TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/092589/09258900.053

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 8.3 KB | 166 lines

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Hope, Not Fear


New York may be the next city to elect a black mayor

By Richard Lacayo


    For American racial and ethnic groups on the way up,
gaining control of city hall is confirmation of emerging
political clout. So it was a triumphal moment last week when
Manhattan Borough President David Dinkins defeated three-term
incumbent Edward I. Koch to win the Democratic Party mayoral
primary in New York City. Since Democrats outnumber Republicans
5 to 1, Dinkins became an instant choice to prevail over the
Republican challenger, former U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani,
and become the first black chief executive of the nation's
largest city.

    Dinkins' chances for a November victory were bolstered by
the fact that he won almost a third of his party's white voters,
the largest share of white support ever racked up by a
nonincumbent black candidate in a mayoral primary in any major
city. Dinkins' victory was widely credited to his quiet,
conciliatory manner, which many voters hope can heal the racial
tensions in a city shaken by several racial incidents, most
recently the murder of a black teenager by a gang of Brooklyn
whites. "You gave this city something special," Dinkins told his
cheering supporters last week. "You voted your hopes and not
your fears."

    If Dinkins succeeds, New York would join the growing ranks
of cities with black mayors. African Americans occupy just 1.5%
of elective offices at the federal, state and local level,
though they account for 11% of the voting-age population. But
22 years after the ground-breaking 1967 elections of Carl Stokes
in Cleveland and Richard Hatcher in Gary, more than 300 American
cities have black mayors, including 25 with populations over
50,000.

    That political triumph has been tempered by the fact that
those same cities are often plagued by crime, drugs and
deteriorating schools. Black mayors have had much success in
fostering the growth of a black middle class, dispensing
thousands of city jobs and using minority set-aside programs to
direct a portion of city contracts toward black-owned
businesses. Unfortunately, they have fared no better than their
white counterparts in solving the intractable problems of the
growing black underclass.

    Many of the first black mayors, like Stokes and Hatcher,
were charismatic veterans of the civil rights movement who
became national spokesmen for the plight of the inner cities.
For their constituencies, long denied access to political power,
the mere election of one of their own to offices from which they
had long been excluded was a reward in itself. "Early on, black
voters' expectations were not necessarily tied to material
gains," says William G. Boone, a political scientist at
Atlanta's Morehouse College. "It was more of a psychological
gain."

    But black takeovers coincided with the deterioration of the
economies of American cities, especially in the industrial
areas to which many blacks had migrated from the South. Places
like Cleveland and Detroit suffered a dwindling of the
well-paid manufacturing jobs that had pulled generations of
unskilled workers into the middle class. Many whites, fearing
black government, fled to the suburbs, taking their taxable
incomes with them. The financial bind worsened under the Reagan
Administration's cutbacks in urban aid. "It's like getting the
prize and seeing that the prize is hollow," says Linda Williams,
policy analyst at the Joint Center for Political Studies in
Washington.

    Even when they presided over healthy local economies, some
black mayors became preoccupied by the needs of the middle
class, black and white, at the expense of poorer constituents.
During Maynard Jackson's two terms as mayor, from 1974 to 1982,
Atlanta became a symbol of New South prosperity. In the 1970s,
however, the number of black households in the city classified
as poor actually increased by almost a fourth, to 31%. But
Jackson jolted the local white establishment by aggressively
demanding that black businesses get a share of city contracts.
As a result, his tenure is so fondly remembered that when he
decided to run for mayor again this year, he quickly piled up
such a huge lead in the polls that his only challenger, Fulton
County Commissioner Michael Lomax, withdrew from the race.

    Mayors who presided over less fortunate cities had even
less to offer their poor constituents, and have suffered
accordingly. In 1986, Gary's Hatcher and Newark's Ken Gibson
became the first black mayors to fall to challenges from a new
generation of black aspirants less interested in national
podiums than in the unglamorous day-to-day management of their
cities. Many of the new generation of urban leaders, such as
Baltimore's Kurt Schmoke, a former prosecutor, have backgrounds
in business or the professions. "There is a growing respect for
the intractability of urban problems," says analyst Williams.
"Some of the new black mayors have learned from the old black
mayors not to promise too much."

    A classic battle between old and new is the one shaping up
in Detroit. Last week four-term Mayor Coleman Young, 71,
finished first in the city's nonpartisan primary in a campaign
in which opponents hammered at Detroit's drug and crime
problems. (The mayor's image was also tarnished when paternity
tests forced him to acknowledge having fathered a child out of
wedlock six years ago.) If Young is getting on in years, it has
not cramped his boisterous style. At a victory rally last week,
he urged his jubilant supporters to "go home, get some rest and
come back tomorrow to kick some ass!"

    Young's toe will be aimed at Tom Barrow, 40, a black
businessman the mayor defeated four years ago by painting him
as a pawn of white suburbanites. But Barrow has been blasting
at Young's predilection for sparkling downtown development
projects over measures to help the city's devastated
neighborhoods. A cousin of the heavyweight champion Joe Louis,
Barrow also derides the mayor as a holdover "from an old era"
who naively granted sizable tax abatements to Chrysler and
General Motors for plant construction projects that did not
create as many jobs as promised or that cost taxpayers too much.
Barrow promotes himself as wise in the ways of business and
administration.

    A crop of hopefuls cut from the same professional cloth is
lining up to challenge Washington's Marion Barry, who has been
weakened by continuing allegations of drug abuse. Barry's
dilemma worsened last week when a grand jury heard testimony
from a witness who said she saw the mayor in a Virgin Islands
hotel room last year with convicted drug dealer Charles Lewis
and a quantity of cocaine. If Barry is forced to resign or
decides not to run for a fourth term next year, Jesse Jackson
may enter the race.

    Even the most successful black mayors can also fall prey to
the arrogance and corruption that have dogged many of their
white counterparts. Last week the city attorney of Los Angeles
concluded that five-term Mayor Tom Bradley "clearly stepped into
that gray area between factual innocence and a chargeable
offense" after Bradley's phoning the city treasurer last March
on behalf of a bank that employed him as an outside "adviser"
led to a city deposit of $2 million. The city attorney also
filed a civil suit accusing Bradley of failing to disclose on
city conflict of interest forms six investments totaling up to
$420,000. Bradley now faces the prospect of stiff civil
penalties as well as continuing investigations into his
financial affairs.

    David Dinkins has been in politics for almost as long as
Bradley, but he seems newer to many New York voters. He has
garnered far fewer headlines than Giuliani, who made a name for
himself with high-profile cases against Mafia chiefs and Wall
Street cheats. Last week elated black voters were greeting
Dinkins' victory with tears and shouts of celebration. But some
had also already reined in their expectations about what any
mayor, black or white, can achieve. "With the Dinkins victory,
there is hope," says Utrice Leid, managing editor of the City
Sun, a Brooklyn-based newspaper aimed at a black readership.
"But so much is desperately wrong."


-- Janice C. Simpson/New York, James Willwerth/Los Angeles and
Don Winbush/Atlanta