POLITICS
Crystal Hudson’s Diverse Résumé for Council Run
Former deputy public advocate aims to be fi rst out LGBTQ Black woman to win election
BY MATT TRACY
Crystal Hudson was cruising
along more than a
decade into a career in
advertising and marketing
that included stints at the
WNBA, the NBA, and Amtrak.
Then everything changed.
Her mother was diagnosed with
Alzheimer’s disease, which was
especially heartbreaking because
Hudson is an only child. It forced
Hudson to turn into a full-time
caregiver, watching her mother
struggle to gain access to services
and resources and helping her
navigate the bureaucracy.
That legwork, Hudson said,
“wasn’t particularly easy,” and it
made her re-evaluate her own outlook
on life.
“At that point in time, I really felt
like I wanted to be doing work that
just seemed to be more meaningful
for me,” Hudson said during an
interview with Gay City News.
She had worked with the WNBA’s
Washington Mystics and the
NBA’s Washington Wizards, and
then played a leading role in diversifying
Amtrak’s national advertising
campaigns to include marginalized
communities, proving
herself as a changemaker early in
her career.
But Hudson wanted to make a
different kind of impact — and she
followed through, pivoting to a career
in public service, where she
knew she could make her mark.
She worked for City Councilmember
Laurie Cumbo and later for
Public Advocate Jumaane Williams,
serving as deputy public advocate.
She now hopes to take her
political chops to the next level by
mounting a City Council run that
would give her a more direct say on
how things operate in her district.
Hudson is one of several queer
candidates running for city offi ce in
a 2021 election cycle during which
all fi ve of the Council’s current gay
members will be pushed out by
term limits. She is mounting an
especially historic candidacy, vying
to become the fi rst out LGBTQ
Black woman elected to city offi ce,
Crystal Hudson (center) with her mother and her partner, Sasha Neha Ahuja.
as she aims to take over for her
term-limited former boss, Cumbo,
in the 35th District encompassing
Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Crown
Heights, Prospect Heights, and
Bedford Stuyvesant.
Hudson is shaping a campaign
platform that focuses on championing
local issues like bike lane
expansions, city rather than state
control of the subway system, educational
initiatives, additional job
opportunities, and more. That approach
appears to be a refl ection of
Hudson’s initial goal when entering
the public sector: To be involved on
a grassroots level in her own community.
“It was really important for me
that I worked for my local elected
offi cial,” Hudson said, referring to
her role as Cumbo’s chief of operations.
“It was there that I learned
a lot about the Council — specifi -
cally, how decisions are made.”
That work brought Hudson to
see issues in a different light —
and she started to question whether
previous decisions made by local
elected offi cials best served the
people of her district.
“One of the things to me, having
grown up here, was wondering
how a project like Barclays Center
had so much community opposition
but ended up happening anyway,”
Hudson explained. “I think
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my experience in the Council has
given me an inside look into how
those decisions are made and also
into the really important work of
constituent services. I think a lot
of times people don’t realize their
local councilmember has a direct
impact on quality of life issues like
potholes, sanitation, and street
lights.”
Sometimes, however, a councilmember’s
“direct impact” can be
too narrowly defi ned, in Hudson’s
view. She envisions a City Council
that ditches the tradition of deferring
decisions on land use to the
local councilmember representing
the area where a proposed development
takes place. The entire
City Council, she believes, should
evaluate such decisions carefully,
because those choices can have
ripple effects extending far beyond
a given district.
“I think it’s short-sighted of folks
to think that rezoning that’s happening
in Inwood or in the Bronx
is not going to have a direct impact
on those of us who live in Brooklyn
or Queens or Staten Island,” she
said.
Hudson’s work as deputy public
advocate included a focus on
issues like environmental justice,
health equity, and education, and
she especially pointed to the way
in which Black girls are pushed out
of school by being overdisciplined
and overpoliced. In talking about
the priority she puts on educational
issues, she is careful to include
discussion of Black trans girls.
While the City Council has an
impact on LGBTQ issues, the most
pressing queer political issue at
the moment is sitting before the
State Legislature, where activists
are demanding that lawmakers
repeal a loitering law known as a
Walking While Trans ban because
of the discriminatory way in which
cops target trans women of color.
Hudson has joined calls to repeal
that ban.
She left her job as deputy public
advocate just months before the
city rose up in a movement that
targeted racism and police abuse,
putting a big spotlight on the new
city budget as advocates called for
the City Council and Mayor Bill de
Blasio to slash at least $1 billion
from the NYPD. Some lawmakers
voted against the budget from the
left, saying it did not slash enough
police funding, and others rejected
it from the right. It nonetheless
passed, but not without a warning
from Hudson’s former boss, Williams,
who vowed to use his power
to withhold the collection of city
property taxes unless more action
was taken to hold the NYPD accountable.
Hudson’s other former
boss, Cumbo, voted in favor of the
budget.
When asked how she would have
voted if she were a member of the
City Council, Hudson initially said
only, “It’s a really good question…
It’s easy to speculate from the outside.”
She added, however, “Without
having every detail available to
me, I would say from my vantage
point I would have defi nitely voted
against the budget.”
Hudson is calling for a stronger
relationship between the mayor
and the City Council in order to
foster “real conversations and
truly productive conversations”
around how policing should work
in the city.
➤ CRYSTAL HUDSON, continued on p.11
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