David Dinkins

African- Americam politician

DAVID DINKINS, who has died at 93, broke barriers as New York City’s first African- American mayor and did much to spark the city’s renaissance in the 1990s.

A calm and courtly figure with a penchant for tennis andformal wear, hewasdramaticallydifferent both from his predecessor, Ed Koch, and his successor, Rudolph Giuliani – both combative and often abrasive politicians in a city with a reputation for impatience and rudeness.

In his inaugural address, Mr 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 was astronomical, homelessness rampant. Its budget was $ 1.5bn in the red.

Critics at first said he was too soft and too slow. Yet the new mayor achieved a lot – raising taxes to hire thousands of police officers, spending billions revitalising neglected housing, and getting the Disney Corporation to invest in the clean- up of the seedy Times Square.

In recent years, he received more credit for those accomplishments. The current mayor, Bill de Blasio, named Manhattan’s Municipal Building after him in 2015.

But the seeds he planted did not bear fruit fast enough, and a close race with Mr Giuliani denied Mr Dinkins a second term in office – a defeat often ascribed to his handling of the Crown Heights riot in Brooklyn in 1991, in which a seven- year- old black 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.

Born in Trenton, New Jersey, on July 10 1927, David 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 stint 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.

While attending Howard University, the historically black campus in Washington DC, Mr Dinkins said he gained admission to segregated cinemas by wearing a turban and faking a foreign accent. Back in New York with a degree in mathematics, he married his college sweetheart, Joyce Burrows, in 1953. His father- in- law, a power in local Democratic politics, channelled Mr Dinkins into a Harlem political club.

He paid his dues as a Democratic functionary while earning a law degree from Brooklyn Law School, and then went into private practice.

He was elected to the state Assembly in 1965, became the first black president of the city’s

Board of Elections in 1972 and went on to serve as Manhattan borough president.

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

His administration had one early high note: the newly freed Nelson Mandela made New York City his first stop in the US in 1990.

One of his last acts was to sign an agreement with the United States Tennis Association that gave the organisation a 99- year lease on city land in Queens in return for building a tennis complex. It guaranteed that the US Open would remain in the city for decades.

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

Joyce died last month and he is survived by his son, daughter and two grandchildren.