RIP David Dinkins

Today we honor David Dinkins, who was the first and only to date, mayor of NY; words from the NY Times; Rest in Power, David, thank you for trying to bring justice to NY, though the systemic racism proved to be insurmountable:

David N. Dinkins, a barber’s son who became New York City’s first Black mayor on the wings of racial harmony but who was turned out by voters after one term over his handling of racial violence in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, died on Monday night at his home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He was 93. 

His death was confirmed by Mayor Bill de Blasio. It came less than two months after Mr. Dinkins’s wife, Joyce Dinkins, died at 89.

Cautious, deliberate, a Harlem Democrat who climbed to City Hall through relatively minor elective and appointive offices, Mr. Dinkins had none of the flamboyance of Edward I. Koch, who preceded him, or Rudolph W. Giuliani, who succeeded him — and who, along with Fiorello H. La Guardia in the 1930s and ’40s, were arguably the city’s most dominant mayors of the 20th century. Indeed, many historians and political experts say that as the 106th mayor of New York, from 1990 through 1993, Mr. Dinkins suffered by comparison with the Gullivers bestriding him.

Mr. Dinkins was a compromise selection for voters exhausted by racial strife, corruption, crime and fiscal turmoil, and he proved to be an able caretaker, historians say, rather than an innovator of grand achievements.

He inherited huge budget deficits that grew larger. He faced some of the worst crime problems in the city’s history and dealt with them by expanding the police to record levels. He kept city libraries open, revitalized Times Square and rehabilitated housing in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Harlem. But the racial amity that was his fondest hope remained a distant dream, and his lapses in responding to the Crown Heights crisis became an insurmountable legacy.

Secure in history as the city’s first (and so far only) Black mayor, Mr. Dinkins became a quiet elder statesman in later years, teaching at Columbia University, hosting a radio talk show on WLIB, attending receptions, dinners and ceremonies, and occasionally being consulted by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and others occupying or seeking office.

In a 2013 memoir, Mr. Dinkins acknowledged missteps during his term, including a failure to contain the race riots in Crown Heights in 1991, for which he largely blamed his police commissioner, and his refusal to break a prolonged Black boycott of a Korean-owned grocery store in Brooklyn in 1990. But he ascribed the narrowness of his victory in the 1989 mayoral election, and his defeat four years later, not to missteps but to the fact that he was Black.

“I think it was just racism, pure and simple,” he said in “A Mayor’s Life: Governing New York’s Gorgeous Mosaic,” written with Peter Knobler.

Read the whole article here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/24/nyregion/david-dinkins-dead.html