David Dinkins, NYC’s only black mayor, dies at 93
NEW YORK ( New York Daily News/ TNS) – David Dinkins, whose historic 1989 victory as New York City’s first and only black mayor was quickly eclipsed by rising crime and racial turmoil that doomed his reelection, died on Monday at his home, police said. He was 93.
Dinkins’s death comes a little more than a month after his wife, Joyce, passed away on October 11.
In his two decades after leaving City Hall, Dinkins kept a busy schedule but a relatively low profile – teaching at Columbia University, doing charity work and making occasional appearances.
His autobiography, A Mayor’s Life: Governing New York’s Gorgeous Mosaic, was published in 2013, its title playing off Dinkins’s most memorable line during his four years in City Hall.
Dinkins underwent triple heart bypass surgery in 1995, and a heart valve repair 13 years later.
The genteel Dinkins, a product of Harlem’s Democratic machine, defeated three- term incumbent Ed Koch and future mayor Rudy Giuliani in his groundbreaking triumph.
But he became just the second one- term New York mayor of the last half- century, unseated in a 1993 rematch by Giuliani and a lingering backlash from the Crown Heights riots.
The gentleman mayor – with his fondness for custom- tailored linen suits and tennis whites – faced mounting problems almost from day one. The city’s finances were in disarray, its image was in tatters, and the crack epidemic was peaking.
Dinkins’s first summer in office was marked by headlinemaking crimes: a Bronx prosecutor killed by a stray bullet while buying donuts, a Utah tourist stabbed to death defending his mother in a Midtown subway station.
By year’s end, homicides in the city hit an all- time high – more than six a day, one every four hours. But nothing was more crippling than the 1991 Crown Heights riots, set off after a hasidic driver fatally struck Gavin Cato, a seven- yearold black child. A subsequent state investigation ripped Dinkins for failure to control the escalating violence in the black and Orthodox Jewish neighborhood.
Yankel Rosenbaum, a hassidic scholar visiting from Australia, was fatally stabbed during the three- day rampage.
The report was issued four months before Dinkins’s 1993 November showdown with Giuliani, who successfully trumpeted Crown Heights as a campaign issue.
Dinkins suffered a narrow defeat, ending his decades- long career in public service.
The son of a barber who came north from Newport News, Virginia, Dinkins was born in Trenton, New Jersey. When his parents split, the future mayor and his sister divided their time between Harlem and New Jersey’s state capital.