In the weeks before he was indicted in a federal corruption investigation, Eric Adams, New York City’s second Black mayor, began regularly comparing himself to David Dinkins, the city’s first Black mayor — a pairing so misaligned it could put you in mind of Donald Trump likening himself to someone like Jimmy Carter. The apparent point was to warn New Yorkers that if they did not back his bid for re-election, the city would reprise its racist past, denying another Black mayor a second term. Mr. Dinkins lost his re-election effort to a race-baiting Rudy Giuliani, while the most serious threats to an Adams win — beyond a criminal prosecution — are coming from the progressive left and include candidates like Zellnor Myrie, a Black state senator with immigrant parents.
By 1990, when Mr. Dinkins took office, crime and racial tension largely defined the experience of living in New York. The preceding months had been witness both to the assault and rape of a white female jogger in Central Park and the murder of Yusuf Hawkins, a Black teenager killed by a group of young white men while he was trying to buy a car in South Brooklyn. That kind of strife and conflict was spreading throughout the country.
Two years into Mr. Dinkins’s tenure, riots erupted in Los Angeles and other cities upon the news that the officers accused of beating Rodney King nearly to death had been acquitted. It was against that backdrop, in a moment of hope for reform, that the Dinkins administration sought to remove members of the Police Department from the city board tasked with monitoring misconduct in it.
The extent to which the police force, then largely white, hated Mr. Dinkins became clear on a September morning in 1992, when thousands of angry off-duty cops descended on City Hall to protest the initiative. The rioters spread out to nearby bars, many holding up cartoons of Mr. Dinkins, some of which called him a “washroom attendant.” They chanted, “The mayor’s on crack.” Mr. Giuliani, who had lost to Mr. Dinkins in the 1989 election, was also outside City Hall, with a microphone, placing blame for the outraged mood at the Police Department on Mr. Dinkins’s inability to boost morale.
“It was just horrific,” Ken Sunshine, a public relations consultant who had been Mr. Dinkins’s chief of staff, recalled. The cops “were drunk, aggressively screaming,” he continued. “It was one of the worst things I’ve ever seen. This was New York, not Mississippi.”
For all the very real crises that Mr. Adams has had to confront — the troubled post-Covid economy, the continued housing shortage, the arrival of so many migrants — he was handed a much more inclusive city than the one that Mr. Dinkins inherited from Ed Koch. During the 1989 campaign, 54 percent of white Democratic voters said that New York was not ready for a Black mayor.
What is even more disheartening than the comparisons made amid these disparities of circumstance is the delusion and crass gamesmanship implicit in Mr. Adams’s effort to cast himself as “Dinkins 2.” If we winnow down the criteria to similarities of affect and character, we come up ice-cold. In his memoir, “A Mayor’s Life,” Mr. Dinkins talked about his natural allergy to “bombast,” the life force of Mr. Adams’s rhetorical style.
Mr. Dinkins spoke in a way that meant to unify, describing New York City as a “gorgeous mosaic.” The current mayor trades in catchphrases and combative language that amplify his personal story. “Eric Adams leans on his swagger, and Dinkins was very careful to be more polished and diplomatic — a statesman,” Basil Smikle, a Harlem-based political strategist and former director of the New York State Democratic Party, said recently. “Adams is always the aggrieved party. Dinkins, at least while he was mayor, tried to deflect a lot of the criticism.”
Mr. Dinkins, Mr. Smikle pointed out, endured Mr. Giuliani’s racialized antagonism not only during the first campaign but also through his four years in office. “Much of what Adams is getting is self-inflicted,” he said. “It does not seem to come from a larger political force out to get him.”
Still, Mr. Adams senses a considerable enemy presence: He has claimed that critics seek to deny his achievements because of race, and that the Biden administration, unhappy with his complaints about migrants, retaliated with criminal charges regarding improper campaign contributions. Mr. Dinkins’s tenure, by contrast, proceeded without scandal. The closest Mr. Dinkins got was during the 1989 campaign when the Giuliani camp accused him of financial malfeasance. As he describes in his book, he had transferred stock to his son without reporting it as a gift on his tax returns. A city investigator concluded that this was not a crime.
If Mr. Adams’s theatrical positivity distracted voters from a pattern of ethical overreach, Mr. Dinkins’s quiet earnestness obscured some of his more macho accomplishments. During his last two years in office, according to federal statistics, major crime decreased for the first time in nearly four decades. Over the full course of his tenure, subway crime declined by 36 percent. Much of what he got done has been forgotten, including his success getting a new tennis stadium built in Queens, which, as the home of the U.S. Open, generates about $750 million a year in economic impact for the city.
Although the love of that sport had led some to call him elitist, Mr. Dinkins spent his post-mayoral chapter modestly, teaching at Columbia, not chasing the St. Regis Istanbul life. He didn’t go “make stupid money the way politicians do,” to borrow Mr. Sunshine’s words. After leaving Gracie Mansion, he and his wife moved into a rental apartment in a white brick building on East 68th Street off Second Avenue that had been home to a long list of post-middle-age bureaucrats, including John Lindsay — a building known as “heaven’s waiting room.”
Invoking Mr. Dinkins is a wager on securing the loyalty of the Black voters who helped elect Mr. Adams the first time. When I asked Mr. Smikle whether he thought this would work, he was not sure. There is “this sensitivity to the precarious position that Kamala is in and the precarious position that Hakeem is in,” he said, referring to Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, and Democrats who worry about the implications of the Adams situation for other candidates in the party.
When his indictment was unsealed, Mr. Adams held a news conference at Gracie Mansion with members of New York’s Black clergy flanking him, claiming that he had been “demonized.” Some members in the audience were not buying it. “This isn’t a Black thing,” one heckler bellowed. “It’s a justice thing.” The mayor’s political capital with his base was not quite exhausted, Mr. Smikle told me, but it was definitely “wearing thin.”
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