David Dinkins

David Dinkins, New York’s first black mayor, passed away on November 23, 2020, at the age of 93, a month after his wife.  “An enormous loss to our city…” Police Commissioner Dermot Shea tweeted. David Norman Dinkins was born on July 10, 1927, in Trenton, New Jersey. After high school, he enlisted to serve the Marines. Later on, he enrolled at Howard University to get a degree in mathematics. In 1953, he joined the British Law School and began his journey to politics. This was around the same time he married Joyce Burrows, the New York state assemblyman’s daughter.

In 1989, he ran for mayor and was able to beat Rudy Giuliani by a 47,000 vote difference, which was considered the closest margin in New York office election history. He opted out of re-election and became a professor at Columbia University instead. Sometime in 2013, he released his memoir, A Mayor’s Life: Governing New York’s Gorgeous Mosaic, which he wrote with Peter Knobler.