Transcript: Mayor Adams Delivers Remarks at AAMA 2025 Annual Business Council Breakfast

April 18, 2025

Mayor Eric Adams: Thank you so much, and it's great being here with you. Just really want to acknowledge Brother Kevin Johnson, just for your vision, your foresight of just being one of the founders of this amazing organization and putting it back online. I never thought in my life I would be quoting Joan Rivers, but can we talk?  

We need to have a real conversation on what it is to be a Black mayor. The job of mayor is challenging, but a Black mayor, the challenge is on steroids and what we go through. By the time you're done, the PTSD, you better have saved up enough for some psychological counseling by the time you get through your run as mayor.  

What we inherit and what we have to accomplish, and particularly if you are the first or the second Black mayor, you inherit those who are part of an institution that will say, we're going to wait you out. You inherit those who have their own agenda, who have long relationships with the media that they can leak and slip information and make calls on you.  

You inherit the fact that so many people want to see your failure and you have to push through that. And so the tips to success is ignore the noise, ignore the noise. Help me understand as the mayor of the largest city in America, I inherited a city where COVID was in place. My city was closed down. Jobs were hemorrhaging. We did not know if our children were going back to school or not. Everyone had on a face mask, our retail shops were boarded up.  

Black unemployment was four times the rate as white unemployment. Crime was through the roof and over proliferation of guns on our streets. Our children were not learning at the capacity that they deserved. 230,000 migrants and asylum seekers were dropped into our city that cost my city $7.5 billion with a B to take care of. And then two and a half years later, what happened? The bond raters have raised my bonds. More jobs in New York City in the city's history.  

More affordable housing built year one and year two in the city's history. Outpacing the state with my children and reading and math, dyslexia screening. Matt Fraser, my CTO, put free high speed broadband in all of our public housing developments. More people moved from homeless shelters into permanent housing in the city's history. Subsidized more housing with our theft voucher program in the city's history. We had to brought down crime across the board.  

This quarter, we had the lowest number of shooters in the city's history. Second lowest number of homicides in the city's history. Dropped Black and brown unemployment by 20 percent in overall unemployment. More small businesses operating in the city's history. 65 million tourists are in New York City, the second largest in the city's history. Stabilized the city. Moved 240,000 migrants and asylum seekers out of our system. 190,000 are moving on to the next location of their journey. All of that, and they say my city's in chaos. What city are they talking about?  

But that's how they define us. And so the goal we must do as Black mayors, we must identify our own communication mechanism. We could no longer be defined by the eyes of those who don't have any desire to see and report on the success that we have accomplished. If we don't find a way in this new mode of communication to communicate direct to consumer, your story will never be told.  

We are like a tree that falls in the forest and no one is around, so people don't believe we're making a sound. How do we have my brother in Chicago and he must deal with the migrants and asylum seekers in his community as he tries to house the residents of his city. And so let me give you my analysis. Poverty is profitable. There's no real desire to stop the systemic poverty that we are experiencing in our cities.  

Archbishop Desmond Tutu stated that we spend a lifetime pulling people out of the river. We don't go upstream to prevent them from falling in in the first place. There's money to be made downstream. It's no coincidence that in all of our cities, our babies are reading at the levels of math and reading that they are because it's profitable if they fail because downstream people are making paper off the fact that they have to give them the additional services that they need.  

Why are 30 to 40 percent of those young people who are incarcerated are having learning disabilities or dyslexia? Why are we seeing food in our communities that feed the health care crisis instead of putting people on a pathway of healthy eating? That's why we're doing lifestyle medicine in my hospitals. That's why we have dyslexia screening inside our young children in schools. Why are we finding guns without the manufacturers in our cities, but we're finding them in our cities?  

That's why we removed over 23,000 illegal guns off our streets in the City of New York to stop the bullets that are carving highways of death to our communities. Our challenges are immense. We all know it doesn't matter if you are in a city of 100 or a city of 8.3 million people like New York, we're going through the same things. That's why this organization is crucial.  

The power of now is harnessing our power and then staffing ourselves with people who have the same vision as we do. You're going to receive criticism. I'm criticized for having the first administration in the City of New York with five deputy mayors, second African-American to be the chief of staff, first African-American woman to be a first deputy mayor, first Hispanic to be a police commissioner, first woman to be a police commissioner, first African-American to be a chief technology officer with a multi-billion dollar budget.  

We have a $114 billion budget, and when you look at my administration, it looks like the people that represent the city. When you do these things, you're going to come under fire. You're going to come under fire. And AAMA, I want to thank you personally.  

This has been the hardest 15 months of my life, of my life, but every day, there was this woman with a third grade education, used mops and rags to clean floors, walked out our home in her arthritic knees leaning on a cane and whispering in my ear all the time when I stumbled and was told that I was a dumb student. She would say, baby, you got this.  

And mommy transitioned in 2021, but as I went through this difficult period, I could feel the spirit of mommy when she would take me in the morning and put my right foot on the floor and my left foot on the floor, and she said, baby, you get up, because people who are going through a lot are watching you, and you will never surrender. You will never give in. You will always stand tall, and it's because of that third grade educated woman that I'm the mayor of the City of New York, and so we know about Malcolms. We know about Sojourner Truth. We know about Nat Turners. We know about Marcus Garvey.  

We know about all of them, but let's not forget those mothers who fried the chicken to make sure the judges can go to the court and fight for integration in our school system. Let's not forget those mothers who made those pies when those men were rallying to march. Let's not forget those mothers who sat in those pews every Sunday and prayed for them. Let's not forget, with all of the great leaders that we know, let's not forget Ms. Jones, Ms. Harris, Mr. Johnson, all of the people who made the willingness to get us where we are now.  

I am here because of them, and that is the power of now. They took what they had, and they made sure we could move forward. They listened to the soothing voice of Lou Rawls when he said a mind is a terrible thing to waste and furnished the United Negro College Fund, and so I say to you, my brothers and sisters mayors that are here, let's live up to the opportunity. Let's be bold. Let's be true. Most importantly, let's be you. No matter what you do, there are going to be those haters, and as we sit here in Washington, D.C., I tell people all the time, let your haters be your waiters as you sit down at the table of success. Congratulations, AAMA.