David Dinkins

David Norman Dinkins was born on the tenth of July 1927 at Trenton, New Jersey, the son of William Harvey Dinkins — a barber — and Sallie Smiley Dinkins, a domestic worker. His parents separated when he was seven. He was raised by his mother and his maternal grandmother and attended the Trenton Central High School, graduating in 1945. He served the United States Marine Corps from 1945 to 1946 — among the first African Americans admitted to the Corps under the wartime executive order.

He completed the bachelor's magna cum laude at Howard University in 1950 and the LL.B. at the Brooklyn Law School in 1956. He entered private legal practice in Harlem in 1956 in partnership with the Manhattan attorney Basil Paterson. He joined the Carver Democratic Club of Harlem — the political-organising base of the Harlem Black Democratic establishment of J. Raymond Jones — in 1958 and across the following two decades rose through the Carver organisation.

He served in the New York State Assembly from 1966 to 1967 and as president of the New York City Board of Elections from 1972 to 1973. He held the position of New York City Clerk from 1975 to 1985 — the senior administrative office of the New York City Council, recording the official acts of all eleven hundred city marriages weekly. He was elected Manhattan Borough President in November 1985 — the second African American Borough President of Manhattan after Percy Sutton.

He stood for the Democratic mayoral nomination in 1989 against the three-term incumbent Edward Koch and won the primary by ten points. The November general election against the Republican Rudolph Giuliani — the closest mayoral contest in modern New York history at the date — produced a forty-seven-thousand-vote Dinkins victory. He took office on the first of January 1990.

His four-year mayoralty was conducted under the conditions of the late-1980s and early-1990s urban crime peak, the August 1991 Crown Heights riot, and the November 1992 collapse of the city's credit rating. He directed across the same period the founding of the Safe Streets, Safe City programme that added six thousand officers to the New York City Police Department and produced the violent-crime decline that has continued for thirty years.

He stood for re-election in November 1993 and lost the rematch with Giuliani by under two percentage points.

He died at his Manhattan home on the twenty-third of November 2020, at ninety-three.

He is honored here as the first African American mayor of New York.