NEW YORK — With heavily Democratic New York City now the poster child for all that President Trump hates, officials came together Wednesday to show their defiance against the White House and Republicans in Congress, and celebrate an age-old civil rights organization. BNV contributor Allison J. Davis was there:

Globally known officials, civil rights leaders, and philanthropists came together in Harlem, the Black world capital, to celebrate the opening of a new headquarters for the National Urban League. The building on Harlem’s iconic 125th street also includes the future Urban Civil Rights Museum dedicated to the experiences of northern Black Americans, a branch of HBCU Virginia Union University (the first such HBCU in New York City), offices for the Studio Museum in Harlem, 100 Black Men of New York, and almost 180 affordable housing units, National Urban League President Marc Morial said. 

“My life’s work has been about defying the odds, … whether it was as the first Black student at my middle school in the turbulent 1960s, where I had to endure being called the N word as a routine or bucking the odds to rescue my beloved New Orleans (from Hurricane Katrina) as its youngest mayor,” Morial said.  

“I’m proud today to say that together we will allow no one to stand in our path, no one to hold us to low expectations, no one to define what we can (or) cannot do,” he added.

New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani evoked the memory of late civil rights and labor leader A. Philip Randolph in celebrating the opening.

“He said freedom is never granted one,” Mamdani said. “How better to describe the work of the National Urban League than the enduring effort to win freedom for the millions of black Americans from whom it has been withheld.”

Leticia James, the New York State attorney general who successfully prosecuted Trump for financial fraud and is now fighting fraud charges by the Justice Department, was greeted like a Hollywood star by the audience when she walked in. The Rev. Al Sharpton, founder of the National Action Network, and New York City Councilman Yusef Salaam, D-Harlem, one of the Exonerated Five, were also there.

Interestingly, homeownership for Black Americans has been one of the goals pushed by the National Urban League, but Wednesday’s event marked a first for the organization.

“When we began this project, we did a survey of all 90 of our affiliates, and we found out that 70 percent of them owned their own office space,” Morial said. “When I shared with the affiliate leaders our plans to build a building, their response was, ‘What have you been waiting on?’ ”