Why Eric Adams Is Nothing Like David Dinkins

By Ginia Bellafante, New York Times

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.

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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.

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