The Washington Post, company paper in a town where the main industry is politics, has an epic biographical spread for the man it calls “the most powerful local politician of his generation”.
Self-labeled “area white gentrifier” Dave Weigel, at Bloomberg Politics, has the shorter:
… Anyone who has not lived in D.C. might struggle to understand the resilience of Marion Barry. For twenty-four years, he was an easy punchline—or the set-up to a punchline about Washington. The city’s insistence on re-electing Barry again and again baffled conservatives, who filed “Marion Barry” next to “Detroit” as examples of race-conscious black leadership ruining great cities. “If Marion Barry does somehow manage to ascend to the mayoral seat,” gasped Republican New Jersey Rep. James Saxton in 1994, “we must examine the D.C. governing process and whether it is a truly effective use of taxpayer funds.” After the elections, when Republicans took over Congress, they devolved some of Barry’s power to a financial control board. In 1998, the undermined and disrespected Barry retired.
Six years later, he was running for the job he’d held till he died—council member from Ward 8, a predominantly black area with jobless numbers about twice as high as the rest of the city. In his final years, starting with a raw but empathetic profile by Matt Labash, Barry burnished his reputation as a character and a survivor. He careened from petty scandal to petty scandal, and kept winning elections. He talked starkly about racism and the need for black people to own their own businesses. In 2012, he told constituents that they needed to “do something” about the Asians coming in and opening “dirty shops.” When he apologized for that remark, Barry managed to accidentally shoehorn in an insult to “Polacks.”
This had plenty to do with personality, and charisma—Barry was a natural—but it had just as much to do with work. Barry used the tools of government to expand the black middle class. As an organizer, he’d called the city’s majority-white police force “an alien army of occupation.” As mayor, he created a police force that was majority-black, patrolling a city where affirmative action was changing who got contracts and who worked for the city…
“You shouldn’t blame me for the racism,” Barry told me this summer. “I didn’t create it. I didn’t bring it into being. It was brought into being because of the racist nature of the society. There are people at the Washington Post who don’t like me to point that out. Using race. But race is real. I would encourage them to get where I am and look at it from my perspective. It’s real.”
Mike in NC
Famous for “The bitch set me up!”
Mnemosyne
I kind of liked this song by Good Charlotte, but I felt a little weird once I realized that every single one of the examples they use in the song is of a black man “getting away” with something because he’s “rich and famous.”
(Though no one is specifically named, Barry is one of the examples.)
Mnemosyne
Also, too, I don’t really see much of a difference between, say, Richard J. Daley and Marion Barry, except for one of them getting caught on camera smoking crack rather than letting his cops beat protesters in the street.
Davis X. Machina
If Rob Ford doesn’t go to the funeral, he’s dead to me.
Anne Laurie
@Mike in NC: Yep, although he later apologized to Rasheeda Moore, because it was the FBI that wanted Barry defanged.
(Doubt they wanted him dead, though, because — as Mike demonstrates — a “discredited recidivist” Barry was more useful for their purposes than a potential martyr would’ve been.)
ETA: Not saying Marion Barry was anywhere near perfect. But bitch set me up! doesn’t define the man any more than what about Monica Lewinsky! defines Bill Clinton.
Poopyman
@Mnemosyne: Daley walked into a smoothly running machine on Day One of his mayorship. Barry pretty much had to build his from the ground up.
skerry
Politico chosen to remember Mayor Barry by having an article about the time he was busted in 1990 for crack and a slideshow of poor behavior from 1990 forward. Nothing about his work or accomplishments.
I look forward to the article about George W Bush’s DUI following his death.
MattF
Did you know that there’s a kind of blackberry called a Marionberry? I am not making this up:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marionberry
As for Marion Barry, the failures of his various successors as Mayor of DC makes him look rather good in retrospect.
Mike G
No dumber than Repukes re-electing Bush/Cheney in 2004, and with a much smaller negative impact on the world.
rikyrah
Marion Barry was on his way to a PhD in chemistry, when political involvement got him. He had a masters in Organic Chem…Organic Chem..
Before Barry, DC politics was truly a plantation. Barry changed that.
Of course, they hated him.
If you are a so-called Christian, then you must believe in the story of redemption. He rose, he fell, he got back up.
And, along the way, Barry helped a lot of people that nobody had given a shyt about before.
So, of course, they hated him.
RIP, Mr. Barry.
Tommy
l lived for many years in DC. On Capital Hill near Union Station. It wasn’t that strange a famous person might belly up to the bar next to you. It was kind of known of these locals bars you don’t say anything when this happens. Let them have a beer and don’t bother them. When Marion Barry sat down next to me I couldn’t let that pass. Maybe one of the most engaging conversations I’ve ever had. I know why he got elected again and again.
Marc
@Mnemosyne:
That’s easy. Harry Jaffe and Tom Sherwood actually make this exact comparison in their book Dream City: Race, Power, and the Decline of Washington, DC. Here’s what they had to say about it:
Pages upon pages of examples follow.
Even the positive achievements in Weigel’s obituary don’t look so positive on closer examination. That majority-black police force Barry put together was underequipped, poorly led, and staffed with hastily trained, unvetted officers who made the streets more dangerous. Barry’s cronies took over the department just as the crack epidemic was hitting the city, and they were completely unprepared to deal with it. The rising crime rates held DC back for nearly twenty years and gave it a “murder capital” reputation that dogs it (wrongly) to this day.
It will be tempting, since Barry appeared to have all the right enemies, to take part in the hagiography that will inevitably follow his death, to reduce his crimes to “The bitch set him up.” Don’t make that mistake. Long before he was a national punchline, he was a terrible, terrible mayor.
eemom
@Anne Laurie:
That is true. Another complicated guy. He was mayor in the ancient days when I lived in deecee.
Still, it’s a great line.
Omnes Omnibus
@rikyrah: @Marc: Interesting to see the divergent views here. I never lived or around DC so I have little personal knowledge either way.
brent
@Marc:
Agreed. I grew up in Marion Barry’s DC. I even introduced him at my 6th Grade graduation. The guy certainly had his moments but was corrupt in ways that was obvious even to an 11 year old. The whole “Bitch set me up” bit was only a symptom of it.
Corner Stone
@Tommy:
Did he have views or positions about people that we just wouldn’t believe?
Poopyman
@Omnes Omnibus: As far as I can see and remember in my 37 years in the MD suburbs, they’re both right.
Corner Stone
@brent:
Firstly, congrats on graduating from the 6th grade. Otherwise, how obvious was his corruption that an 11 year old would have understood it?
Tommy
@Marc: Nobody I know, and I lived there, would say Marion Barry was a good mayor. Nobody. But, people have to understand the situation he worked under. I was the only white dude on my block in NE, yet later it became a diverse neighborhood. The people I worked with in Tyson Corner were scared to come to my house. But things did get better. Much better. It started with Marion Barry.
Corner Stone
@Omnes Omnibus:
You would not make it an hour there. I mean, you just would not.
Corner Stone
@Tommy:
?
Mnemosyne
@Marc:
I’m assuming you’ve heard about the links between lead and the crime rate, and how removing lead may have contributed to the sudden sharp decline in crime.
The major metropolitan area that had a huge problem with lead in its water well into the 2000s? Washington DC.
Tommy
@Corner Stone: Nope. This was like 1999. We talked about statehood for DC. The issues of the day. He was just engaging and made me want to vote for him, which I had not in the past.
Belafon
Yep, well, Bush only makes sense when you think in terms of whites voting based on their own skin color no matter what.
Woodrowfan
he was a crook, but did a hell of a lot for the city. Not all of it was good (business-as-usual contracts to his buddies). But he was the first mayor to pay attention to the poor in Ward 8.
The thing I remember about him personally was seeing him illegally parking his Jaguar blocking the street on Capitol Hill, knowing that with his city official placard in his window he wouldn’t get a ticket. This was when he turned out he’d been cheating on his taxes for year and he was pleading poverty.
Violet
From the article:
Good for him. Like a lot of leaders he was a complicated person. Plenty of good he did balanced by the bad stuff he’s notorious for.
Marc
@Mnemosyne: Our crime rates started dropping at the same time everybody else’s did, in the mid-1990s; now it’s at fifty-year lows. That article you cited was written well into the city’s recovery. Homicide rates in 2010 were around a quarter of what they were in 1990; now they’re closer to 20%.
I’m a big believer in the lead removal theory of crime reduction, but that doesn’t account for why DC’s crime rates were so much higher than other cities at the time. Local conditions matter, too.
burnspbesq
When I worked for the Feds in the 1990s, I had a colleague who did her undergrad work at Howard. I heard some stories about Barry and his entourage crashing Howard sorority events that we so outlandish that I didn’t know whether to believe them.
Deeply flawed man, to be sure. On balance, good or bad? Might be too close to call.
Marc
@Tommy: I think of the Anthony Williams years as marking the city’s turnaround, particularly in terms of reversing white flight and middle class flight (though Barry did lay some of the groundwork for that in his final term as mayor, particularly the redevelopment around Gallery Place). I promise you, the city got a lot worse in Barry’s first three terms (1978-90) before it got better.
By the way, I don’t deny all the good he did for people around the city; he was a complicated and vexing figure. But he also presided over the city’s precipitous decline in the 1980s and early 90s, and an honest reckoning has to take that into account.
Also, the man’s personal problems are beyond dispute. Again, I’m not talking about the punchlines. If you’re seriously going to cite all the women he appointed to leadership positions as proof of his virtue, you also need to acknowledge all the women who accused him of sexual harrassment or outright assault. No amount of “complexity” can excuse that.
Omnes Omnibus
@Corner Stone: There apparently are a lot of places like that.
Another Holocene Human
Marion Barry? No love, me.
OT: Finally found a good article on the Kim Kardashian Paper Magazine controversy that really sums up all the key issues well (and that I happen to agree with whole-heartedly, so there’s that):
http://thegrio.com/2014/11/12/kim-kardashian-butt/
Of course I should have seen this weeks ago but I stopped trying to read The Grio at work because it wants to load a million scripts. Also, becaseu the comments were vile but it looks like they’ve curtailed them a lot, which is a good thing. Thinking of installing Ghostery at work. Don’t think IT will have a cow. It’s 2014. (I got in trouble at work for using Mozilla back in the bad old IE/Win2K days when Exploder was a digital virus-attractor. I, uh, did not tell them about using Opera. Heh heh.)
eemom
@Corner Stone:
Yes he would, because I would look after him.
You, not so much.
NotMax
@Another Holocene Human
In its day, Netscape 4.0 rocked.
ET
I have lived in DC since 1994 and have spent a few year watching the local politics but am no expert but people love to point to Hiz Honor as an example of all that is wrong with the city and he wasn’t a good mayor but most don’t know anything about the city beyond the fools on the Hill. For one reason or another – mostly the rules at the federal LEVEL-DC has never been run well. The thing is, before Barry and Mayor Washington the city was run by and for whites and was just as corrupt in its own way.
Corner Stone
@eemom: eemom would become oomom?
I shutter at the horrible connotations involved.
Another Holocene Human
@Marc:
I feel like the “decline” was about white flight and that happened decades earlier. Barry was corrupt, he was a showman, he was one of those hollow men narcissists in it for himself, said one thing for the rubes and did another. Who cares about the crack thing. Well, a lot of people were all indignant, he’s a felon! Hur hur. But if the stuff he had done with the schools was criminal, why was he never prosecuted for that? Was it all legal corruption? Or did the DoJ just not give a fuck about schools for Black children?
DC is always scraping by with insufficient funds because of the way the Constitution is written and because of institutional barriers. These barriers were less significant before cars and suburbs and stuff because legislators had to live in the District when Congress was in session. Now they don’t … and don’t … so they don’t give a fuck. MD and VA collect income taxes earned in DC. Sure, that’s fair.
GWB admin was the worst, just to show they could one-up Newticles in their abuse of DC. GWB DEMANDED tons of security for his inaugural and then stuck the District with the bill. And then CONgress hemmed and hawed about making it good. Since EHN doesn’t have a vote there is NO leverage for the District.
Washington DC is a complete joke and embarrassment as a national capital although it does inspire corrupt regimes like when the oligarchs in Brazil built Brasilia. Still, DC is looking much, much better on a physical level due to some very rapid, late stage gentrification and presumably a decent increase in property tax income. Haven’t heard much lately about making the suburbs part of MD.
When I was in MD and VA in the late 1990s I heard and saw a lot of racist shit from white people especially directed towards DC residents and employees of Washington Metro. Just vile, nasty stuff. The Klan was active in MD. Frankly it was much more openly vile, derogatory, and contemptible than anything I’ve heard in years of living in Crackerville, Florida–from Crackers–except for that bullshit after Trayvon Martin was killed. (Which was scary as fuck.)
In terms of institutional racism there’s no doubt that Florida is way more horrific than Maryland … see death penalty in Florida … but there’s quite some truth to the adage that the DC area represents the very worst of the North and the South.
Belafon
Heard the story about the woman that bought a gun because of the possible unrest in Ferguson, and shot herself in the head: http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/23/us/ferguson-woman-kills-herself/index.html.
NotMax
@Corner Stone
D key on keyboard broken? Or is blocking out light a favorite pastime?
/gentle ribbing
raven
@Belafon: Xin Loi dumbass.
Another Holocene Human
I will add one interesting thing with the Federal gov’t being the number one employer is that there are a lot of Black professionals, much more so in a shithole like Northern Florida where you’ve got the post office, the VA, and uh … the people brave enough to push their way into local law enforcement. Look at state jobs and there’s a lot of segregation, Black men tend to be blue collars (with very low pay). And then private sector, wow, even more so.
So there are institutional differences. But perhaps therefore, more white people either perturbed by the changes in status, or Chesapeake-accented deadenders still pissed that the state parks and public pools were desegregated and shit like that (note: the beaches were still de facto segregated in the mid-1990s–I saw it with my own eyes!!), or transplants from other states–lots of them–who’d never lived even in the ‘burbs of a Chocolate City and it bothered them. A lot. Like the Cheesehead I worked with who I actually got in a screaming match with about DC self-governance. Oh wait, they have Milwaukee and Milwaukee hating is like a Wisc sport. Never mind. And Detroit hating. Woo! It’s a nationwide epidemic of hate!!
Corner Stone
Well, 60 Minutes. Are you going to come right out and state that Republicans are the ones causing our infrastructure to fall to pieces?
Poopyman
@Belafon: If the entry wound is from the left that guy is in a heap of shit.
Another Holocene Human
@ET: Is Barry and Mayor a spoonerism? Never heard that one.
You said it well. I have too much unresolved anger about this issue.
Corner Stone
@Poopyman: Yeah, I’m wondering what the Xin Loi dumbass will have to say when it’s found out her BF killed her.
Poopyman
@Corner Stone: Is this a trick question? ‘Cause I’m guessing the probability’s about 95% for “no”. SATSQ, and all.
Another Holocene Human
@Marc: DC had like 5 police forces, all of them ineffective.
The Congress had a subterranean passageway between the office buildings and the Capitol building, so it was all good.
//
Corner Stone
@Poopyman: It’s going to be “gridlock in Washington”. Ho hum, why can’t they compromise to get shit done?
Another Holocene Human
Do you know this one dude was setting fires–killed a few people too–all over the DC area for fucking … for years, man, for fucking YEARS and they only caught him recently?
Because it wasn’t until he attracted the attention of the NCIS that they even tried to catch this guy? Oops, got cocky.
DC police chronically lacked resources and fucking FBI and ATF were RIGHT THERE and didn’t do SHIT because he was burning down houses in NE or whatever.
Corner Stone
“Politicians in Washington” don’t want to have the political courage to do what’s needed.
/Ray LaHood
Another Holocene Human
@Corner Stone: Everything they say they want to get done is no good anyway. We can only hope that Boehner is so little in control of his right–hard-right coalition that he and McConnell can’t effectively ram the CoC wish list through.
Corner Stone
So, you see this as a bipartisan failure?
Absolutely.
/some douchebag D rep in OR
Corner Stone
High speed rail. That’s the funniest shit I’ve heard in a long time.
Elizabelle
@Belafon:
Darwin award, Ferguson division.
Interesting to see if the story holds. But waving a loaded gun around in a moving car?
raven
@Elizabelle: Oh, she didn’t KNOW it was loaded.
JPL
@Corner Stone: hahahaahha
Elizabelle
@Mike in NC:
Gonna be Marion Barry’s epitaph, formal or not.
Larger than life figure. If he was fictional, you’d think it was exaggeration.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Corner Stone: We’re working on it in CA.
Elizabelle
@raven: Perhaps she had a brief moment of awareness there.
I shall be laughing, loud enough for you to hear at the beach (over the waves) if we have a spell of buttocks, foot and kneecap shootings as Ferguson’s fair citizens learn their way around their firearms.
PS: Are we likely to see the police report on Miss wave the gun around the car’s death before we ever see Michael Brown’s?
Another Holocene Human
@rikyrah: He also from what I gather more or less sold public schools to his developer buddies, and this was in the early 90s.
Sometimes in public life it takes a narcissist, to accomplish what others cannot. To refuse to accept the little indignities. To blaze a trail. To enact a vision. But they leave a personal trail of destruction in their wake … and sometimes the edifice is a sham.*
There are non-narcissists who trailblaze too. Sometimes they don’t live that long.
Barry was your classic scapegrace politician. It was hard not to admire that. He became the avatar for so many who felt that heel on their neck. Because he threw that shit right back at the white community.
He was shit at running a machine, though. Good for him that he was so beloved.
I admire Anthony Williams. A self-effacing, hard working politico and wonk who dutifully dine on shit from all corners for years trying to build a better DC.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/jonetta-rosa-barras-anthony-williams-earned-the-title-of-dcs-mayor-for-life/2014/06/25/0ba90448-fb1e-11e3-b1f4-8e77c632c07b_story.html
DC is enormously prosperous and desirable now and while part of that is just RE pressures from GWB’s massive expansion of the Federal government, a ton of credit belongs to Williams and the City Council as a whole.
*-also, it appears that in classic narcissist fashion, Barry seized the moment to tear down the FIRST freely elected African-American mayor of DC to clear his way to power. Look, I wasn’t born yesterday–I’ve seen this playbook before. Barry’s like one of those backbencher congresscritters favored by the nutroots because they always come out and talk shit about Republicans … but accomplish little to nothing for their constituents … but Barry was in a sense a genius to ride the wave of the very real racism and contempt and to bait it and engage it and convince voters that he was their avatar, their image, and he was providing that psychological need to infuriate and frustrate the powers that be
Gin & Tonic
@Corner Stone: Riddle me this. Why does it work in Europe? Madrid to Barcelona is exactly the distance from LA to Sacramento. The AVE does that run in 2 1/2 hours, probably 15 times a day, and it’s always close to full.
Corner Stone
@Gin & Tonic:
Yeah, but I think you’ve answered your own question here. Spain has like 25%+ unemployment.
mainmati
I am not a DC native but have worked there (and briefly lived there) during the Barry Era and now live in nearby Silver Spring MD. Barry, of course, was his own worst enemy but he fought hard against the worst of the Colonial Congress that long treated the District as a plantation (either the Southern Democrats or the Southern Republicans that replaced them (plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose). American racism doesn’t ever change; it just takes other forms in different places.
Ultimately, while he gave a voice to the poorest of DC, he didn’t do much for the governance of the District. The post-MLK assassination riots destroyed a lot of the economic core of the city and accelerated white flight. That was before his time but he was left with a ruined local economy that wasn’t the federal government. So, Washington had a bizarre 3rd world economy existing along side the national government. His successors have done a better job of building a much more balanced DC with a lot of young working and entrepreneurial people even if it still also depends mostly upon other state commuters. Of course, Anacostia and other poor places remain poor and dangerous as always.
Marc
@Another Holocene Human:
It began in the sixties and continued for decades (also, FWIW, it wasn’t just white flight; it was black middle class flight, too). But Barry presided over the nadir when it bottomed out, and the city didn’t start regaining people until the decade after he left the mayor’s office for good. The crime rate followed more or less the same curve, but inverted.
Also, your doom-and-gloom account of the city’s structural problems overlooks all the things the city has going for it, like a local industry that’s counter-cyclical and gets to write its own budget. Prior to the Republican takeover of congress, that meant locals could usually count on federal jobs always being there, and the city has always attracted (and created) a larger than average number of professionals. Thomas Frank once described DC as a “middle-class paradise.” He meant it as an insult, but he accidentally hit on one of the city’s real virtues–until recently it was a city with a strong middle class but very little in the way of a local aristocracy.
So no, the city is not ungovernable, and it’s actually been governed pretty well in recent memory (the Anthony Williams years). Some people are working awfully hard to absolve Marion Barry of any responsibility over the city he ran into the ground.
Elizabelle
Incidentally, we in the hostile (semi-white) suburbs had no mention whatsoever of Marion Barry’s passing in our Sunday Washington Post. I checked to see if there was a tiny story in the front or Metro section.
No. He died about 1:30 am, after they could not revive him? So I guess WaPost prints then or soon after?
I am curious what his last meal turned out to be. And kind of hoping for his sake the heart attack hit so suddenly that he was not aware he’d just hit his mortal limit.
sharl
The always good Jonetta Rose Barras – who also wrote the June 2014 op-ed Another Holocene Human linked above (#59), posted a remembrance of the former Hizzoner today.
Bokonon
As a former DC resident … I can say that Marion Barry was larger than life (at least until the last decade), and he could be engaging and funny in person. He was a hell of a politician.
But you have to judge the man by his works, and by the affect he had on the city he governed. And he was terrible for the District of Columbia – like a long-term addiction that the city just could not totally shake. Barry nearly took the city down with him. Not once, but several times. And the corrupt, sclerotic, dysfunctional, racially poisoned patronage system he set up was truly awe-inspiring in its awfulness.
True story – a friend of mine went up to Barry in a bar, after he got out of jail for the crack bust. My friend said point blank – “Mister Mayor, what were you thinking? That was a really stupid thing to do!” Barry turned, and laughed, and said “Oh, yeah … I know. That was really stupid. But you have to understand … it wasn’t about the drugs, man! I wasn’t there for the drugs! It was about the sex!”
So that’s it. Yeah, the bitch really did set him up.
sharl
@Bokonon: As I recall, the woman who set him up confirmed that bit of history, saying that she had one hell of a time doing the DA’s bidding – getting him to light the crack pipe – because he was far more interested in getting busy ASAP with the sexytime.
Gene108
@Marc:
Name one major city that was “ready” for the crack epidemic that fucked up a generation in the 1980’s?
Fuck, looking at social indicators between the 1980’s and today – teen pregnancy, crime, etc. – we are fucking light years ahead of where we were then; we’ve gone from record highs in those categories to record lows.
Shit was fucked up in the 1980’s and the Federal government did jack shit about it, as there were major problems that stretched from LA to NYC, where subsequent Federal guidelines and coordination have helped get us where are today, with regards to such things as crime, teen pregnancy, high school graduation rates, and so on.
hamletta
God bless him. My mom worked in the District all through the ’70s and complained constantly about the crappy DC government.
I knew Mr. Barry as “Mayor For Life” as an avid City Paper reader, and I remember waking up in the middle of the night and seeing the crack video.
But he did a lot of good for the city, too. Actor Jeffrey Wright sent out a series of tweets about how he got his first job through Barry’s summer youth employment program.
Steeplejack
@Elizabelle:
The Sunday edition is printed very early (not just the Post, all daily papers). I think I have seen the Sunday Post at the grocery store very late on Saturday night. So I don’t think this is a snub of Barry.
karen
I’ve lived in Montgomery County, MD (a suburb in the DC area) since 1988. I remember the sting for the crack smoking. I remember when Marion Barry was asked about snow removal and his answer was “spring.” I remember how much of a joke he seemed to be in the Beltway media. But the one thing he managed to do was serve Ward 8, which was poor, neglected and African American. That was the reason the Conservamedia hated him.
There’s this illusion that DC is just the touristy area: monuments, White House, Capital Hill, etc. I say it’s an illusion because DC is basically a city state and includes residential areas as well as businesses, think tanks and commercial properties. Let’s not kid ourselves however. If DC wasn’t “Chocolate City” it wouldn’t be used as a political football and would have statehood.
Brett
Mark Kleiman over at Reality-Based Community had a bit of a harsher take on Berry, including this and a bit reiterating Marc’s point about the mismanagement of the transition in the police force:
Chris
@Mnemosyne:
I was just going to say that (the Daley thing). I don’t have enough firsthand experience to judge (most of my life in the DC area was in a Maryland suburb and then on a college campus in NW) the way others here do. But a lot of what I hear of Marion Berry reminds me of the attacks I read in history books against the “urban machine politicians” (the Tammany Hall types) of the old days, who carefully cultivated the immigrant vote (especially, stereotypically, the Irish – later on, Italians, Poles et al as well) and were often from immigrant backgrounds themselves.
Part of the similarities is how much criticism they get is both completely warranted and pretty transparent. Certainly there was plenty of crime and corruption involved in the old machines. Just as certainly, a lot of the criticism of them wasn’t actually aimed at the crime and corruption, so much as general revulsion at watching These People getting ideas above their place – and getting into the kind of crooked games that many of the critics had no problem with when it was kept between whiter and wealthier folks.
lou
I came to DC immediately after Barry left office, so I have no strong feelings about his administration. But I understood how people admired him because of this book, “Voluntary Slavery,” by Jill Nelson. She was a reporter for the Washington Post during Barry’s arrest and trial.
As an aside, I know a lot of white folks think black-run cities are more corrupt. To which I would reply, “Horse manure.” Black corruption grabs all the headlines because it happens in big, populous urban places. As someone who worked as a local reporter covering small (white) towns, they’re just as corrupt. But it’s smaller scale and doesn’t make national news. Example 1. Example 2. Example 3.
Jackie Chiles
I grew up in DC. In the 1970s and 80s under Barry.
In the city. Ward 7 and 8. All black and almost entirely imporverished.
My grandparents came to Washington from South Carolina in the 1940s. Lived in public housing and then were able to buy a home in Ward 7. They worked for the Federal government during World War II and then one day, they along with tens of thousdands of other black people, were told their services were no longer required, because the white veterans were coming home and “needed” those jobs.
If Marion Barry’s rule could be characterized by anything, it was by his desire to make sure that never happened again.
Marion Barry was not complex. He had a very straightforward agenda.
Help the poor blacks like my grandparents who, after being forced to flee the outright terrorism of the deep South, were essentially refugees in their own country.
Through patronage and corruption and kickbacks, Barry did everything in his power to alleviate the distastrous effects of American racism to the swelling ranks on black people who found themselves under his stewardship.
This meant, as people have hastened to point out, lots of red books, shady deals and city governance that SEEMED not to be working, but was in fact working as intended.
The intent? To facilitate black people leave the ranks of the impoverished and enter the middle class.
Barry’s successor, Williams did a much better job of balancing the books and reducing corruption, but without Barry, Washington would have been another large urban center which continued the longstanding traditions of marginalization and exploitation of poor people of color.
And it, like Atlanta under Young, Detroit under another man named Young, and many other places where black politicians had managed to gain purchase in the halls of local government, would likely have burned again, and again, and again.
Against the backdrop of the aftermath of the riots that hollowed out the city’s core and white flight, followed by the crack epidemic which began in 1984.
And let’s be clear, what the riots didn’t destroy, the crack epidemic did.
As “raw” as it may seem, “The Wire” is a very mild characterization of the despair, tragedy, chaos, lawlessness, and misery that crack brought to urban America.
I witnessed it first hand.
No amount of policing and no amount of responsible fiscal management could have prevailed against what could best be characterized as a chilling mixture of factionalized guerilla war for control of the low level drug trade, waged mostly by children AND occupation by a police force with neither the tools, or the training to do anything about it.
Crack was quite simply beyond the scope of any institution to prevent its complete decimation of urban America, and DC’s embodied this absolute truth.
Barry’s mayorship was another casualty of this war, compounded a brace of other factors.
People who shit on his tenure quite frankly, have no idea what they are talking about.