Former New York City Mayor David Dinkins Dies at 93

[IceWizard]

Former New York City
Mayor David Dinkins
Dies at 93


The first and only Black mayor of New York City died of natural
causes just a month after his wife Joyce Dinkins died at 89


Published November 23, 2020
• Updated 4 hours ago



The former mayor is believed to have died
of natural causes at his home in the city that
he led from 1990-1993.



What to Know

* David Dinkins, New York City’s first and only Black mayor,
has died at 93.

* Two senior NYPD officials confirmed to NBC New York
that Dinkins' health aide found him unresponsive in his Lenox Hill
apartment Monday night, having apparently died of natural causes.
The former mayor died a little more than a month after his wife,
Joyce Dinkins, passed away.

* Dinkins briefly practiced law in New York City before he
began his career in politics as a district leader and was elected
a Harlem state Assemblyman in 1966. He went on to serve as
President of the Board of Elections and City Clerk before winning
election as Manhattan Borough President in 1985. He ran for
mayor in 1989 and defeated Mayor Edward I. Koch and he
went on to defeat Rudy Giuliani.


David Dinkins, New York City’s first and only Black mayor,
has died at 93.

Two senior NYPD officials confirmed to NBC New York that
Dinkins' health aide found him unresponsive in his Lenox Hill
apartment Monday night, having apparently died of natural
causes. The former mayor died a little more than a month
after his wife, Joyce Dinkins, passed away.

Dinkins briefly practiced law in New York City before he
began his career in politics as a district leader and was
elected a Harlem state Assemblyman in 1966. He went
on to serve as President of the Board of Elections and
City Clerk before winning election as Manhattan Borough
President in 1985.

Dinkins, who also served in the Marines in Korea, ran for
mayor in 1989 and defeated Mayor Edward I. Koch and
he went on to defeat Rudy Giuliani by the narrowest
electoral margin in New York City history: 47,000 votes.



Joyce Dinkins, the former first lady of New York City,
has died at 89.



During his term as mayor from 1990 to 1993, Dinkins vowed
to be "mayor of all the people of New York," and declared:
"We are all foot soldiers on the march to freedom."

As the first Black mayor of the city, Dinkins inspired others to
get into politics just as his father-in-law Daniel Burrows, a
businessman who became involved in Democratic politics and
was among the first Black men to serve in the state Assembly,
inspired him. Among them was New York Attorney General
Letitia James.

"The example Mayor David Dinkins set for all of us shines
brighter than the most powerful lighthouse imaginable.
For decades, Mayor Dinkins lead with compassion and an
unparalleled commitment to our communities. His deliberative
and graceful demeanor belied his burning passion for
challenging the inequalities that plague our society,"
James wrote in a statement.


“Personally, Mayor Dinkins' example was an inspiration to
me from my first run for city council to my campaigns for
public advocate and attorney general. I was honored to
have him hold the bible at my inaugurations because I,
and others, stand on his shoulders."

Gov. Andrew Cuomo called Dinkins "a remarkable civic leader"
who served the city "with the hope of unity and a deep kindness."

In his own inaugural address, Dinkins spoke lovingly of
New York as a “gorgeous mosaic of race and religious faith,
of national origin and sexual orientation, of individuals
whose families arrived yesterday and generations ago,
coming through Ellis Island or Kennedy Airport or on
buses bound for the Port Authority.”

But the city he inherited had an ugly side, too.

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

Dinkins’ low-key, considered approach quickly came to be
perceived as a flaw. Critics said he was too soft and too slow.

“Dave, Do Something!” screamed one New York Post headline
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 neglected
housing. His administration got the Walt Disney Corp. to invest
in the cleanup of then-seedy Times Square.

In recent years, he’s gotten more credit for those accomplishments,
credit that Mayor Bill de Blasio said he should have always had.
De Blasio, who worked in Dinkins’ administration, named
Manhattan’s Municipal Building after the former mayor in
October 2015.
(De Blasio ordered city flags to fly at half-staff in Dinkins' honor Tuesday.)

"He was a guiding hand in our lives in so many ways,"
Mayor Bill de Blasio said of Dinkins during his daily coronavirus
briefing Tuesday. "What he did for the city, he simply put us
on a better path...He showed us what it was like to be a
gentleman, to be a kind person, no matter what was thrown
at him -- and a lot was thrown at him."

The current mayor went on to say that the greatest lesson he
learned from Dinkinks was "the power of love."

De Blasio said it was a "remarkable" experience to work
alongside Dinkins, pointing out that Dinkins "never really
got the credit he deserved," including for putting the city
on the path to becoming safer.

Results from his accomplishments, however, didn’t come
fast enough to earn Dinkins a second term.

After beating Giuliani, Dinkins lost a rematch by roughly
the same small margin in 1993. Political historians often
trace the defeat to Dinkins’ handling of the Crown Heights
riot in Brooklyn in 1991.

The violence began after a black 7-year-old boy was
accidentally killed by a car in the motorcade of an
Orthodox Jewish religious leader. During the three days
of anti-Jewish rioting by young black men that followed,
a rabbinical student was fatally stabbed.
Nearly 190 people were hurt.

A state report issued in 1993, an election year, cleared
Dinkins of the persistently repeated charge that he
intentionally held back police in the first days of the violence,
but criticized him for not stepping up as a leader.

In a 2013 memoir, Dinkins accused the police department
of letting the disturbance get out of hand, and also took a
share of the blame, on the grounds that “the buck stopped
with me.” But he bitterly blamed his election defeat on
prejudice: “I think it was just racism, pure and simple.”

After news of Dinkins passing broke, Guiliani tweeted that
Dinkins "gave a great deal of his life in service to our great City.
That service is respected and honored by all."

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 in discrimination: Blacks were not
allowed to use the school swimming pool.

During a hitch in the Marine Corps as a young man, a
Southern bus driver barred him from boarding a segregated
bus because the section for blacks was filled.

“And I was in my country’s uniform!”
Dinkins recounted years later.

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

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

Dinkins defeated Koch, 50 percent to 42 percent, in the
Democratic primary. But in a city where party registration
was 5-to-1 Democratic, Dinkins barely scraped by the
Republican Giuliani in the general election, capturing only
30 percent of the white vote.

His administration had one early high note: Newly freed
Nelson Mandela made New York City his first stop in the
U.S. in 1990. Dinkins had been a longtime, outspoken
critic of apartheid in South Africa.

In that same year, though, Dinkins was criticized for his
handling of a black-led boycott of Korean-operated grocery
stores in Brooklyn. Critics contended Dinkins waited too
long to intervene. He ultimately ended up crossing the
boycott line to shop at the stores — but only after Koch did.

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

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

In the last years of his administration, record-high homicides
began a decline that continued for decades. In the first year
of the Giuliani administration, murders fell from 1,946 to 1,561.

One of Dinkins’ last acts in 1993 was to sign an agreement
with the United States Tennis Association that gave the
organization a 99-year lease on city land in Queens in return
for building a tennis complex. That deal guaranteed that the
U.S. Open would remain in New York City for decades.

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

He had a pacemaker inserted in August 2008, and
underwent an emergency appendectomy in October 2007.
He also was hospitalized in March 1992 for a bacterial
infection that stemmed from an abscess on the wall of
his large intestine. He was treated with antibiotics and
recovered in a week.

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