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A Fragile Alliance
David Dinkins, Coalition Politics, and the Struggle to Govern a City in Crisis
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A major reassessment of New York City’s first Black mayor and the fragile coalition politics that reshaped urban America.
Charting the rise and fall of New York City’s first African American mayor, A Fragile Alliance offers a vivid, deeply researched account of governance, coalition-building, and political change in one of the nation’s most turbulent urban eras. Drawing on newly available archival sources, James J. Barney examines David Dinkins’s mayoralty (1989–1993) as both a turning point in New York City history and a revealing case study in the possibilities, and limits, of identity-based coalition politics.
Dinkins’s historic 1989 election brought together a diverse, multiracial alliance that defeated entrenched political power and promised a new vision for the city. Yet once in office, Dinkins confronted a cascade of crises: rising crime and the crack epidemic, racial tensions and the Crown Heights conflict, the AIDS epidemic and its activism, economic recession, and a growing conservative backlash. Barney shows how these flashpoints tested the fragile coalition that brought Dinkins to power and ultimately contributed to its unraveling.
Blending political history, urban studies, and biography, the book explores how race, class, gender, sexuality, and shifting party politics shaped both Dinkins’s governing challenges and the broader transformation of American liberalism in the late twentieth century. In reassessing a mayor often overshadowed by louder political figures, Barney illuminates how the Dinkins years anticipated today’s debates over policing, public safety, identity politics, and the future of Democratic coalition-building.
Written with narrative clarity and grounded in extensive archival research, A Fragile Alliance brings long-overdue attention to a pivotal moment in New York City’s political history and offers essential insight into the enduring complexities of governing a diverse metropolis in times of crisis.
James J. Barney’s Fragile Alliance: David Dinkins, Coalition Politics, and the Struggle to Govern a City in Crisis is a thoughtful and well measured examination of the first black mayor of New York City. Barney cautions political parties and political figures who embrace identity politics over issues that impact people across race, gender, class, and ethnicity. This book serves as a blueprint for those interested in a more long-lasting progressive agenda that can build broad coalitions, struggling for what the author asserts is a shared humanity. Barney’s call for a politics of love, instead of identity, is a bold and courageous solution, that few in academia and government would dare to utter.—Clarence Taylor, professor emeritus of History, Baruch College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, and author of Fight the Power: African Americans and the Long history of Police Brutality in New York City
