David Dinkins, the first black mayor of New York City, who has died aged 93, was in many ways the right man at the wrong time. His single term as mayor of the city he called “a gorgeous mosaic”, from 1990 until 1993, was a period of chaos for New York, consumed by a then-huge deficit of $1.8bn, the flight of business and money, a soaring murder rate and the seeming constant provocation of racial and ethnic conflict. Dinkins’ political personality was that of a conciliator, cautious and dignified, which contrasted starkly with his predecessor, Ed Koch, and indeed his successor, Rudy Giuliani, both of whom were as aggressive, abrasive and assertive as the population they represented.
This image had been Dinkins’ selling point in 1989 to New York’s Democratic party. But during his mayoralty, as New York’s melting pot became a crucible, Dinkins was unable to make the sort of crucial gesture that might have calmed the city, like John Lindsay’s walk through Harlem in 1968 after Martin Luther King’s assassination sparked riots in other cities.
Dinkins was born in Trenton, New Jersey, where his father, William, was a barber. When his parents divorced, David moved to Harlem with his mother, Sally (nee Lucy), a domestic worker. Eventually he and his sister, Joyce, returned to Trenton, where he attended high school, and discovered segregation, which he had not experienced in New York – the school’s swimming pool was not open to black people.
After graduation he wanted to join the Marine Corps, but found the “negro quota” filled. He entered the army and managed to transfer to the Marines, becoming one of the “Montford Point” recruits who integrated the corps.
Discharged in 1946, he entered Howard University in Washington, one of the elite traditionally black colleges, where he graduated with an honours degree in mathematics. When his college sweetheart, Joyce Burrows, graduated in 1953, they married and moved to New York. Dinkins attended law school at Brooklyn College, getting his degree in 1956. In the meantime, he worked in a liquor store for his father-in-law, Daniel, a property magnate in Harlem and a powerful figure within Tammany Hall, the Democratic power structure in the city.
While Dinkins was opening a private law practice, his father-in-law introduced him to the Carver Democratic Club, run by J Raymond Jones, “The Harlem Fox”, under whose mentorship Dinkins became one of the so-called “Gang of Four”, the group of rising young black politicians that also included the future US congressman Charles Rangel, the Manhattan borough president Percy Sutton and deputy mayor (under Koch) Basil Patterson.
David Dinkins reflecting on New York’s problems after leaving office as mayor
In 1965 Dinkins was elected to the state assembly, but in the face of redistricting, he did not run for a second term. Instead, he worked his way up through administrative positions. In 1973, he became the first black president of the city’s Board of Elections, and was credited with widening the voter base. The mayor, Abe Beame, nominated him as a deputy, which led to the revelation that Dinkins had failed to file tax returns for four years. This “oversight” was rectified, but it scuppered his nomination. In 1975 Beame appointed him city clerk, an influential position he held until 1985, when he won, on his third attempt, election as Manhattan’s borough president.
Koch had originally been elected mayor in 1978, after running as a reformer against Tammany Hall, but in 1989 he was seeking an unprecedented fourth term following mammoth corruption scandals, and had also angered New York’s black community with his opposition to Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign.
That April the city was rocked by an attack on a white female jogger in Central Park, which led to the arrest of five black and Hispanic youths (13 years later their convictions were overturned when the real rapist confessed). Shortly before the primary in August that would decide the Democratic candidate, Yusuf Hawkins, a black 16-year-old, was shot dead by a gang of white youths who attacked him in their Brooklyn neighbourhood of Bensonhurst.
In the face of massive racial tension, Dinkins was seen as a voice of reason, and he easily won the primary over Koch. In the election he faced Giuliani, whose reputation as a mafia-busting US attorney led him to adopt a strong law-and-order platform. Although Democrats held an almost five to one advantage in voter registrations, Giuliani added the endorsement of New York’s Liberal party, which helped him win more than half of Koch’s voters. Dinkins was elected by a margin of only 46,000 votes, 51% to 48%, and New York became the last of America’s 10 largest cities to elect a black mayor. In his inaugural address, he spoke of “a new coalition of conscience and purpose”.
Taking office in the middle of a recession, with 357,000 private jobs gone and federal aid cut, Dinkins had a difficult time keeping campaign promises in the face of a tightening budget, and was forced to raise city taxes. He moved to improve public housing, and to keep libraries open while cutting other programmes. He did a deal with the Disney corporation to help clean up Times Square, and another to keep the US Open Tennis in Queens. With a murder rate approaching 2,000 per year, he appointed a black police commissioner, Lee Brown, who came in from Atlanta and Houston with a reputation as a reformer. But while Dinkins waited for Brown to report, the city again exploded.
In August 1990, a tourist attending the US Open Tennis was stabbed to death on a subway platform. Dinkins announced a massive increase in the number of uniformed police. A few months later, the city was split by a black boycott of Korean-owned grocery stores, when a Korean-American owner accused a Haitian-American customer of shoplifting.
Finally, in August 1991, the keg burst as a driver in a motorcade taking the head of a Lubavitcher Orthodox Jewish sect through Crown Heights in Brooklyn swerved on to a sidewalk and killed a seven-year-old black boy, Gavin Cato. Hours later, a group of black youths killed an Australian rabbinical student. The two killings prompted almost five days of rioting, with black citizens protesting over the boy’s death and Jewish groups claiming the police were failing to protect them.
Although an independent investigation in 1993 cleared Dinkins against charges of withholding police aid, it did criticise his relative lack of action. By then it was too late to heal the wounds. Giuliani turned the tables on him and took a larger percentage of the white vote and he won his rematch in the mayoralty race that November.
In 1998 Giuliani and the city settled a lawsuit against the city by Jewish organisations, with the mayor calling Dinkins’ response “inadequate”. Dinkins invited Giuliani to dinner, saying: “I extend my hand to him in brotherhood,” but Giuliani declined this Obama-like gesture. In his 2013 memoir, A Mayor’s Life: Governing New York’s Gorgeous Mosaic (written with Peter Knobler), Dinkins called Giuliani a “cold, unkind person who practised the politics of boundless ambition”.
After leaving office, Dinkins was a professor in the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, and hosted a radio talk show. A keen tennis player, he served on the board of the US Tennis Association. He remained active in politics, and in 2013 supported his former aide Bill de Blasio in his successful campaign for election as mayor.
Dinkins’ wife died in October. He is survived by his son, David, and daughter, Donna.
• David Norman Dinkins, politician, born 10 July 1927; died 23 November 2020
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