Amid all the flowery tributes to New York’s cheerleading mayor is an area of Ed Koch’s legacy that still remains tarnished.
If he had asked, “How’m I doin’?” on the subject of race relations, the answer would have been: “Not so good.”
It was under his 12-year watch that some of the city’s most disturbing racial conflicts took place, and some of the wounds have still not healed.
Koch was in City Hall in 1984 when a knife-wielding, black grandmother named Eleanor Bumpurs was gunned down by cops in her apartment.
He was running the city in 1986 when white youths from Howard Beach chased a black man to his death on the Belt Parkway.
And he was running for re-election in 1989 when a black teen named Yusuf Hawkins was shot to death in a racial confrontation in Bensonhurst.
Critics said Koch’s divisive leadership did nothing to improve relations between blacks and whites.
“That hurt and divided the city a lot,” said lawyer Norman Siegel, former director of the New York Civil Liberties Union.
He also outraged supporters of the Rev. Jesse Jackson before the New York presidential primary in 1988 when he said Jews who voted for him would have be “crazy.”
Jackson had infuriated Koch and many Jews when in 1984 he referred to New York as “Hymietown.”
But yesterday Jackson looked past the insult.
Koch’s “leadership and legacy will never be forgotten in New York City, New York state or our nation,” he said.