Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,668

This is the grave of David Dinkins.

Born in 1927 in Trenton, New Jersey, Dinkins split his time as a child between Trenton and Harlem, as his parents divorced when he was young. He really tried to volunteer for World War II when he graduated in 1945. But he couldn’t get into the Marines because they had a quota of Blacks they would take and they had filled it so they told him no. Good thing we weren’t trying to win a war here or anything. He did finally get into the Marines late in 1945 and served for about a year before being discharged.

Dinkins then went to Howard University, graduating in 1950. After a few years, he decided to go to law school and finished at Brooklyn Law School in 1956, passing the bar shortly after. He stayed in New York and became involved in the city’s Democratic politics, making a long, slow rise through the machine. Working with other Black New York pols such as Charles Rangel and Basil Patterson, Dinkins became a power player within the labyrinthine nature of the city’s political life. He occasionally held some kind of office. He was briefly in the state Assembly in 1966 to fill out a term of someone who left. He was president of the New York Board of Elections in 1972-73. He was almost the first Black deputy mayor in the city’s history, but he had some tax issues that he needed to work out and which would have looked bad, so it didn’t happen. But really, he was more an insider for about thirty years.

In 1985, Dinkins won election as Borough President for Manhattan. He had thrown his hat in the ring for this twice before, but this time he won. This is when he really became a public figure. He did well enough and ran for mayor in 1989, winning and becoming its first Black mayor. The circumstances of this victory had as much to do with the corruption inside the city’s Democratic machine as anything else. The Brooklyn Dems were all tied up with the mob and that went public. The Queens Borough President offed himself when he got caught up in the investigations. So let’s just say that the city needed to run someone not connected with the Italian roots of the party. At the same time, the Supreme Court threw out the New York Board of Estimate, which had representatives from all the boroughs and which de facto governed the city. The Court threw it out based on the lack of proportional representation.

The larger point is that the city’s Democratic Party was a real mess in the late 80s and there was room for fresh blood to rise faster than they normally could have done. Dinkins was the winner of that.

Or sort of. I say that because the real issue with Dinkins in our history is how horribly he was treated by the media and by the racism throughout New York City. Dinkins was a good mayor. New York in 1989 was not exactly a great place. Dinkins’ successor, the odious Rudy Giuliani, gets most of the credit for cleaning up New York, but Dinkins started almost all of this. The city’s high murder rate peaked in 1990 and began to decline from there. Dinkins increased police hiring by 25 percent and the murder rate declined 12 percent by 1993. But the perception was still there that crime had worsened under Dinkins and no amount of data was going to convince whites that crime wasn’t worse under the Black guy. Dinkins also cracked down on police violence the best he could, leading to tensions between him and the cops, who became big Giuliani guys since he was happy to let them beat and kill Black people all they wanted. The cops basically tried to ruin Dinkins and they mostly succeeded. In 1992, 4,000 off-duty cops held a protest closing Brooklyn Bridge against Dinkins’ attempt to hold them accountable. Naturally, the thugs turned violent and tried to rush City Hall, forcing cops more loyal to Dinkins or at least loyal to law and order to push back on the cops who didn’t care about law and order at all.

I want to quote Steve’s (RIP) great post about whether recent NYC mayors were assholes or not. Here is what he said about Dinkins:

David Dinkins (1990-1993):

New York City’s first black mayor, Dinkins reminds me a lot of John Lindsay, in the sense that his detractors were overwhelmingly motivated by racial animus refracted through the lens of policing. The fact that crime rates in NYC began to drop significantly during his tenure as mayor (well before Guiliani), or that he massively expanded the police force – none of that matters because he tried to make the Civilian Compliant Review Board legitimately civilian and independent of the NYPD.

That was enough to touch off a massive, and openly racist, police riot at City Hall, which Guiliani happily attended and stoked the flames of resentment against a black mayor who dared to tell the NYPD what to do.

Verdict: not an asshole. Fuck the haters.

There’s no question that Dinkins had some rough stuff to deal with over his four years, as any city’s mayor would have to deal with. The Crown Heights Riot would have been hard for any mayor. But this was a New York filled with racial tensions. It was the Spike Lee New York of Do the Right Thing. Boycotts of Korean stores by Black customers or battles in the streets between Black and Orthodox Jewish New Yorkers is not something any mayor can magically alleviate.

It was also Dinkins who started cleaning up Times Square and he got Disney to put money into the Amsterdam Theatre to become the area’s centerpiece, friendly for tourists. He put together the lease to the US Tennis Association to create the modern facilities of the U.S. Open, which is one of the few deals between cities and sports leagues that worked out for the city.

Can we talk about why we think New York is some kind of liberal city? Because I see nothing to support this. They elect terrible mayor after terrible mayor, usually in the asshole mode, as Steve pointed out. The election of Giuliani was pure white ethnic backlash politics against the Black guy, showing how Democratic bases would later abandon the party for Donald Trump after another Black guy got elected. As far as I can tell, New York voters are largely horrible and they have hurt the nation a lot through their mayors, most especially Giuliani, but also Bloomberg and Adams. One thing I can say pretty strongly is that Dinkins is the best New York mayor of my lifetime.

After he left the mayoral office, Dinkins taught at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs and did all the elite corporate and charity board stuff that retired politicians do.

A word as well as about Dinkins’ wife Joyce. They married in 1953 and so had a very long life together. In addition to raising their children, she was an active political animal as well. As first lady of the city, she did a lot of work on child literacy and healthcare issues. Before that though, she was coordinator of metropolitan affairs for the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance. She left that job when her husband became mayor.

Dinkins died in 2020, a month after Joyce. He was 93 years old.

David Dinkins is buried in Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, Manhattan, New York.

If you would like this series to visit other mayors of the 1980s, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Buddy Cianci is in Cranston, Rhode Island (why have I not done this grave yet?) and Coleman Young is in Detroit. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.