At least three socialists have declared victory in New York’s city council races: Alexa Avilés of Sunset Park, Brooklyn, Tiffany Cabán of Astoria, Queens, and Kristin Richardson Jordan of Harlem, New York. Cabán and Avilés were both endorsed by New York City Democratic Socialists of America (NYC-DSA), while Jordan is a DSA member (though not endorsed by NYC-DSA, her campaign was endorsed by socialist congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez). Their effective election is an exciting milestone for the contemporary socialist movement — but socialists and communists have a long history on this body.

Last year, when a slate of socialists won seats in New York State government, Jacobin noted their predecessors in the immigrant activists of the late teens and early 1920s, who were repeatedly elected before being expelled from the legislature by their Albany colleagues. During the same period, socialists were also active in municipal politics.

In 1917, seven socialists, all backed by the Socialist Party, were elected to the seventy-member New York City Board of Aldermen, an earlier form of the body that later became the New York City Council. One of the best known of these men was Baruch Vladeck, a journalist. Born in a small, impoverished village near Minsk, he was drawn to revolutionary movements as a teenager, became an accomplished orator, and served time in a czarist prison for recommending “liberal books” to schoolchildren. When he came to the United States, he studied Abraham Lincoln, worked for the Jewish Daily Forward, and became involved in socialist politics, just as he had been in Russia.