A Fragile Alliance: David Dinkins, Coalition Politics, and the Struggle to Govern a City in Crisis (Fordham University Press, 2026) by James J. Barney that examines the rise, mayoralty, and electoral defeat of New York City‘s first Black mayor, David Dinkins.
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.
Drawing on newly available archival sources, Barney examines Dinkins’s rise to power in 1989 and his mayoralty from 1990 to 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.
In doing so A Fragile Alliance brings long-overdue attention to a pivotal moment in the City’s political history and offers essential insight into the enduring complexities of governing a diverse metropolis in times of crisis.
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