Dinkins, David N.

Born in Trenton, New Jersey, David N. Dinkins (1927-) joined the U.S. Marine Corps in 1945 and graduated from Howard University in 1950. After serving in the Korean War, he graduated from Brooklyn Law School in 1956 and entered politics. Dinkins joined the Democratic machine in Harlem and was elected that district's New York State Assemblyman in 1965. He served as the head of the Board of Elections (1972–1973) and city clerk (1975–1985) before he was elected Borough President of Manhattan in 1985.

As racial tensions in New York City mounted, many Democrats viewed Dinkins as less divisive than Mayor Edward I. Koch and an alternative to Koch. Campaigning as a racial healer, Dinkins ousted Koch in the Democratic Primary in 1989. With the strong support of the city's liberals and African Americans, Dinkins went on to defeat Rudolph W. Giuliani in the general mayoral election to become the first African American mayor of New York City.

Dinkins's mayoralty was marked by his inability to quell the city's deep racial divisions. His slow response in criticizing black demonstrators picketing Korean groceries in Flatbush, Brooklyn angered many whites. In 1991, Dinkins was blamed for failing to order police to intervene in a racial disturbance in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, where black rioters attacked Hasidic residents, looted stores, and killed a rabbinical student. Dinkins was also criticized the following year for his handling of a disturbance between police and Dominicans in Washington Heights in Manhattan.

Dinkins's mayoralty was hampered by a weak economy. A strong ally of labor, fiscal constraints prevented Dinkins from increasing salaries for municipal employees and effectively attacking homelessness and other social ills. The crackcocaine epidemic increased violent crime in the city, where 2,245 murders were committed in 1990. Dinkins and Police Commissioner Ray Kelley deserve credit for the decline of crime in New York during the 1990s. Their addition of more police and focus on the enforcement of minor crimes caused the city's crime rate to drop significantly in the last 2 years of the Dinkins administration (with the number of murders down by 14 percent). In 1993, Giuliani, running on a law-and-order platform, narrowly defeated Dinkins, limiting the city's first black mayor to one term.

After his defeat, David Dinkins became a professor at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs and a radio personality. In 1999, Dinkins was one of several prominent African Americans to be arrested for protesting the shooting [Page 221]death of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed African immigrant, by four white police officers.