Politics & Power Quote by David Dinkins

A sentence like this is doing coalition politics in miniature: it plants David Dinkins inside a specific alliance and dares the listener to treat it as deliberate rather than anomalous. In 1975, “blacks” and “Support of Israel” in the same breath wasn’t a neutral pairing; it was a choice with consequences, especially as Black political energy was splintering between pragmatic electoral power, internationalist solidarity with decolonization movements, and the rising influence of outspoken critics of Israel in some activist circles. Dinkins isn’t just recalling a committee. He’s documenting a fork in the road.

The phrasing “among a group of blacks” matters. It resists the lazy idea that Black politics moves as a single bloc, and it signals that the coalition had to be constructed against headwinds. “Formed” is the operative verb: this wasn’t passive sympathy, it was institution-building, the kind of civic scaffolding that turns sentiment into meetings, letters, fundraising, introductions. Dinkins is presenting himself as a builder of bridges that would later become invaluable in New York’s combustible mix of Black and Jewish constituencies.

Subtext: credibility. For Jewish audiences, it’s a bona fide stamp of long-term commitment, not election-season pandering. For Black audiences, it’s a claim to independence from ideological fashion. For everyone, it’s a reminder that the “natural” alliances we assume today were, in fact, negotiated into existence by politicians willing to take heat in exchange for leverage, trust, and a seat at more than one table.