Hope, Not Fear

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."

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