Hope, Not Fear

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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.