The consummate gentleman politician, David N. Dinkins was dapper and self-effacing, possessing a gentility and humility all too rare in politics. As the 106th mayor of New York City—and the first African-American chief executive—Dinkins served in a time of great turmoil and challenge. Throughout his leadership, he relied on his natural qualities of kindness and compassion, working to inspire those around him to embody them as well.
Dinkins, who passed away on Nov. 23 at the age of 93, was elected mayor as the city struggled under the burdens of a homelessness crisis, the crack cocaine epidemic, and what seemed to be an endless downward spiral of urban violence and decay. In 1990, the first year of his term, 2,262 people were murdered in New York City. In addition, the city faced a looming municipal and state deficit.
Calm and reassuring, Dinkins sought to be a quiet bridge-builder among the city’s vastly complex and divergent economic and social interests. At the same time, he worked to concretely turn the struggling city around. His Safe Streets, Safe City initiative hired record numbers of police and placed them on the city’s most violent streets, becoming a model of preventative community policing. While Dinkins’ tenure is often remembered for New York’s astronomically high crime rates, some of his proactive policies—along with changes put in place by future administrations down the line—helped pave the way for the dramatic crime reduction the city would experience after his tenure.
Though often eclipsed by the trauma and anti-Semitic violence of the 1991 Crown Heights Riots, Dinkins had a deep respect for the Jewish community, believing very much in the broad vision he termed “the gorgeous mosaic” of New York City. In all this and more, both before his tumultuous time as mayor from 1990-94 and afterwards, Dinkins was inspired by the Rebbe—Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory—whom the mayor visited on a number of occasions for advice and blessing. Dinkins was innately drawn to the Rebbe’s conception of a society that lifted up those in need—with a special focus on the educational needs of children, the disadvantaged, the elderly and those with disabilities—an impression that ultimately left a lasting impact upon the mayor and the city he served.
“He saw in the Rebbe a global leader,” recalls Herbert Block, Dinkins’s liaison to the Jewish community and today the executive director of American Zionist Movement. In particular, the Rebbe’s focus on youth and education “was something the mayor saw as benefiting the city and society at large.”
As Dinkins himself would later recall at “One-to-One,” a 12-hour symposium held at the New York Public Library in 2016 exploring the Rebbe’s social impact, “I was in awe of the Rebbe. The Rebbe and his greatness helped me, and I’m sure he persuaded many others to go on the right path.”
Stalwart Ally of the Jewish Community
David Norman Dinkins was born July 10, 1927, in Trenton, N.J., to Sally and William Harvey Dinkins Jr. After graduating high school in 1945, Dinkins tried enlisting in the U.S. Marines but was rejected because, as he later put it, they had already “filled their quota for Negro Marines.” He was successful on his second try, joining the so-called Montford Point Marines, the first wave of African-American Marines to enter the Corps after its 1942 desegregation. The Montford Point Marines, Dinkins among them, received the Congressional Gold Medal in 2012 for their pioneering efforts.
After attending Howard University on the G.I. Bill, where he majored in mathematics, Dinkins enrolled at Brooklyn Law School, taking classes during the day while working nights at his father-in-law’s liquor store to pay his tuition. Aside from the private law practice he held for 20 years, in 1966 he was elected to a brief term in the New York State Assembly and later spent a decade as city clerk. He was elected as the Manhattan Borough Mayor in 1985.
Slow to advance up the political ladder, Dinkins was elected Borough President only on his third try. The year of his mayoral election, the city was galvanized by the notorious Central Park jogger case and the murder of 16-year-old Yusef Hawkins. Some 203,042 violent crimes were recorded that year, as violence seethed through the streets of a city held in the rapture of urban decay. Dinkins’s optimistic vision of harmony broadcast a hope for municipal unity among the multitudes of ethnic, religious and cultural minorities, and he was viewed as someone who might help heal the city of its polarizing by racial strife.
Throughout his political career, Dinkins actively and vocally placed himself as an ally of the Jewish community, even when it would have been politically expedient for him to be antagonistic or merely remain passive. In 1975, he was involved in the formation of BASIC (Black Americans to Support Israel Committee), which opposed the delegitimization of Israel in the United Nations. Dinkins also was one of a number of prominent African-Americans to condemn the United Nations’ notorious “Zionism Equals Racism” resolution in a full-page ad in The New York Times. Later, he traveled to Israel “in support of Jews under attack”—as he later wrote in his autobiography—went to Germany to witness the vastness of Nazi crimes against the Jews and spoke out on behalf of Jews trapped in the Soviet Union.
In a dramatic 1985 episode, Dinkins loudly denounced Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan as a bigot during the build up to a mass Farrakhan rally at Madison Square Garden. Finding the silence or muted protests of other leaders, particularly within the African-American community, troubling in light of Farrakhan’s well-documented hate, Dinkins led a counter-protest outside of the Garden.
“Living in a free society, as we do,” Dinkins told the small rally outside, “presents us with a clear obligation to face the wrongs in our community and to speak out against them. Recognizing this responsibility, and in light of Minister Farrakhan’s visit to New York, I must say I find his blatantly anti-Semitic remarks offensive, and I condemn them.”
While Farrakhan, like all Americans, had the right to free speech, Dinkins said: “When those opinions express racial prejudice and bigotry, we cannot be silent, for in this climate, silence can often suggest assent. … A call for power and pride couched in terms of racial and religious bigotry can never offer true hope.”
At the rally inside, Farrakhan mocked Dinkins and made open threats against his life. “Do you think the leader should sell out and then live?” he coaxed his audience. “We should make examples of the leaders!” Dinkins tried to ignore these threats but ultimately accepted the police protection ordered by the commissioner of the NYPD.
In February of 1989, after serving a term as Manhattan Borough President, Dinkins announced his run for mayor of New York. During the campaign, Dinkins came to visit the Rebbe twice at Chabad-Lubavitch headquarters in Crown Heights, Brooklyn—the second time just days before Rosh Hashanah. Dinkins noted that the Rebbe’s first blessing had worked well—he had, after all, won the hotly contested Democratic primary when conventional wisdom had said he would not. “I am very happy to hear it,” the Rebbe responded with a smile.
On this second occasion the candidate arrived together with a small entourage of elected officials, including longtime Brooklyn Borough president Howard Golden and City Council member Noach Dear. While some of the Brooklyn politicos present sought to focus the conversation on what they perceived as local communal needs, the Rebbe spoke about the city’s needs as a whole. This greatly impressed Dinkins.
“May G‑d Almighty bless everyone with a happy year, and to go from strength to strength in all things necessary, especially for the benefit of the multitudes of nationalities in New York,” the Rebbe said, before noting that New York had always been a “melting pot” for people from various backgrounds. While the term had often historically been used to denote the necessity of new Americans leaving all differences and distinctions of religion and ethnicity behind, the Rebbe used it in reference to a society where various peoples could and should maintain their unique identities while living “in good peace and harmony” and each “strengthen[ing] all the nationalities around him, especially in matters of charity.”
“I hope that in the near future the ‘melting pot’ will be so active that it will not be necessary to underline every time that they are ‘Negro,’ or they are White, or they are Hispanic … ,” the Rebbe explained, “because they are no different. All of them are created by the same G‑d, and created for the same purpose, to add in all good things around them, especially beginning with themselves and their families … .”
Rather than flattening what made each community unique, the Rebbe envisioned a society where they each aided each other and worked together in harmony, united by the one Creator. This did not only apply to varying ethnic communities. The vast and growing gap between rich and poor was a constant conversation in New York of the 1980s and ’90s, and the Rebbe also noted it was time to look beyond the divisions in socioeconomic groupings. “As I said before, I am not so happy about underlining Brooklyn on one side, Manhattan on a second side and … a third side,” said the Rebbe. “If it is a real melting pot then certainly it must be a melting pot for all good things.”
Dinkins had himself raised many of these points. While he used the term “gorgeous mosaic”—a picture made up of many small pieces to form something larger than each individual one alone—he had also responded to questions regarding how white voters would see him by saying he hoped they’d “judge me on the basis of my ability and on the positions I take,” rather than on the basis of the color of his skin. Here was a Jewish leader not advocating for narrow parochial concerns but energizing the would-be mayor to see and work on the behalf of the greater human family.
The Rebbe made “the point that there’s just one people, we’re all together … ,” Dinkins told Jewish Educational Media’s (JEM) My Encounter with the Rebbe oral history project in a 2014 interview. “And if more of us felt that way, we’d have a better world.”
The Communal and the Personal
For the Rebbe, the personal and the communal could never be two disconnected things, each also having a supporting role for the other. Dinkins, who was married to his wife, Joyce, for 67 years until they passed away a month apart from each other, was well-known as a family man and someone with a special fondness for children. While doing good for the entire world was a worthy and attainable goal—the Rebbe told Dinkins he should not “ … be afraid of a task to do something for all the universe”—it had to start with one’s own immediate surroundings, beginning first and foremost with family.
“It is also important … for someone who is active in communal affairs not to forget about his wife and his children and his grandchildren,” the Rebbe said as Dinkins nodded enthusiastically, “and with time to come, his great-grandchildren.”
“I have one and a fraction grandchildren,” Dinkins proudly told the Rebbe.
“I’m very happy to hear it,” the Rebbe replied. “It should be a good start.”
On the campaign trail later that afternoon, Dinkins was involved in a car accident, and he went to Metropolitan Hospital to get checked out. In his interview with JEM, Dinkins recalled how the Rebbe, hearing of the accident, asked his secretary Rabbi Yehuda Krinsky—chairman of Merkos L’Inyonei Chinuch, the educational arm of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement—to call the Dinkins campaign and make sure he was alright. “One in such a circumstance appreciates anybody expressing concern for their or her welfare,” said Dinkins. “But for the Rebbe ... when so many people from all over want to come to meet with him, that’s pretty good.”
Fortunately, no one was injured in the accident.
“Maybe it was the Rebbe who looked after us,” Dinkins told JEM. “Who knows?”
A Positive Vision for the City’s Future
Dinkins was elected mayor of New York City in November of 1989, assuming office at the start of 1990. Immediately, he began moving forward with his vision for the city, initiating a gamut of programs focusing on improving housing, health care and especially youth issues. Among his innovations was the establishment of the first 10 Beacon Programs, a string of school-based community centers programs that operated after school let out and aimed to not only keep young people off the streets and out of trouble, but help them grow in their academic enhancement, life skills and civic and cultural engagement.
When Dinkins returned to the Rebbe in February of 1990 to present him with a scroll honoring his 40th year of leadership, the Rebbe reminded the mayor to continue pressing forward with positive social changes. In the face of a looming budget crisis, the Rebbe encouraged the mayor’s positive achievements, “Don’t be afraid to spend money on good things,” the Rebbe reassured him.
Despite his incorruptible presence and honorable intentions, at times, Dinkins’s leadership style, which had seemed calm and steady during the election, was plagued by indecision. The New York Times would note in 1993 that “his peevishness, his overawe at the credentials of experts and overreliance on aides with their own conflicting agendas make him a worse Mayor than most might guess.”
Through 1991, crime in New York continued to rise as the mayor waited for his police commissioner, Lee Brown, to report on the overhaul of the police department. That year, 2,605 people were murdered at a rate of more than seven a day. The mayor became increasingly beleaguered.
Then, that summer, came what would become known as the Crown Heights Riots, four days of caustic anti-Semitic violence that lasted from Aug. 19 to Aug. 22, 1991. The riots would leave a lasting impact on Dinkins’s career. “The Crown Heights riots … and I are linked inextricably in New York City history,” he wrote in his autobiography, A Mayor’s Life, “so much so that I have no doubt it will lead my obituary … .”
On the surface, it started when a car being driven by a Chassidic driver was involved in a tragic accident that accidentally took the life of 7-year-old Gavin Cato, a Caribbean American child, and injured his cousin, Angela Cato. In a heated reaction, the Crown Heights neighborhood was thrown into days of ugly anti-Semitic violence. Later that day, Yankel Rosenbaum, a visibly Jewish Australian man doing research at the archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City for his doctoral thesis on anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust, was surrounded by a band of some 20 young Black rioters yelling “Get the Jew! Kill the Jew!” and brutally stabbed and beaten. Dinkins, who visited Rosenbaum in the hospital before he died, would go on to call his death a “lynching.”
“No question,” stated the mayor. “Whatever term one gives to these kinds of vicious murders, that’s what it is.”
At a memorial for Gavin, the mayor’s words stood in stark contrast to the incendiary rhetoric of the other speakers, like Al Sharpton, who compared the Jewish community to blood diamond merchants in South Africa and the Ku Klux Klan in Birmingham, Ala. At the time, Dinkins clearly negated the moral equivalency being employed by the press and has been used by some since to define the tragic accident and the anti-Semitic murder as some kind of tit for tat. The deaths were both awful, but “one tragedy ... was an accident,” stated Dinkins. “The other ... tragedy ... was not.”
Over the next days, the Jewish community found itself under attack, as their neighbors smashed the windows of Jewish homes, ransacked Jewish businesses, firebombed synagogues, burned cars and Israeli flags as Jews were assaulted amid calls of “Heil, Hitler!” The police, in total disarray and seemingly unprepared for the violence, stood idly by. In the words of the academic Edward Shapiro, it was “the most serious anti-Semitic incident in American history.”
Despite the sudden and shocking violence convulsing through the streets of Crown Heights, the police department and Dinkins were slow to request an increased police presence. Dinkins’s characteristic calm demeanor began to seem increasingly like indecisiveness, aloofness and inactivity.
A 1993 fact-finding report about the riots ultimately painted what The New York Times called “a scathing portrait of ineptitude“ stemming from a “chain of leadership failures by Mayor David N. Dinkins, top City Hall advisers and the city’s leading police commanders.”
Dinkins often shifted the burden of fault onto his subordinates. “See, I believe that if there’s a fire,” he later told JEM. “It’s not the mayor’s job to arrive at the scene to inspect the diameter of the hoses.”
“Ultimately, he knew that as mayor,” notes Block, “what happened in Crown Heights was under his watch, and he had to own that situation.”
Dinkins was not blind to the Jewish community’s reality: “The Jewish people, I knew well, had a long and terrible history as victims of oppression and injustice.” “ ... [T]here was no excuse to let people vent and create mayhem,” he’d write, “no invitation for cops to stand down, no permission given to allow blacks to attack Jews. Far from it.”
Despite his good intentions, the anti-Semitic riots had occurred on his watch. Ultimately, he’d write, “the buck stopped with me, the mayor.”
In the wake of the violence, the mayor went to see the Rebbe a fourth time. Dinkins told the Rebbe that “I am confident that with the good people of all of our communities—of both sides—we will come together to do what is necessary to protect everyone.” The Rebbe, however, underscored the broad-reaching nature of Dinkins position. While the mayor, caught in the heat of a local conflagration, saw only the immediate situation in the Crown Heights of 1991, the Rebbe reminded Dinkins of his vision of the mosaic, of a multitude of different people unified as New Yorkers. “We should not forget that [we are] one side, one people, united by the management of New York City,” the Rebbe told him.
“That really resonated with him,” recalls Block. “It was a call back to his vision of the gorgeous mosaic. The Rebbe’s words really stuck with him.”
The events of the riots and their aftermath deeply pained Dinkins, as would later injustices the Crown Heights Jewish community experienced. Before his death, Rosenbaum had identified Lemrick Nelson Jr. as his primary attacker, but in October of 1992, a New York state court acquitted him of murder as a hate crime. “I continue to fail to understand that verdict,” Dinkins wrote in his 2013 memoir, noting that Nelson later admitted to the murder and was convicted of violating Rosenbaum’s civil rights and incarcerated.
In the decades that followed, his respect for the Jewish community, and particularly for the Rebbe, only grew stronger. In 1995, not long after his loss of the 1993 mayoral elections, Rabbi Avraham Berkowitz—today an adviser to the CDC Foundation—bumped into Dinkins at a train station. The former mayor showed the then-yeshivah student one of the dollar bills he had received from the Rebbe, which he kept in his pocket.
“He told me,” recalls Berkowitz, “that the most memorable part of the Rebbe speaking to him was how the Rebbe blessed him that his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren would follow in his ethical example.”
Back during the 1989 primary campaign, on the morning of Dinkins first visit to the Rebbe, as he and his team exited 770 Dinkins picked up a keychain displaying a picture of the Rebbe on one side and the traveler’s prayer on the other.
“And so I took my door key, I was then living on RIverside Drive, and I put my door key on this new keychain,” Dinkins recalled to JEM. During the years that followed whenever people saw a photo of the Rebbe on his keychain they’d react in surprise. But to Dinkins, it was rather simple.
“ … I’ve always figured that I needed all the help I could get, and the Rebbe is closer to G‑d than I am, for sure,” he told JEM. “And just maybe that would help.”
* * *
Dinkins went on to join Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) as a professor in the practice of Urban Public Policy. As the mayor was fond of saying, “service is the price of admission to heaven." At Columbia, he was able to inspire a new generation to focus on the big picture of governance—in a vein similar to how the Rebbe had articulated the city to him.
“The mayor really loved the energy of youth,” says Block. “So at Columbia, he was able to follow that passion.”
In his post-mayoral career, Dinkins went on to assume what City Journal—an urban policy focused publication that was never a fan of his leadership—called “a sort of elder statesman role in New York [, which] suited him best.” Even the New York Post, which had gone after him hard during his mayoralty with biting headlines such as “Dave, Do Something!” would mourn him as “above all ... a dignified and well-respected gentleman.”
Reflecting on the blessing the Rebbe offered him at the outset of his mayoral career, for 40 years of leadership, Dinkins wryly noted, “I remember saying at that point, I’d settle for four years. It developed that’s all I got was four years, but I thought that was quite nice to offer me 40 years.”
But as the years passed, despite the knowledge that the mishandling of the riots was a deciding factor in his re-election, the Rebbe’s “double blessing,” as Dinkins referred to it, remained precious to him. In 2019, he wrote about the Rebbe’s vision for society:
“During my several visits with [the Rebbe], I experienced firsthand his kindness and his compassion for all humanity. The Rebbe expressed to me his view that we are all children of God, regardless of our race or religion, and we must all work together for the betterment of the entire society. He urged me to join him as we aim to transform the entire world, and especially encourage all children to personally give charity with their own hands. The Rebbe’s social vision is a timeless message that should be an inspiration for all people.”
Join the Discussion