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 five years ago at age 93, as the Big Apple’s first 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 ethnicity defined your political reach, these four men, and their many associates, decided who got put on and who didn’t among the African American community.
Dinkins was the least charismatic and overtly less ambitious member of this posse — his chief goal for many years was becoming Manhattan borough President, a position Black men like Julian Jack and Sutton had held before him. But what really united these men (and their group was very insular and male centered) was a collective desire to elect a Black Mayor in New York. While Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Detroit, and other American cities had seen Black municipal leadership, cracking that glass ceiling in the city had frustrated them. Sutton had made a failed attempt in the late ’70s before focusing on building a national radio empire…