A Fragile Alliance : David Dinkins, Coalition Politics, and the Struggle to Govern a City in Crisis

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.