tuesday, the first off-topic press conference after the indictment was unsealed, the mayor took questions from the press alone. Typically he has sat at a dais with several of his deputy mayors.

“I know as an African American woman, I feel in this moment that African Americans are being elected to, being appointed to positions that were never, ever held before,” Cumbo said. “And while we are evolving and this new dynamic is coming, it's important that we show grace in this period and time. It's important that we show patience in this period in time.”

She went on: “I wake up in the morning and I think about the movement of blood, sweat and tears, of lynchings, of beatings, of hangings, of all sorts of things, getting beat upside the head on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. There was a movement that got all of these Black leaders into the positions that they're in, and there are so many young people looking at this moment in terms of what it will bring.”

The closest she got to directly referencing the mayor’s situation was this: “Often, people will want to fire an individual or have an individual resign, but they don't realize that it's bigger than the individual.”