By SAM ROBERTS
David A Paterson was the great hope of Harlem’s Gang of Four. He was the instrument by which an extraordinary political quartet nurtured since professional infancy by the legendary Democratic leader J. Raymond Jones would impart their legacy to a younger generation of New York politicians.
That hope died with a thud on Friday.
David Paterson’s fall personifies something more than the end of a decades-old Democratic dynasty. It signifies the passing of the Old Guard in black politics in New York and other cities. Neighborhoods have changed. Black voters have dispersed. And politics has evolved into a less racial, if not quite a post-racial, period.
Just a week ago, as McFadden & Whitehead’s “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now” blared from loudspeakers, Mr. Paterson formally declared his candidacy for a full four-year term as governor, an office he ascended to by a fluke in 2008. But, on Friday, with his campaign hobbled by a meager war chest and historically low popularity ratings, he announced that he was giving up the race. What finally drove him from the campaign were allegations reported in The New York Times that he and his State Police intervened in a domestic-abuse case involving one of his top aides.
Those allegations, by coincidence, were reported on the same day that a Congressional ethics committee admonished one of Mr. Paterson’s mentors, Representative Charles B. Rangel, the only member of the Gang of Four still in office, for accepting corporate-sponsored trips to the Caribbean. Still pending are the ethics panel’s verdict on more serious questions involving his fund-raising, failure to pay federal taxes on rental income from a Dominican villa and his use of four rent-stabilized apartments provided by a Manhattan real estate developer.
Today’s Harlem is a very different place from the neighborhood that became a magnet for rural blacks from the South and spawned the Gang of Four: Mr. Paterson’s father, Basil, who was a deputy mayor, New York secretary of state, and a trailblazing Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor in 1970; David N. Dinkins, who became Manhattan borough president and the city’s first black mayor; Percy E. Sutton, the former Manhattan borough president, who died in December at age 89; and Mr. Rangel.
Blacks now account for only 3 in 10 residents of Mr. Rangel’s congressional district. In greater Harlem, running river to river, and from East 96th Street and West 106th Street to West 155th Street, blacks no longer make up a majority of the population — a shift that occurred a decade ago after uptown blacks joined a growing contingent of Caribbean immigrants in better neighborhoods of Brooklyn and Queens. Even in central Harlem, their population has shrunk to the lowest since the 1920s — just after J. Raymond Jones arrived in the nation’s black cultural capital from St. Thomas.
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