3

Home in Harlem

After Joyce graduated from Howard that spring, we got married on August 30, 1953. While waiting for an apartment to become available in the Riverton, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company’s uptown development, she and I moved in with her mother and father in an apartment on 149th Street and Convent Avenue in Harlem.

I married well. Joyce’s mother, Elaine Burrows, was terrific. At those rare times while Joyce and I were courting when we had a dispute, my future mother-in-law was, more often than not, on my side. She loved me and was convinced that I would be able to support her daughter. I tell Joyce that the reason she never learned to cook was that her mother thought she’d be having a maid. I have been very fortunate; in a way, I’ve had three very loving mothers!

My father-in-law, Daniel L. Burrows, was a self-made, rough-and-tumble kind of man, beginning with his middle name, L. It didn’t mean a damn thing; he gave it to himself because he thought that he should have a middle initial, that it added stature. He was a man who liked these kinds of gestures. Mr. Burrows dabbled in politics and was one of the first African Americans to serve in the New York State Legislature. He had been a significant presence in the New York City Democratic Party, a prominent member of the State Assembly in the 1930s, and a successful real estate and insurance executive. The New York Times reports that in 1939, during an Assembly debate on a bill to “classify as dangerous weapons those typically used by warring gangsters … Assemblyman Burrows suddenly brandished a switchblade knife, snapped its catch and swished its four-inch blade through the air.” End of discussion. Flashing metal in the Assembly was sufficient to scare the members into passing the bill 140 to 0.

Mr. Burrows was politically well-connected and he had interesting friends. I was in Frank’s Restaurant on 125th Street joking around with some guys, and I made a comment that apparently offended Bumpy Johnson, who was also in Frank’s at the time. Now, I didn’t know Bumpy Johnson personally, but I knew of him: Bumpy Johnson was alleged to be the gangster who ran organized crime in Harlem, he was an enforcer for the Genovese crime family, and he was known to do whatever it was he wanted to do to whomever he wanted to do it. He was not a man to cross, and without knowing quite how, I had crossed him. I had pissed off Bumpy Johnson! Under normal circumstances, I would have been in big trouble—people died for less—but someone said, “No, no, no, no, leave him alone, he’s all right, that’s Danny Burrows’s son-in-law.”

Mr. Burrows saw a future for me in the Democratic Party and encouraged me to go back to school and get a law degree. I was more than pleased to oblige. I enrolled in Brooklyn Law School in September 1953. Money continued to be an issue. I went to school full-time during the day and at night worked over at St. Nicholas Avenue and 148th Street at St. Nicholas Wines & Liquors, which was owned by my father-in-law.

Living with my in-laws while we were on the Riverton waiting list was not a situation I encouraged, but it was an acceptable short-term solution. While we were in this circumstance, Joyce and I visited a store and picked out furniture for our future abode. Despite the fact that we did not yet have a place to put it, Joyce wanted the suite delivered and stored in the liquor store basement. “Honey,” I said, “if we have them deliver it now, we’ll have to pay to have it shipped again to the apartment where we’re going to live.” She argued and argued, but there was no logic to her position, and I would not capitulate. Finally one day she said, “But it’s my first furniture. I just want to look at it!”

Ah! “Why didn’t you say that?!” I asked. “Now I understand!” And that’s exactly what we did.

Law school was rigorous, but I learned a lot about negotiating by selling alcohol in Harlem. If a person came into the store and requested a bottle of Canadian Club, and we didn’t have any in stock, I couldn’t very well just stand there like a fool and say, “I don’t have Canadian Club. Is there anything else you’d like?” The sale was very apt to walk out of the store. What I learned was to step to the shelves, grab a bottle of Seagram’s VO, a Canadian whiskey, in one hand and MacNaughton, another Canadian whiskey, in the other, turn, set the two bottles firmly on the counter in front of the customer, and say, “Out of Canadian Club.” And wait. Let the sale make itself. Automatically, the person’s mind had moved from what he or she had wanted to what I was offering and would start concentrating on those choices. Rather than being disappointed, the buyer would try to choose between two attractive alternatives. And instead of being a person who said no, I became someone with the good sense and goodwill to present two satisfactory solutions. This technique works in other endeavors as well, the law and politics among them. Options are beautiful.

When my bride and I found we were going to have a child, we knew it was going to be a boy. In those years one could not determine the gender in advance, as they do today, but we just sort of knew. Bill Hayling was a resident at Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx. Joyce loved and trusted Bill, so she delivered there. I had always loved kids—I still do—and now we had one of our own. We eliminated what could have been a nasty clash of grandfathers by naming him after me. David Jr.—Davey—was our joy.

We moved into the Riverton, located from 135th to 138th Streets, from Fifth Avenue to Madison. Its resident manager was a man named Cliff Alexander, whose son later became secretary of the Army, the man to whom the list of promotions to general was handed. He handed the list back because there were no blacks on it. When a new list was produced, it included the name of Colin Powell.

The Riverton was Stuyvesant Town North, so to speak. The apartment was very small, and the rent was very low. I was paying the rent, but not much more.

We surely did love our boy. What a wonderful child! My bride was a very protective mother and would allow only her mother or mine to take care of our son. When Davey was an infant, we received a visit from Joyce’s childhood friend Joan Carter, who had attended Howard with us. Some women think children are like dolls or toys, and Joan wanted to give him a bath. When Joyce went out, she hid the bassinette, so Joanie gave him a bath in a salad bowl!

I tried to instill a sense of responsibility and accomplishment in our son. He was Daddy’s Little Fella. (He’s in his fifties now, but he’s still Daddy’s Little Fella!) One morning when he was five or six years old (my wife swears he was three or four, and by now there’s no way of knowing), I decided it was time for him to go outside and get the Sunday paper. This is a New York child’s rite of passage: take the money, buy the paper, and bring home the correct change. My bride disagreed. What if he gets lost?! What if he gets hit by a car?! What if he gets stolen by a stranger?! I told her, “He knows how to stop on red and walk on green.” We discussed the pros and cons, but I was resolute: this was a good life lesson, and he might as well learn it now.

From where we lived, Davey would have to cross Fifth Avenue and then Lenox Avenue to the far, westerly side. While Fifth Avenue at 135th Street was not particularly broad, Lenox Avenue was a boulevard, a six-lane transit hub with a grass median in the middle, filled with cars and trucks and all manner of speeding vehicles. I told our five-year-old, “Cross half at a time. Cross to the median, wait until the light changes, and then cross the next half. Do the same coming back. You will be fine.” I sent him on his way.

Joyce set about taking a bath. When I walked in, I found her sitting up in the bathtub, crying. Tears were pouring down her cheeks. She raised so much hell that I got dressed and ran out after him. Davey didn’t know I was following, he was just running along, skipping and whistling, having a grand old time, and I was a half-block behind, making sure no harm came to him. Which, of course, it did not. Davey returned successfully, as I had great faith that he would.

From the beginning our son was smart and inquisitive. Davey grew up to be an active, athletic boy, always passionate about sports.

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I passed the bar the first time I took the exam, in the fall of 1956, because I had to—I didn’t have the luxury of playing around, for I needed a job. To become a lawyer in New York in 1956 you were required to submit papers to the Committee on Character and Fitness of the Appellate Division of the First Department for Manhattan and the Bronx. These papers had to contain a letter or affidavit from every employer you had ever had, which for me included summer job bosses, post office supervisors, all kinds of people. I don’t believe I asked for one from Mr. Donahue at the country club or from my favorite postal worker, but I rounded up almost everyone else. I had been a stock boy in the shoe department of a department store and was very proud to go back there and say, “I’m going to be a lawyer, I need this letter.”

In addition to the employment references, you had to present an affidavit from someone on the committee who knew you. To be a lawyer you had to know a lawyer. The law profession was a chain, a network; one needed to be vouched for. The Committee on Character and Fitness consisted of eleven men, and if you were not personally acquainted with a member of the committee, it was customary to obtain an affidavit from someone who knew you and also knew one of them. For the majority of New York’s black lawyers, that person was Thomas Benjamin Dyett. Upon my acceptance to the New York bar, I was fortunate to get a job in the law offices of Mr. Dyett, Fritz Alexander, and Kenneth McArthur Phipps. Law school admission was dominated by quotas, and there was no abundance of jobs at white firms for those black lawyers who graduated. There were very few African American law offices in the 1950s, but the association of Dyett, Alexander, and Phipps was one of them.

Thomas Benjamin Dyett was the dean of black lawyers. He was also an old-fashioned gentleman. If he were to meet a woman in the street during a light rain, he would take off his hat because one simply did not converse with a lady while covered. So it would be raining on his bald head while he stood there talking. Similarly, Mr. Dyett would no more remain seated when a woman approached a table than he would fly. (To this day I follow his lead. If I am seated for dinner and rise as a woman comes to greet me, she will often say, “Don’t get up, I just want to say hello.” My rejoinder always is, “Either you’ve got to sit down or I’ve got to stand up, because I can’t sit while you are standing and talking to me. It’s just not done.” I learned that from Mr. Dyett. I never called him Tom to his face. He was Mr. Dyett, or more often, Mr. D. Everyone stands on someone’s shoulders, and I stood on Mr. D’s. I frequently say to women, “I always rise for royalty.” It always gets a rise out of them.)

Unlike today, when young associates just out of school earn over a hundred thousand dollars when they join a practice, Messrs. Dyett, Alexander, and Phipps paid me $25 a week, and each partner lectured me on how I should be paying them for the privilege of learning the practice of law. Actually, they were quite generous. If I happened to bring in a client, whether I worked on the case or not, I always shared in the fee. Because the office consisted of only the four of us, I filed papers, helped write briefs, and was intimately involved in most areas. One might think of law offices as moneymaking machines, and perhaps they were elsewhere, but in our office times were tight. Though each attorney had a sterling reputation, none of us was making a lot of money. We attended to business with great acumen, but we were hungry for dollars.

Mr. Dyett’s specialty was wills and estates, and I followed in his footsteps. He had written wills for many people in the community. When they died, the family would find the document, come to the office, and say, “Daddy died,” and we would handle the estate. It didn’t take long for me to become familiar with the surrogate judges and the head clerk for the probate section; on occasion, when someone died intestate, we would be handed the business.

I continued to work two jobs. Each morning I put on a shirt and tie, picked up my briefcase, and went to the law office on Broadway, but at night I took the subway up to St. Nicholas Avenue and the liquor store.

In 1958 Ken Phipps, who had been a member of the State Assembly representing Harlem, was appointed to the criminal court bench by Mayor Robert Wagner. Mr. Phipps was in Hulan Jack’s political club—Hulan Jack, New York’s first black borough president, not only lost his job but was indicted for having his property renovated for free by a developer. (An indictment related to similar behavior was brought against NYPD commissioner Bernard Kerik many years later.) One of three judges who presided in the obscenity trial of comedian Lenny Bruce in 1964, Mr. Phipps died only four years after that at the age of fifty-one.

After Mr. Phipps’s appointment, Mr. Dyett, Fritz Alexander, and I formed the firm Dyett Alexander & Dinkins. We helped create Allied Federal Savings & Loan Association, a black institution based in Queens, and I spent a considerable amount of time representing the bank while closing mortgage loans. Frequently, the black folks coming in to get those loans had white lawyers. This wasn’t difficult work—we were not arguing before the Supreme Court of the United States, and the actions of all the attorneys in these proceedings were largely pro forma—so one wondered why these white lawyers were in the room when there were black lawyers to be had. The answer was simple: there was a widespread sense in the black community that in order to obtain a favorable result you needed a white lawyer.

We encountered this all the time. “White folks run everything,” the reasoning went. “They have power, access, they all know each other. If I’m going to get anything done, I need a big downtown white lawyer.” These weren’t necessarily the facts, but as is so often the case, perception clouded reality. Our own offices were downtown at 401 Broadway, a block below Canal Street in the Foley Square area near the courts—and there were some very fine lawyers with offices in Harlem—but we were faced with a perverse and pervasive prejudice. We spent a lot of time trying to counter it, and the best way to do that was to do good work and hope the word got out. It was a very big day in my life when, in 1958, I was making enough money to stop working at the liquor store and devote myself full-time to the law.

How did a lawyer get clients? Word of mouth and personal contacts. Only a handful of men of color were in my law classes. If the white student sitting next to me had a business client, he might be someone who owned a string of muffler shops, because these were the people whom that white student knew. Any business client of mine was more likely to be leasing a corner candy store, because these were the people whom I knew. I might have been far brighter or more capable than my fellow student, but clearly he was going to make more money. This is the self-perpetuating nature of class. How did anyone go about breaking this barrier? You had to meet people to know people, and the perfect avenue for such networking was the local political club. In Harlem the place to be was the George Washington Carver Democratic Club.

...

The Democratic Party has ruled Harlem politics for almost a century because it has made the African American community part of its constituency. The Republican Party has for the most part abdicated any role in Harlem politics; the GOP is not a significant presence there because it has never evinced a great concern for black New Yorkers, and we are simply not part of its equation. The Republican Party has not made our needs a priority, or even in any large way a talking point, and black folks are well aware of this disregard. Harlem is a Democratic enclave because we support those who support us.

The general structure of the Democratic Party begins at the top with the Democratic National Committee. Beneath it stands the state committee, then the county committees with one county committeeperson per election district. These committee people are members of the local Democratic club, and they are the ones who organize the petition drives and get candidates on the ballot for public office. They elect district leaders. The president of the Carver Democratic Club was my law partner, Fritz Alexander, but the more powerful leader of the district that included Harlem was a man named J. Raymond Jones, known throughout New York political circles as “the Fox.” My father-in-law had been active in the Carver Democratic Club, and he introduced me.

The Carver club was on what old-timers called Sugar Hill. Central Harlem was to the south, down in what was called the Valley, and the neighborhoods were separated from one another by St. Nicholas Park. One must climb a mountain of steps to get from the Valley to City College or St. Nicholas Avenue. During the Harlem Renaissance, Sugar Hill residents included W.E.B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, Adam Clayton Powell, and Duke Ellington. But times had changed, and if Sugar Hill had ever been an affluent part of town, it wasn’t now.

The Carver club had enormous clout. First and foremost, it got people jobs, particularly in civil service. The post office was a convenient conduit, and the regional postmaster could be counted on to be helpful when someone with the Carver club imprimatur came looking for employment. We used to love to tell the story of a guy who was “casing” mail, taking individual letters from the huge piles sprawled on the industrial tables and putting them into slots from which they would be delivered to each street. Amsterdam Avenue from number 1 to number 99, Amsterdam from 100 to 199 . . . this was a tedious business, but this guy was very good, very fast. Instead of standing in front of the slots and placing the letters in them one by one, he stood a couple of yards away and tossed mail behind his back, between his legs. The guy was putting on quite a show. The Harlem Globetrotter of mail distribution. All he needed was a soundtrack of “Sweet Georgia Brown.” The letters zipped through the air and slapped into the boxes with accuracy and certainty. Someone said, “Damn, you’re good!” “It’s nothing,” he replied. “Wait till I learn to read!”

Located at 145th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, the Carver Democratic Club was the place where the wheels of government and industry were made to glide smoothly. People in the community looked there when they needed more help than their friends or neighbors could give; it was the place where people who didn’t know anybody knew somebody. The club did more than hand out Thanksgiving turkeys, though it did that too. We had lawyers in the club twice a week to help attend to the needs of the people. “I’m out of work, I need a job” was a recurring problem in Harlem in the 1950s, and the club often could be counted on to provide a solution. Yet one of the Fox’s favorite sayings was “Nobody does anything for nothing.” In return, the community could be counted on to vote consistently and convincingly Democratic.

At one point in my career I was approached by some West Side politicians who asked me whether I wanted to become a judge. When I declined, they asked, “What about Fritz?” It didn’t appear to me that being a judge was among the aspirations of my law partner, so I said, “I doubt it, but ask him.” They asked Fritz, and he said, “What time?!” Fritz Alexander was elected to the New York Supreme Court and went on to sit on New York’s highest court, the Court of Appeals.

James L. “Skiz” Watson, a member of the Carver Democratic Club, became a federal judge in the US Court of International Trade, appointed by President Lyndon Johnson. He got to be a judge because Ray Jones had a relationship with LBJ. From then on, Judge Watson carried some weight and ultimately became the first African American to head a federal court in the South since Reconstruction.

We were sitting around one Saturday afternoon waiting for the start of a meeting of a committee that was making plans for a community center in Harlem, of which Judge Watson was chairman. Someone among us got impatient and said, “Man, let’s go, let’s get started, we have enough people.”

He was shot down. “No, we’re waiting for the chairman, waiting on the judge.”

In the door walked Herb Evans, who was a judge on the State Supreme Court. The impatient fellow said, “There’s the judge now!”

Not good enough. “No, man, I mean the heavy judge!”

From that moment on, Skiz Watson was “the Heavy Judge.”

Esteemed civil rights attorney Constance Baker Motley (she wrote the 1950 complaint that became the landmark civil rights case Brown v. Board of Education and was the first African American woman to argue before the US Supreme Court) became borough president of Manhattan out of the Carver club in 1965. She later moved on to become a federal judge, raising the question of who was going to succeed her. Percy Sutton wanted to be that person. Ray Jones single-handedly had the power to make that selection: the vacancy was filled by the county committee, and Jones controlled that committee. Jones had a record for assisting people of quality (your humble servant excluded). For example, Kenneth Clark, the psychologist so influential in the Brown v. Board of Education case, became the first African American appointed to the New York Board of Regents with Jones’s support. So every Monday on our ride together to Albany Percy would ask me, “What’s Ray saying?” One possible rival was Herb Evans, who was also in the Carver Democratic Club but did not appear to want the job. Ultimately, much to his pleasure, Percy Sutton did succeed Constance Baker Motley as borough president. The BP’s offices and the federal buildings were almost next to each other. I asked Connie, “How do you like it? What’s the difference?” She said, “When I was borough president, I’d come to work in a limo. Now I ride the subway.”

As in the black churches, the backbone of the club was its women. They were reliable, they were committed, they turned out in large numbers to participate in the petition drives, and they did the scut work that maintained the club’s power. For decades women performed these functions without taking leadership positions. In recent years, however, they began to say, “It’s time. We supported you men all those years; now we want to lead.” In the past few years several women have successfully sought elective office from Central Harlem: Virginia Fields became borough president of Manhattan and Inez Dickens a member of the City Council, who may become speaker.

I met many people and became a known quantity at the club, bringing clients to Dyett Alexander & Dinkins while also working to elect local Democratic candidates. I managed to get Ray Jones’s attention. One day someone there said, “Ray wants to see you.” His office was in back, and the door was closed, so I sat outside at 9:00 at night and waited. Nine o’clock passed, then ten. Finally, at around a quarter past eleven, Ray walked out, big cigar in his mouth. “Hi there, boy,” he said and kept on going.

But over the course of several years I made an impression. I started as a worker and grew to become captain of an election district. My job was to get to know the people, personally and as a voting bloc, and to be responsive to their problems. I spent time in the street handing out flyers and introducing myself, and I would meet with the individuals who came to the clubhouse with situations to be resolved. My experience selling insurance had taught me a valuable lesson in recognizing the need for respect—both giving and earning it.

Harlem was sufficiently congested that an election district could consist of one square block. In the old days a good captain was supposed to know all the people in his district, and I knew mine. I’d stand near the polling site, hand out literature in the period leading up to the contest, and say, “Be sure to vote for John Brown,” or whomever I had on the ballot. I learned how to motivate my workers to get out the vote, and on election day I delivered my district.

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Ray Jones decided he wanted to run for a seat on the City Council, which brought the council seat into play in Harlem because the Valley’s New Era Democratic Club in Central Harlem was supporting a different candidate, Henry Williams. Jones recruited a young man named Charles Rangel, who was very dissatisfied with New Era’s leadership, to run in a club election against its chief, Lloyd Dickens. Rangel thought his own smartness and brilliance had attracted this attention, but in fact Jones was trying to dethrone a rival district leader. It was simple addition by subtraction. Another New Era activist, Percy Sutton, was also running a candidate against Dickens, and Jones wanted to undermine him. At first, Percy and Charlie were fighting between themselves much of the time. Percy called Charlie “Pretty Boy,” which drove Rangel up a wall. Despite Jones’s efforts, both Williams and Rangel were defeated and Dickens was reelected. Even the Fox couldn’t win every time.

Though he lost, Rangel’s run earned him Ray Jones’s ear. “I had my club in Central Harlem,” Charlie says, “but I didn’t have any J. Raymond Jones or anyone who won anything citywide. If I had to lose, it didn’t hurt me too badly politically, since I was able to set the impression that I was a pretty important guy from the Valley. Who the hell knew the Valley? And I was the only connection that the City Council and the county elite had with the Valley. I had a lot of meetings with J. Raymond Jones at his home, and I wanted to be perceived as being his right-hand man, but no, J. Raymond Jones really was his own right-hand man.”

 Rangel and Sutton had met during the campaign and sooner or later found that they liked and thought like each other. They agreed that whoever won would reach out to the other. After they both lost, they began working together despite the fact that, as Charlie says, Percy “had never won anything. . . . [He] nevertheless was very well known.” Rangel was valuable to Ray Jones because he knew what was going on inside New Era’s operation. Jones, however, despised Percy Sutton, not because of his personality but because Percy had chosen to identify himself with what was referred to as the “reform movement” and against the regular organization, which was J. Raymond Jones.

To an outsider, the term “reformer” might indicate someone who wants good government, honesty among politicians, and candidates with high qualifications, someone who is against corruption. But the reformers were all white folks, and to those of us on the ground being led by a black county leader, “reform” meant a whole bunch of whites who were anxious to overthrow the regular organization only for the purpose of obtaining political jobs.

The reformers’ basic platform was “Politicians shouldn’t hold public-service jobs.” District leaders should not be City Council members. It was clear what their intentions were: run for office, win, quit the Democratic clubs, and leave the neighborhoods without personal representation. It was just the title “reformer” that would make it sound so aboveboard; in actuality, it was a power grab. So when it came to picking candidates, it was us against them.

The reformers attacked Ray Jones, and because there were no blacks in the reform movement, they jumped at the opportunity to land Percy Sutton. He, seeing a chance to advance himself and have an effect, grabbed them right back. When Jones found out that Rangel and Sutton were allies, he told Charlie, “Those Sutton brothers are gonna eat you up alive.” Percy had a brother, Oliver, with whom he practiced law. They didn’t look that much alike, but they were very close and were together so often that when I first met Percy I wasn’t sure which one he was. Charlie told Ray, “I’d rather be eaten up in the Valley than be ignored on the Hill. I don’t have a lot of choices. I don’t have a lot of problems with these reformers. They don’t know me, I don’t know them.”

“They’ll know you soon, and you’ll be subject to attack.”

“Hey, there’s nothing to attack. They’ll attack you; you’re the county leader. But I will be irregular.”

After much discussion, Ray Jones was persuaded to at least meet Percy Sutton, and there in Jones’s living room, sure enough, he fell in love with Sutton and Rangel both, and as a result of that friendship they never looked back. As a result of Jones’s support, Charlie became district leader and Percy was elected assemblyman. When Percy went on to become borough president, Charlie took his Assembly seat. When Charlie ran for Congress, Ray Jones supported him in a very contentious race against the incumbent, the legendary Harlem figure Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.

I got to know both Charlie and Percy much better during the height of this controversy. I looked up to Percy Sutton, whose reputation preceded him. He was polished, well groomed, soft-spoken, knowledgeable, articulate, influential. A major presence in Harlem, Percy was involved in all its main organizations, both political and civic. It wasn’t so much his politics that was impressive—he was a smooth lawyer, and we and many others got to know one another through the Harlem Lawyers Association—as the fact that in many ways Percy was a visionary. Who but Percy Sutton would have dreamed that a black could own a radio station in New York City? Who but Percy would have decided that a black could run for mayor of New York and that he would be that person? Percy was active in the NAACP. For years there was competition among Percy, Basil Paterson, Charlie Rangel, George Miller, and some others for that organization’s district leadership positions. Percy succeeded spectacularly. One of the accolades he was most proud to receive was the Spingarn Medal, the NAACP’s highest award for outstanding achievement, previously bestowed upon W.E.B. Du Bois, George Washington Carver, Paul Robeson, Mary McLeod Bethune, Thurgood Marshall, and Jackie Robinson. Percy was our leader, a man undeterred by the fact that something had never occurred before. He had a vision that one day New York City could have a mayor of color. He was prepared to make it happen. Percy Sutton was a pioneer.

Charlie Rangel was my brother. We saw the world the same way, we saw our community the same way, and we saw individual people the same way. Sometimes we didn’t even have to talk about an issue; we knew what we stood for, we knew where we wanted to go, and we knew how we wanted to get there. Neither Charlie nor I can recall more than a few times in our lives when we had a difference of opinion over politics.

It takes a lot to get a candidate on the ballot in New York City. Whether you’re running for the position of district leader, a seat in the Assembly, or a spot on the City Council, any office requires first and foremost that you have a petition signed by the requisite number of duly registered voters in your district stating that they want you to run. Those people you see in the street, sitting at tables or standing in the middle of the sidewalk with clipboards and lined paper? They are out there using up shoe leather, talking to their neighbors, making democracy work. (If you are not registered to vote, let me encourage you strongly to do so immediately.)

The petition is spelled out at the top of a single sheet of paper, with space for signatures underneath. Sometimes there are duplications, typographical errors, illegible signatures, or errors of fact in these petitions—wrong election district, wrong assembly district. Sometimes people are not who they say they are, which is why we routinely collected many times more signatures than the law deemed necessary. If your petition is defective, you have no candidacy, but once the qualifying number has been reached it is valid. Petitions run hundreds and hundreds of pages and become literally worth their weight in gold! The candidate or his staff collects these sheets—stacks from one location combined with stacks from another and another—and binds them in a book or secures them with rubber bands or gathers them with twine, and then guards them with his life. The term of art is “wrapping the petition.”

The Board of Elections is the governing body that decides who gets on the ballot. For the sake of security, the Board of Elections accepts only original signatures; carbon copies (then) or photocopies (now) are impermissible. If you lose the petition, not only have days and months of people’s time and effort been rendered useless, but you as a candidate will be denied ballot placement, your election becomes impossible, and your career may die before it is born. Why? Because the Board of Elections doesn’t care what happened; if you don’t have your petition, it’s over.

There were all sorts of political stories running around the Carver Democratic Club and every other political club in New York City about a candidate getting a call in the middle of the night—“Can’t imagine how that fire started. . . . The whole damn house burned down.”

“The house burned down? And my petitions?!”

“I had just put them inside. I was returning shortly. When I got back, they burned the house to the ground!”

Even though accidents do happen and petitions have been known to get legitimately lost, there’s a certain amount of healthy skepticism among the people on the Board of Elections, because they have heard every “the dog ate my homework” story in the book. “The clubhouse burned down.” “I left them in the trunk of the car.” “Don’t you remember? I gave them to Jerry.”

Jerry shrugs, and your political career is gone. Security is therefore at a premium, and you will as much as sleep with that petition under your pillow. This may sound silly to outsiders, but to the people involved the degree of trust you put in the person who wraps your petition is extraordinary. Fritz Alexander and I wrapped Charlie Rangel’s petition. It’s the kind of thing you do for your brother.

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Our daughter Donna was born in Newark because Dr. Bill Hayling had moved his practice to New Jersey. Early in the pregnancy, I was driving Joyce to an examination with Bill. The New Jersey Turnpike had yet to be created, so we were on either the Pulaski Skyway or Route 1.

When we started our road trips, Joyce, like many wives, would routinely get in the car and lean over and say, “Are you sure you have enough gas?” This was a constant. I would respond by giving her a lecture. “Honey, if the tank holds twenty gallons, and if it’s on a quarter, that means it has a fourth of twenty, or five gallons, and if you can get fifteen miles per gallon, that’s seventy-five miles.”

So we started off, and we were on the Skyway and—putt, putt, putt—the car sputtered to a halt. A police car came along almost immediately and pulled up behind us. “What’s the trouble?” the officer asked.

I said, “I don’t know, but it’s not out of gas.”

The officer used his patrol car to shove our vehicle fifty yards, a hundred yards, to an exit. We coasted down the ramp, and at the bottom was a gas station. The attendant came and lifted the hood.

“What’s the trouble?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, “but it’s not out of gas.”

He checked the spark plugs and everything, and he finally said, “Why don’t we put a little gas in and see?” Put some gas in and—vroom!—it kicked right over. It took a long time for me to live that down.

...

We just knew our second child was going to be a girl, because we already had a boy. Seemed logical. Sure enough, it was a girl. I wanted to name her Dawn. “Dawn Dinkins,” I said. “That’s cool!” Joyce wanted to name her Deborah, so she could call her Debbie. She thought that was cute, Debbie. I said, “If you want to call her Debbie, you should name her Debbie.” We debated and argued, and I was almost holding my own until I made a big mistake. I said, “Can’t you see, she’s lovely, she’s sixteen, she comes to the prom, the trumpets blare, and the announcer says, ‘Comes the Dawn!’” Joyce said, “That’s it. Never!” So our daughter’s name is Donna.

Donna was a sweet and lovely child, as was her brother Davey. She was bright and inquisitive, as we found out early in her infancy. Sometime shortly after she learned how to stand, she managed to get on top of a chair and reach some hair tonic, which she drank. We found her crying next to the open bottle. There were no ingredients on the label, so we were truly frightened. I scooped up our baby and ran to the Harlem Hospital emergency room, which fortunately was on Fifth Avenue almost directly across the street from our home.

The place was crowded, of course. I came running in, cradling our baby, and was told something like, “Take a number, take a seat.” I said, “You don’t understand, this is our daughter! You’ve got to do better than that!” I raised a little hell, and whether my anger made a difference is hard to determine, but the doctors examined her and decided they had to pump her stomach. It hurt me more than it hurt her. Donna was crying, but I was just about to die. Oh, my God.

Apparently, when the ER receives a case such as this, they file a report with the appropriate city agency. Much to our embarrassment, Poison Control arrived at our door to interview Joyce. She was mortified. “They think I’m a bad mother!” Joyce was exactly the opposite: she was the most loving, protective, almost overly protective parent one could imagine. For a long time she would not let anyone, except her mother or mine, take care of the kids, and when we had only one, certainly no one else was going to take care of Davey. Davey used to fall down from time to time, nothing serious, but the scare with Donna, boy, that was something.

I was the taskmaster, I suppose. It wasn’t quite “Wait until your father gets home,” but I did feel the need to establish order. Davey to this day thinks I was a pretty stern dad. He recalls the following incident, which I do not:

One morning when he was under the age of ten, we gave our son a quarter to buy an ice cream cone. Walking in the street, Davey carelessly dropped the coin down a grate on the sidewalk. The money was irretrievable, the ledge on which it sat was too deep for either of us to reach. As far as I was concerned, the case was closed; we had given him the opportunity to have a treat, and he had not been sufficiently responsible to accept it. Davey started crying, but I would not give him another quarter; I felt there was an important lesson to be learned here.

We happened to be standing in front of his grandfather’s liquor store, and my father-in-law heard the boy’s crying and walked outside. He reached into his pocket, gave his grandson a coin, and said, “Go get some ice cream.” Davey ran on his way, and the grown-ups proceeded to have a serious father-in-law/son-in-law talk.

Davey had a monkey—like a rag doll, but it was a monkey. He loved this stuffed animal, just loved it; it was his security blanket. Once, when we were perhaps twenty or thirty miles from home, my father-in-law driving, we realized we had left this monkey behind. I must not have been entirely severe: we turned around and went all the way back home to get the damn monkey.

This animal was filthy, just disgusting. Finally, when we could not stand it anymore, when the monkey was approaching the status of an environmental hazard, Davey’s mother put it in the washing machine. After it emerged all nice and clean from the wash, rinse, and spin cycles, that was the end of the monkey. Davey didn’t want it anymore.

Donna was “Daddy’s Angel.” Our children were equally bright, but Donna was a better student, more attentive, less likely to be outside playing ball than attending to her studies. I tell Joyce all the time, “You did a good job.”

It is my contention that the mothers get together in the playground with the baby carriages and strollers to plot and scheme and conspire. Daddies do not have a clue. God bless mothers! Because Joyce told me that, after talking to these other women about New York’s educational opportunities, she had decided that we ought to send our children to private school. I said, “You must be out of your mind. There’s a brand-new school across the street at 135th and Fifth, and it’s free!”

But she was insistent and eventually convinced me that she’d made the right decision. Education is the foundation of civilization, and in order to progress satisfactorily all children need to be given full opportunity to develop their minds. In the early 1960s in New York City, we felt that the best education available to our children was in private school. The tuition was estimable, and we had very little money, but through grants-in-aid and some personal sacrifices—Joyce and I rarely exchanged gifts or dined out or indulged in holiday travel—we were able to send Davey and Donna to the Ethical Culture and Fieldston Schools all the way through high school.

Joyce and I felt it was important to expose our children to life outside Harlem as well as in it. At Ethical Culture and Fieldston, they met a group of people whom they might not otherwise have encountered. Central Park was their playground, and when they went to museums and on other field trips, they interacted with people from very different backgrounds and cultures than their own. “You know,” I told Davey, “everybody’s not the same as people you see in the neighborhood. The people whom you meet at school are not necessarily of the same background as those in Harlem.” We did not want our children cloistered in one neighborhood with only one culture, and it was important to us that they not develop misconceptions about people with whom they were not familiar. Davey came home one day and told me, “The Jewish kids don’t celebrate the holidays that we celebrate.” He kept me informed when he learned about his Asian friends’ unfamiliar history and culture.

“People are different,” I told him. “They’re just different. They’re still people!”

But this was not a Hallmark card education either. Joyce and I were keen on making certain that our children did not become narrow-minded or have prejudices engrained in them at an early age. When Davey or Donna would come home from school and tell us an inappropriate joke they had heard among their classmates—we were extremely pleased, but not at all surprised, that they would share their stories with us—I recall Joyce saying, “That’s not right, and here’s why. You don’t use those kinds of names to talk about other people.”

At the time our children were growing up, I was developing my law practice and becoming increasingly involved in politics. My job was not a conventional nine-to-five one, and often my time was limited by my professional responsibilities. Joyce was juggling part-time work as a bookkeeper in her father’s liquor store with being a homemaker and a full-time mother. Nevertheless, I tried to make it clear to our children that they could always find me. In the summer we would occasionally visit my in-laws’ summer home in Belmar, New Jersey, which is south of Asbury Park, by driving down the shore early Saturday morning and spending the weekend there. We would swim and have lunch, and I would read the paper, and we would all relax together. Our talks in the car on the way down and back were precious. Sometimes, because of my schedule, the family would have to travel without me, and I would join them late at night or early the next morning; Davey now informs me that the fact that I made the time to get away made a powerful impression on him. I was a husband, a father, and a man with a career, and I tried to make those occasions special.

...

My baby sister, Joyce, is three years younger than I. We called her Boots, though I don’t recall why. She was smart and a lot of fun. She was my kid sister and also went to Howard University. On campus I didn’t exactly try to avoid her, but whenever they told me, “Your sister’s looking for you,” I knew she wanted money. Joyce stayed in Trenton and became a teacher in the school system. She has four great kids, three daughters and a son. One day she went to school and developed a headache so severe that she had to be driven home. It turned out that she had a brain aneurysm; she ended up in the hospital, partially paralyzed on one side. In middle age, Joyce had to relearn how to talk—“That’s a window, that’s a door”—and she remains affected to this day. Her son, a psychologist separated from his wife, is now living with her, which is a great benefit. But she’s a good kid and a tough cookie, and I love her.