New York City’s first African-American mayor, David Dinkins, has died at 93

David Dinkins, who broke barriers as the first African-American mayor of New York City, has died at 93.

The New York City Police Department said officers were called to the former mayor’s home that night. The first indications were that he died of natural causes.

Dinkins’ death came just weeks after the death of his wife, Joyce, who died in October 2020 at the age of 89.

Dinkins, a calm and courteous figure with a penchant for tennis and formal wear, was a dramatic departure from both his predecessor, Ed Koch, and his successor, Rudolph Giuliani, two combative and often abrasive politicians in a city with a reputation for of World class. out of impatience and rudeness.

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In his inaugural address in January 1990, he lovingly spoke of New York as a “magnificent mosaic of race and religious faith, of national origin and sexual orientation, of individuals whose families arrived yesterday and generations ago, passing through Ellis Island or the Kennedy airport. or in buses to the Port Authority ”.

But the city he inherited also had an ugly side.

AIDS, guns and crack kill thousands of people each year. Unemployment skyrocketed. Homelessness was rampant. The city faced a budget deficit of $ 1.5 billion.

Dinkins’ low-key and considerate approach was quickly perceived as a flaw. Critics said it was too smooth and too slow.

“Dave, do something!” yelled one New York Post incumbent in 1990, Dinkins’ first year in office.

Dinkins did a lot at City Hall. He raised taxes to hire thousands of police officers. He spent billions of dollars revitalizing abandoned homes. His administration got Walt Disney Corp to invest in cleaning up the then seedy Times Square.

In recent years, he has received more credit for those accomplishments, credit Mayor Bill de Blasio said he should have always had. De Blasio, who served in the Dinkins administration, named the Manhattan Municipal Building in honor of the former mayor in October 2015.

“The example Mayor David Dinkins set for all of us is brighter than the most powerful beacon imaginable,” said New York Attorney General Letitia James, who broke barriers as the state’s first black woman elected to state office.

“I was honored that he held the Bible at my inaugurations because I and others are leaning on his shoulders,” she said.

However, the results of his achievements did not come quickly enough for Dinkins to win a second term.

After beating Giuliani by just 47,000 votes out of 1.75 million cast in 1989, Dinkins lost a rematch by roughly the same margin in 1993.

Political historians often attribute the defeat to the Dinkins’ handling of the Crown Heights riot in Brooklyn in 1991.

The violence began after a 7-year-old black boy was accidentally killed by a car in the caravan of an Orthodox Jewish religious leader. During the three days of anti-Jewish riots by black youth that followed, a rabbinic student was fatally stabbed. Almost 190 people were injured.

A state report issued in election year 1993 cleared Dinkins of repeated accusations that he had intentionally detained police in the early days of the violence, but criticized him for failing to assume leadership.

In a 2013 memoir, Dinkins accused the police department of letting the riots get out of control and also took some of the blame, arguing that “the ball stopped with me.” But he bitterly blamed his electoral defeat on prejudice: “I think it was just racism, outright.”

Born in Trenton, New Jersey, on July 10, 1927, Dinkins moved with his mother to Harlem when his parents divorced, but returned to his hometown to attend high school. There, he learned an early lesson about discrimination: Blacks were not allowed to use the school pool.

During a hitch in the United States Marine Corps as a young man, a southern bus driver prevented him from boarding a segregated bus because the black section was full.

“And I was in the uniform of my country!” Dinkins recounted years later.

While attending Howard University, the historically black university in Washington, DC, Dinkins said he gained admission to segregated movie theaters by wearing a turban and feigning a foreign accent.

Back in New York with a degree in mathematics, Dinkins married his college sweetheart, Joyce Burrows, in 1953. His father-in-law, a power in local Democratic politics, channeled Dinkins into a Harlem political club. Dinkins paid his dues as a Democratic civil servant while obtaining a law degree from Brooklyn Law School and then went into private practice.

He was elected to the state assembly in 1965, became the first black chairman of the city’s Board of Elections in 1972, and served as president of the Manhattan borough.

Dinkins’ election as mayor in 1989 came after two racially charged cases that took place under Koch: the rape of a white runner in Central Park and the biased murder of a black teenager in Bensonhurst.

Dinkins defeated Koch, 50 percent to 42 percent, in the Democratic primary. But in a city where the party’s record was Democrat 5 to 1, Dinkins barely outscored Republican Giuliani in the general election, capturing just 30 percent of the white vote.

However, that same year, Dinkins came under fire for his handling of a black-led boycott of Korean-operated grocery stores in Brooklyn. Critics argued that Dinkins waited too long to intervene. He eventually ended up crossing the boycott line to buy in stores, but only after Koch did.

During Dinkins’ tenure, the city’s finances were in bad shape due to a recession that cost New York 357,000 private sector jobs in his first three years in office.

Meanwhile, the number of murders in the city soared to an all-time high, with a record 2,245 homicides in his first year as mayor. There were 8,340 New Yorkers killed during the Dinkins administration, the bloodiest four-year period since the New York Police Department began keeping statistics in 1963.

In the last years of his administration, record homicides began a decline that continued for decades. In the first year of the Giuliani administration, murders decreased from 1946 to 1561.

One of Dinkins’ last acts in 1993 was signing an agreement with the United States Tennis Association that granted the organization a 99-year lease on land in the city of Queens in exchange for the construction of a complex. tennis. That agreement guaranteed that the US Open would remain in New York City for decades.

After leaving office, Dinkins was a professor at Columbia University’s School of Public and International Affairs.

He was fitted with a pacemaker in August 2008 and underwent an emergency appendectomy in October 2007. He was also hospitalized in March 1992 for a bacterial infection resulting from an abscess in the wall of the large intestine. He was treated with antibiotics and recovered within a week.

Dinkins is survived by his son, David Jr, his daughter, Donna, and two grandchildren.

– Associated Press writer David B. Caruso and former AP writer Larry McShane contributed to this report.