Columbia University's "Dinkinsgate Scandal" Connection--Part 3

After New York City voters decided in the 1993 mayoralty election that David Dinkins did not deserve a second term as New York City’s mayor, the Columbia University administration hired the local Democratic Party politician to be a professor “in the practice of public affairs” at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. And during the last few years Columbia University Professor Dinkins (http://www.sipa.columbia.edu/academics/directory/dd98-fac.html ) has apparently attempted to use his remaining special political influence in New York City politics to help his private employer undemocratically implement its land-grabbing campus expansion plan north of West 125th Street in West Harlem, despite the objections of local community tenant activists. Not surprisingly, when Columbia University Professor Dinkins tried to sell Columbia University’s expansion plan to the 700 community residents who attended the local community board’s hearings in August 2007, the former New York City mayor was booed, hissed and shouted down by West Harlem residents and their Columbia and Barnard student supporters.

Following, is another section of an article on “The Dinkinsgate Scandal” which first appeared in the August/September 1991 issue of the Lower East Side newspaper, Shadow:

Former Inner City Broadcasting Corporation Director David Dinkins was born in Trenton, New Jersey in 1927 and is the son of a prosperous Trenton realtor named William Dinkins. While living in a predominantly African-American middle-class neighborhood in Trenton in the early 1940s, Dinkins attended the predominantly white Trenton high school—which refused to allow its African-American students to use the Trenton High School swimming pool.

Because Dinkins didn’t graduate from Trenton High School until June 1945, he didn’t see too much World War II combat action. But after being drafted into the U.S. Army and then being transferred to the U.S. Marine Corps, Dinkins spent much of his July 1945 to August 1946 military service at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, where he worked much of the time as the Colonel’s chauffeur.

After leaving the Marines in August 1946, Dinkins enrolled at Howard University in Washington, D.C., received his degree in mathematics in 1950 and was awarded a Rutgers University mathematics fellowship. Yet, despite being a college math mayor, Dinkins has sometimes blamed his accountants whenever mistakes are discovered on income tax or financial disclosure forms which he has filed or failed to file during his years in public life.

After dropping out of Rutgers in the early 1950s, Dinkins sold insurance for a Red Bank, New Jersey firm for a while before coming to New York City to live at the age of 26 and enrolling in Brooklyn Law School in 1953.

On August 30, 1953, Dinkins married the daughter of Harlem State Assemblyman Daniel Burrows, Joyce Burrows (who held a state government patronage post in New York between 1978 and 1989). Assemblyman Burrows introduced his son-in-law to Harlem clubhouse politics and gave him a job in the Burrows family liquor store while Dinkins studied law at Brooklyn Law School. After marrying into the Burrows political family, Dinkins also “ran errands for local politicians,” according to the 1990 Current Biography Yearbook.

According to Who’s Who In America, Who’s Who In Black America, the 1990 Current Biography Yearbook and the Martindale-Hubble Directory of Lawyers, Dinkins received his law degree from Brooklyn Law School in 1956, at the age of 29. Reached by telephone, a Brooklyn Law School alumni office spokesperson also stated in 1991 that Dinkins received his law degree from the school in 1956.

Yet, in the book The Harlem Fox: J. Raymond Jones and Tammany, 1920-1970, J. Raymond Jones noted that “Dinkins, a 1950 graduate of Howard University, obtained his law degree from Brooklyn Law School in 1965, some fifteen years after graduating from college,” at the age of 38.

Asked to comment on the discrepancy between the claimed 1956 law school graduation date and the passage in the J. Raymond Jones biography that “Dinkins…obtained his law degree from Brooklyn Law School in 1965,” a spokesperson in then-Mayor Dinkins’ press office replied, in a 1991 phone interview, that “The Mayor’s biography gives the 1956 date as his graduation date.”

Next: Columbia University’s “Dinkinsgate Scandal” Connection—Part 4

Columbia University's "Dinkinsgate Scandal" Connection--Part 2

After New York City voters decided in the 1993 mayoralty election that David Dinkins did not deserve a second term as New York City’s mayor, the Columbia University administration hired the local Democratic Party politician to be a professor “in the practice of public affairs” at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. And during the last few years Columbia University Professor Dinkins (http://www.sipa.columbia.edu/academics/directory/dd98-fac.html ) has apparently attempted to use his remaining special political influence in New York City politics to help his private employer undemocratically implement its land-grabbing campus expansion plan north of West 125th Street in West Harlem, despite the objections of local community tenant activists. Not surprisingly, when Columbia University Professor Dinkins tried to sell Columbia University’s expansion plan to the 700 community residents who attended the local community board’s hearings in August 2007, the former New York City mayor was booed, hissed and shouted down by West Harlem residents and their Columbia and Barnard student supporters.

Following, is a section of an article that I wrote on “The Dinkinsgate Scandal” which first appeared in the August/September 1991 issue of the Lower East Side newspaper, Shadow:

Exhibit A: “Dinkins, a 1950 graduate of Howard University, obtained this law degree from Brooklyn Law School in 1965, some fifteen years after graduating from college.”…J. Raymond Jones in The Harlem Fox: J. Raymond Jones and Tammany, 1920-1970

Exhibit B: “Mr. Dinkins testified that he sold the stock to his son in late 1985, and that his son paid for the stock by promising to pay him $58,000, plus interest by January 1991.”—page 8 of the Report of the Special Deputy Commissioner Concerning The Transfer of Inner City Broadcasting Stock By David N. Dinkins on January 10, 1991

Exhibit C: “Dinkins said that before taking office, he transferred his stock in the company, at no charge, to his 32-year-old son to avoid any conflict of interest”—Paul Moses in his September 26, 1986 Newsday article, “Dinkins’ Cable Link: Lists Stock On City Form.”

Exhibit D: “The financial disclosure report for 1985 was completed by Mr. Dinkins in 1986, and the report for 1986 was completed by Mr. Dinkins in 1987. At no time did Mr. Dinkins disclose on the financial disclosure reports that his son owed him any money.”—page 21 of the Report of the Special Deputy Commissioner Concerning the Transfer of Inner City Broadcasting Corporation Stock By David N. Dinkins.

Next: Columbia University’s “Dinkinsgate Scandal” Connection—Part 3

Columbia University's "Dinkinsgate Scandal" Connection--Part 1

After New York City voters decided in the 1993 mayoralty election that David Dinkins did not deserve a second term as New York City’s mayor, the Columbia University administration hired the local Democratic Party politician to be a professor “in the practice of public affairs” at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. And during the last few years Columbia University Professor Dinkins (http://www.sipa.columbia.edu/academics/directory/dd98-fac.html ) has apparently attempted to use his remaining special political influence in New York City politics to help his private employer undemocratically implement its land-grabbing campus expansion plan north of West 125th Street in West Harlem, despite the objections of local community tenant activists. Not surprisingly, when Columbia University Professor Dinkins tried to sell Columbia University’s expansion plan to the 700 community residents who attended the local community board’s hearings in August 2007, the former New York City mayor was booed, hissed and shouted down by West Harlem residents and their Columbia and Barnard student supporters.

In addition, the Columbia University Executive Vice-President who recently demanded that a representative of the local community board be excluded from a negotiating session with student hunger strikers that discussed university expansion policy plans which affects the West Harlem community, former Philadelphia City Planning Commission Executive Director and Regional Plan Association board member Maxine Griffith ( http://www.columbia.edu/cu/gca/vp-staff/vp-list.html#griffith ) , was previously appointed by Dinkins to sit on the New York City Planning Commission when Columbia Professor Dinkins was New York City’s Mayor.

Coincidentally, although Columbia University Professor Dinkins promised to provide homes for homeless families when he campaigned for mayor in 1989, the Dinkins administration failed to provide enough homes for the homeless during the early 1990s. As the publication of the Metropolitan Council On Housing, Tenant (5/93) noted in the early 1990s:

“Dinkins’ record on the homeless is` long on rhetoric and short on achievement,’ says Steve Banks, coordinator of the Legal Aid Society’s Homeless Family Rights Project. There are more and more homeless instead of fewer, with the administration equally unable to stem the tide of recession-rooted evictions or help those who find themselves without a home. The number of homeless families in the city’s shelter system has nearly doubled from 3,200 in July 1990 to a record 5,600 in January of this year [1993].”

(Downtown 6/9/93)

Next: Columbia University’s “Dinkinsgate Scandal” Connection—Part 2

`High-Technology Homeless'

They got this high-technology to send shuttles to the moon
They got this high-technology to blow up this world in two
They got this high-technology to produce more plastic food
And they got the high-technology homeless, too.

They got this high-technology to solve math equations quick
They got this high-technology to help keep Bill Gates rich
They got this high-technology to monitor your every move
And they got the high-technology homeless, too.

They got this high-technology to automate the winds of war
They got this high-technology to make laid-off workers poor
They got this high-technology to solve all problems complex
And also they got the high-technology homeless.

They got this high-technology to help “keep Amerika great”
They got this high-technology which they want to control our fate
They got this high-technology to cover their brutal greed
And they got the high-technology homeless in the streets.

The High-Technology Homeless protest folk song was written during the Reagan Era of the 1980s, when the term “yuppies” acquired a negative connotation, the proponents of high-technology promised us that high-technology would soon create a free market/capitalist/corporate-oriented utopia and the number of homeless people in the United States increased dramatically.

(To listen to High-Technology Homeless, click on the following link:

http://www.myspace.com/bobafeldman68music )

Next: Columbia University’s “Dinkinsgate Scandal” Connection—Part I

`New York Times' Foreign Editor Worked With CIA

In his 1980 book, Without Fear Or Favor, a former New York Times Moscow correspondent named Harrison Salisbury revealed that the CIA:

“was interested in talking to Times men when they come back from assignment abroad and this, too, was set up…The contact for this, for many, many years was Emanuel Freedman, The Times foreign editor, now dead. The same CIA case officer who had handled these contacts since the early 1950s was still on duty in New York, still handling the same chores in 1979. He had been in the New York office for 30 years, but didn’t want his name mentioned. The CIA New York man got to know many Times correspondents and editors quite well although always on a business basis.”

(Downtown 9/23/92)

Next: High-Technology Homeless lyrics

`New York Times' Collaborated With FBI Historically

During the McCarthy Era, the New York Times apparently collaborated with the FBI. As Compromised Campus by Sigmund Diamond revealed:

“On Oct. 2, 1953, Assistant FBI Director Louis Nichols wrote Clyde Tolson, J. Edgar Hoover’s closest associate, that he had been visited that day by General Julius Ochs Adler, general manager of the Times, to discuss matters of mutual interest. Adler had left a letter, dated Oct. 1, 1953, for Hoover. Nichols wrote:

“`Adler further stated he is very glad to cooperate with the Bureau in any respect in this matter, and while he appreciates the confidential character of the bureau’s work, he wondered if the Bureau could possibly assist him. Adler further advised, of course, he doesn’t want any Communists on the New York Times…’”

Compromised Campus also revealed the following:

“According to a memorandum from the FBI official Alan Belmont to (D.M.) Ladd, June 15, 1953, Assistant SAC Whelan of New York had called that very evening: `(Name deleted) of the New York Times had informally discussed with him a campaign being waged by the Rosenbergs…for clemency or a stay of execution. The informant wondered whether it was not possible for the Government to hit back through the medium of newspapers…He wondered if there was any slant we would want to give the New York Times for this purpose.’”

(Downtown 4/19/95)

Next: New York Times Foreign Editor Worked With CIA

`Times' Coverage of JFK Assassination

Although the Sulzberger Dynasty’s New York Times claims to be interested in printing “all the news that’s fit to print,” the Times has apparently felt that news which contradicts the Warren Commission’s official version of how President Kennedy was actually eliminated in Dallas isn’t fit to print. As Destiny Betrayed by James DiEugenio recalled in the early 1990s:

“A summary of the Times’ early devotion to the Warren Report includes Tom Wicker’s unprofessional failure in November 1963 to follow up diligently on the Parkland doctor’s statement that JFK suffered wounds of entry into his throat; Arthur Krock’s appraisal of the Report as `the definitive history of the tragedy’; Wicker’s unqualified testimonial in the preface for Warren Commission counsel David Belin’s book;…the Times’ shamelessly doctored and biased selection of testimony in The Witnesses…its flagrant headline November 24, 1963, when Oswald was killed by Jack Ruby; the systematic violation of the pledge, taken after Oswald’s death by then-managing editor Turner Catledge, to refer to Oswald as `the alleged assassin’; the removal on Dec. 1, 1970, of searching pro-conspiracy questions in John Leonard’s book review of Jim Garrison’s Heritage of Stone from all but the early bulldog edition…”

(Downtown 5/12/93)

Next: New York Times Collaborated With FBI Historically