Paul Gibson Jr., New York City’s First Black Deputy Mayor

Paul Gibson Jr., a lawyer and airline executive who in 1974 became New York City’s first black deputy mayor, died on Friday at his home in Jamaica, Queens. He was 86. His family announced the death.

Mr. Gibson was a vice president of American Airlines, one of the highest positions a black had achieved at any airline, when Mayor Abraham D. Beame appointed him deputy mayor.

Mr. Gibson had earlier been general counsel and housing chairman in the state N.A.A.C.P., a board member of the Democratic Club in Jamaica and a social worker in Brooklyn, among other positions. 

Some had criticized Mr. Beame for explicitly making race a job qualification, a view expressed in an editorial in The New York Times, though it recognized what it called Mr. Gibson’s “substantial talents.” But Mr. Dinkins, in a phone interview on Tuesday, said that such racial criteria had been necessary then because no black had ever been named deputy mayor. 

Paul Peyton Gibson Jr. was born in Manhattan on Aug. 5, 1927. His father was a post office supervisor, and his family moved to the Bushwick section of Brooklyn when he was 8. He graduated from Boys High School in Brooklyn and entered the City College of New York. In 1946, he was drafted into the Army and assigned to a unit of the Army Air Forces in the Philippines.

City College, the public Harvard.