Giuliani's Ties to Black New York Troubled
GOP Front-Runner's Handling of Crime and Relations With Leaders Questioned

By Perry Bacon Jr.
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 10, 2007

NEW YORK -- Once the cultural capital of black America, Harlem had reached the bottom of decades of decline by the late 1980s, with streets full of abandoned houses, virtually an open-air crack cocaine market and thousands of violent crimes each year. It took the collaboration of people including Rudolph W. Giuliani, the mayor of New York from 1994 to 2001, and Karen Phillips, who ran the development arm of a historic black church, to turn it around.

Under policies advanced by the Giuliani administration and carried out by Phillips and other activists dedicated to saving the neighborhood, real estate and retail boomed and crime plunged. It was dubbed the second Harlem Renaissance, and Giuliani seemed quite proud of his achievements there, telling the New York Daily News in December 2000 that "the reality is that my administration has done more for Harlem than any administration in the last 50 years."

Phillips, however, now finds nothing positive to say about Giuliani. Besides being "vindictive," his approach was "you're either with me or you're my enemy," Phillips, a member of New York's city planning commission, said in a recent interview. "I can't see him as president. I would not like to see his hand on the red phone."

As Giuliani seeks the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, he cites his achievements in turning around New York as one of the main reasons he should be elected, specifically highlighting a dramatic reduction in crime.

But Giuliani's mayoral tenure was also marked by an almost toxic relationship with African Americans in the city, a relationship that shows no sign of healing 5 1/2 years after Giuliani left Gracie Mansion. When he won a second term in 1997 with more than 55 percent of the vote, he received just 20 percent of the black vote.

That disaffection was often a source of frustration for Giuliani. Asked about the strains in 1997, he replied: "They are alive -- how 'bout we start with that. You can't help people more directly than to save lives."

More recently, at a presidential debate last month, he said "I tried very, very hard to treat everyone in New York City the same," and again cited the city's reduction in crime when he was mayor.

Few GOP primary voters are African American, so any lingering tension is unlikely to have any direct effect on his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. But Giuliani's reputation as a polarizing force in his home town could undermine his image as a unifying figure in American politics -- an image that came from his role in calming New Yorkers after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

"The mayor deserves credit and recognition for many of the positive developments of this community," said Lloyd Williams, who runs the Greater Harlem Chamber of Commerce. But "he had a terrible reputation with black elected officials. It's a unique set of circumstances."

Phillips noted that "we had a very good working relationship" with then-New York Gov. George E. Pataki, a Republican, and she served on the transition team of Giuliani's successor, Michael R. Bloomberg, another Republican, in 2001.

Her dissatisfaction with Giuliani, she said, was almost entirely based on instances in which she was actually pursuing goals that were in line with his priorities, and in which his aggressive approach prompted a backlash.

Early in his first term as mayor, Giuliani wanted to spur commercial development in low-income areas such as Harlem, where the city owned many abandoned buildings. Phillips had been recruited by the Rev. Calvin Butts, pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church, one of Harlem's most venerable congregations, to work on community development issues, and she was interested in obtaining land from the city to build a Pathmark grocery store in East Harlem.

But East Harlem has a strong coalition of Latino small-business owners, some of whom had backed Giuliani in his 1993 race, and they worried about the Pathmark destroying their businesses. Giuliani aides set up a meeting with Phillips and Paul Grogan, then head of the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, a nonprofit group that works on community development projects around the country. At the meeting, Giuliani's head of economic development, Clay Lifflander, insisted that Phillips agree to jointly managing the property with a Latino firm.

Lifflander, Phillips recalled, told her that he had two news releases on his desk, one announcing a deal had been reached, the other saying the city could not reach an agreement. Giuliani's office would issue one of these by the end of the day, no matter what. In a recent interview, Lifflander defended these tactics, saying that the city needed to move urgently on the deal.

Phillips consulted with Butts, and they agreed that, although the city's method angered them, they would accept the deal. But Butts wanted to talk to Giuliani personally.

The mayor declined the offer. "We were working with mayors all over the country. There was not another mayor in the country who would have refused to talk to one of the most prominent black clergy," Grogan said.

Two years later, Phillips organized a groundbreaking for the Pathmark and was told by Giuliani aides that Ruth Messinger, the Manhattan borough president and a candidate for mayor against Giuliani, must be disinvited from the event. Messinger had been closely involved in getting Harlem the supermarket. "We were all just seething," Phillips said.

To be sure, Giuliani was never destined to have a perfect relationship with the black community in New York. He ran two bitter campaigns against David N. Dinkins, the city's first black mayor, losing the first time before defeating the Harlem political veteran in 1993.

Once gaining office, Giuliani tried to build relationships with influential blacks and Latinos. Three days after he was elected, Giuliani made a highly publicized trip to Harlem, where he met with Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.), one of Dinkins's closest allies. Giuliani named Richard D. Parsons, one of the city's most prominent black Republicans, to head his transition team. And in the first few months of his tenure in 1994, Giuliani brought a series of black leaders to his office, including Butts and Williams.

But Giuliani often inflamed relationships with these new allies. In 1996, his administration demanded that Time Warner Cable add Fox News Channel to its New York lineup, infuriating Parsons, then the company's president. Parsons eventually resigned from a mayoral board because of his frustration with Giuliani.

For other black leaders, it was the mayor's unstinting support of police policies that caused friction. African Americans felt specifically targeted by some policies, such as the New York City Police Department's aggressive stop-and-frisk procedures, in which officers, in search of guns and drugs, patted down people whom they viewed as suspicious.

The lingering resentment burst into full-throated protests all over the city in 1999, when officers fired 41 shots at an unarmed man named Amadou Diallo, a 22-year-old Guinean immigrant.

Floyd Flake, a former Democratic congressman who is pastor of a large black church in Queens and who backed Giuliani in 1997, said he sat down with the mayor "to try to explain to him, as a black father, every African American father sees his son in Diallo. He did not understand."

Rudy Washington, an African American who served as a deputy mayor for community relations under Giuliani, defended his former boss's actions in the Diallo case, saying Giuliani could not simply attack the police without knowing the facts. "People wanted him to do a condemnation on the spot, and that's not prudent," Washington said.

A year later, when an unarmed security guard named Patrick Dorismond was shot to death by a undercover officer posing as a drug buyer, Giuliani brought out details of Dorismond's juvenile crime record and declared that the dead man was no "altar boy." Critics accused the mayor of demonizing Dorismond.

The four officers in the Diallo case were acquitted of criminal charges. A grand jury decided not to indict the officer who shot Dorismond.

Giuliani's aides say that whatever he might have done with regard to specific police shootings, the revivals in many areas of New York, including Harlem, could have not have happened without his focus on reducing crime. "The necessary thing for economic development is to reduce crime," said John Dyson, a Democrat who served as a deputy mayor for finance and economic development under Giuliani.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Giuliani's poll numbers, which had dropped after his messy divorce from Donna Hanover and the Diallo shooting, surged upward. But blacks remained largely unhappy with his tenure.

Giuliani "paints himself as the savior" of New York, Phillips said, "but he was brutal in terms of how he dealt with this. That kind of government was not productive."

Giuliani countered that it was the results that mattered. Asked in 2000 about the fact that he did not meet very often with black and Latino leaders in New York, he said: "If I had spent my time engaged in that dialogue, the changes that you saw take place would have not have taken place. Because what happens when you engage in that dialogue is you compromise."