Fordham University Press has published James J. Barney’s A Fragile Alliance: David Dinkins, Coalition Politics, and the Struggle to Govern a City in Crisis.

The book offers a major reassessment of David Dinkins’s rise to power in 1989 and his mayoralty from 1990 to 1993. Drawing on newly available archival sources, Barney examines the diverse, multiracial coalition that elected New York City’s first African American mayor and the pressures that ultimately fractured it.

Dinkins entered office promising to govern New York as a “gorgeous mosaic,” but his administration faced an extraordinary convergence of challenges, including the crack epidemic, rising crime, economic recession, racial conflict, AIDS activism, and an increasingly powerful conservative backlash. By examining these crises and the political responses to them, A Fragile Alliance considers both the possibilities and limitations of coalition politics in a diverse democracy.

Although centered on New York City, the book speaks to broader questions in American political history: How can electoral coalitions be transformed into durable governing alliances? How should political leaders reconcile competing demands involving race, class, identity, and public policy? What can the Dinkins years teach us about governing divided communities today?

The book was published by Fordham University Press’s Empire State Editions in September 2026.