New York David Dinkins, who broke barriers as the first African-American mayor of New York City, died but was sentenced to one term due to a high murder rate, stubborn unemployment, and mismanagement of riots in Brooklyn. He was 93 years old.
The New York City Police Department confirmed Dinkins ’death on Monday. The administration said that the officers were summoned to the former mayor’s house in the evening. Early evidence indicates that he died of natural causes.
Dinkins ’death came just weeks after The death of his wifeJoyce, who passed away in October at the age of 89.
A calm, kind person with a penchant for tennis and formal attire, Dinkins was a drastic shift from his predecessor, Ed Koch, and his successor, Rudolf Giuliani - two militant and often violent politicians in a city with a global reputation for impatience and rudeness.
In his inaugural address, he lovingly spoke of New York as “a wonderful mosaic of ethnicity and religious faith, national origin and sexual orientation, of individuals whose families arrived for generations yesterday, either via 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 cocaine kill thousands of people every year. Unemployment rates rose. Outbreaks of displacement. The city ran a budget deficit of $ 1.5 billion.
Soon the Dinkins' understated and thoughtful approach came to be seen as a flaw. Critics said it was too weak and too slow.
"Dave, do something!" I shouted into a New York Post headline in 1990, Denkin’s first year in office.
Dinkins did a lot at City Hall. Raise taxes to employ thousands of police officers. Billions of dollars have been spent reviving neglected housing. His management made the Walt Disney Company invest in cleaning up Times Square at the time.
In recent years, he has taken more credit for these accomplishments - a credit that Mayor Bill de Blasio said he should always have. De Blasio, who worked in the Dinken administration, named Manhattan City Hall after the former mayor in October 2015.
“The example that Mayor David Dinkins set for us all shines more than the strongest beacon imaginable,” said New York Attorney General Letitia James, who broke barriers as the state’s first black woman to be elected to a statewide office.
She said, "I was honored to carry the Bible at my inauguration because I and others stand on his shoulders."
However, the results of his achievements were not fast enough for Dinkins to earn a second term.
After beating Giuliani by just 47,000 votes from the 1.75 million cast in 1989, Dinkin lost the rematch by roughly the same margin in 1993.
Political historians often trace the defeat to Dinkins' handling of the riots in Crown Heights in Brooklyn in 1991.
The violence began after a 7-year-old black child was accidentally killed by a car in the motorcade of an Orthodox Jewish religious leader. During three days of anti-Jewish rioting by young black men after that, a rabbinic student was fatally stabbed to death. About 190 people were injured.
A government report released in 1993, the election year, absolved Dinkins of the persistent charge that he had intentionally stopped police in the early days of the violence, but criticized him for not escalating as leader.
In his 2013 diary, Dinkin accused the police department of letting the turmoil spiral out of control, taking his share of the blame on the grounds that “the responsibility ceased with me.” But he bitterly blamed his electoral defeat on prejudice: “I think it was just racist, pure and simple.”
Dinkins was born in Trenton, New Jersey on July 10, 1927, and moved with his mother to Harlem when his parents separated, 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 pool.
During a hiatus in the Marine Corps when he was young, a southern bus driver forbade him to take a separate bus because the black section was full.
"I was in my uniform!" Dinkin recounted years later.
While studying at Howard University, a historically black university in Washington, D.C., Dinkins said he gained admission into separate movie theaters by wearing a turban and pretending with a foreign accent.
Returning to New York with a degree in mathematics, Dinkin married his college sweetheart Joyce Burrows in 1953. His father-in-law, who has power in local democratic politics, directs Dinkin to Harlem’s political club. Dinkin paid his dues as a Democrat while earning a law degree from Brooklyn Law School, then moving into private practice.
He was elected to the state assembly in 1965, became the city’s first black president of the election board in 1972 and continued to serve as the president of the Manhattan District.
Dinkin’s election as mayor in 1989 follows two Koch-era racist cases: the rape of a jogger in Central Park and the biased murder of a black teen in Bensonhurst.
Denkins defeated Koch by 50% to 42% in the Democratic primary. But in a city where party registration was a 5-to-1 Democratic, Denkins barely won the hand of Republican Giuliani in the general election, garnering only 30 percent of the white vote.
His administration made a high note early: the newly released Nelson Mandela took New York City his first stop in the United States in 1990. Dinkin was a longtime vocal critic of apartheid in South Africa.
That same year, Dinkin was criticized for his handling of a black-led boycott of Korean-run grocery stores in Brooklyn. Critics argued that Dinkin waited too long to intervene. He eventually ended up crossing the county line to shop in stores - but only after he did a hut.
During Denkins ’tenure, the city’s finances were in dire straits due to the recession that cost New York 357,000 private sector jobs in his first three years in office.
Meanwhile, the death toll in the city rose to an all-time high, with 2,245 murders recorded during his first year as mayor. 8,340 New Yorkers were killed during the Dinkin Administration - the bloodiest period in four years since the New York Police Department began keeping statistics in 1963.
In the final years of his administration, record-high homicides began to decline that lasted for decades. In the first year of Giuliani’s administration, murders decreased from 1946 to 1561.
One of Dinkins ’last acts in 1993 was to sign an agreement with the American Tennis Association that granted the organization a 99-year lease on city land in Queens in exchange for building a tennis complex. That deal ensured that the US Open would stay in New York City for decades.
After leaving office, Dinkin was a professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.
The pacemaker was introduced in August 2008, and underwent an emergency appendectomy in October 2007. He was also hospitalized in March 1992 due to a bacterial infection caused by an abscess on the wall of the large intestine. He was treated with antibiotics and recovered within a week.
Dinkin was escaped by his son David Jr. And his daughter Donna and two of his grandchildren.
