John Lindsay

John Lindsay was mayor of New York for eight years that began with a transit strike and ended with the city close to bankruptcy, and he is remembered for walking through Harlem the night Martin Luther King was killed. He was a liberal Republican congressman from Manhattan's silk stocking district, tall and telegenic, and was elected mayor in 1965 against the machine. The Transport Workers Union struck on his first day and shut the subway for twelve days; strikes by teachers, sanitation workers and others followed through his terms, and he lost most of them. He created the Human Rights Commission and a civilian review board for the police, which the police union put to referendum and defeated in 1966. He served on the Kerner Commission and pushed it toward its finding that white racism was the cause of the disorders. In April 1968, while other cities burned, he went into Harlem on foot to talk to people, and New York did not riot on the scale that was expected. The Ocean Hill-Brownsville school decentralisation fight in 1968 set Black parents against a largely Jewish teachers' union and did lasting damage to the coalition he depended on. He lost the Republican primary in 1969 and was re-elected on the Liberal line, switched to the Democrats in 1971, and made a brief presidential run in 1972 that collapsed in Florida. The fiscal crisis that broke in 1975 was built on borrowing done under him. He later hosted a television programme and practised law.

• Lived: 1921 CE – 2000 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: politician