Mayor David Dinkins’ Fight to Undo New York City’s Race War

Remembering New York’s first Black mayor, who steered the city through racial unrest and the late crack era

David Dinkins in his office in New York, New York in November 1986. Photo: Karjean Levine/Getty Images

Stuck between the bombastic personalities of Edward Koch and Rudy Giuliani, David Dinkins’ one term as Mayor of New York City sometimes gets lost. But the 1989 election of Dinkins, who died this week at age 93, as the Big Apple’s first (and so far only) non-white Mayor was both the culmination of and the beginning of two very significant threads in the city’s history.

The soft spoken, almost grandfatherly politician (think Morgan Freeman in one of his many mentor movie roles), born in New Jersey and a product of Howard University, was a member of a group of Harlem-based Black power brokers known as “the gang of four” — longtime Manhattan borough President and businessman Percy Sutton, Representative Charles Rangel, who succeeded Adam Clayton Powell as Harlem’s voice in Congress, and Basil Patterson, who would hold myriad jobs in NY politics and whose son David would one day become the state’s first Black governor. Together they held sway over black political power in New York for decades, working for civil rights and Black progress while building a network of patronage jobs for those who kissed the ring. In a city where your hood, race, and…