Dream City
Jaffe, Harry S. & Sherwood, Tom
H e philandered, gladhanded, and backpedaled. He wore leopard print dashikis to Mau-Mau, three-piece suits to pow-wow. Crack cocaine was his smoke of choice, but at least one mistress maintained...
...money he's the one they mean...
...He ended up a few credits shy of a doctorate, but made his way north to Washington, where a firmly established light-skinned black elite had no use for jacket-and-tie sit-ins or the populist rantings of a coal-dark agitator...
...Even so, services declined and some disappeared altogether...
...One of the mayor's girlfriends was already in the can, and his first wife went down a year later...
...in the end Barry could not rein in his voracious appetites—for women, for booze, and eventually for cocaine...
...She has allowed the decrepit public-housing system to deteriorate further as the worst in the nation—this alone, no small feat...
...The popular press has accustomed us . to believing that racism is what white people do to blacks, and many readers of this worthwhile book are not apt to know much about the mutual resentments between the aristocratic "high-yellow" elite who thought of Barry and his ilk as"cotton pickin' niggers...
...Infant mortality rates far exceeded that of many Third World nations, ambulances routinely got lost or showed up too late, and the child-support collection agency became the only one of its kind in the nation—it repeatedly spent more money than it brought in...
...Jaffe and Sherwood note that Barry's populist rise was largely on the wings of a revolt against the light-skinned black elite by the dark-skinned lower class, but they are too timid in outlining the nature of the conflict between the groups...
...His absurd mismanagement and venal criminality has given way to the illusion that he has given his people a seat at the table...
...Eventually he was sentenced to seven years for embezzling almost $200,000 in city funds...
...politics, even today...
...A fuller explanation of the historical divide would have been helpful...
...But has the man in the leopard dashiki changed his spots...
...he was lucky to have a sympathetic jury that found him guilty on only one of fourteen drug-related counts...
...fter the establishment of homerule, by which D.C...
...Polls show Barry will run away with the Democratic primary, as current mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly slumbers at a distant third, and in a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans 9-1, his return to the mayor's office seems virtually certain...
...His administration was so disorganized that deadlines for filing paperwork were routinely missed or ignored, and hundreds of millions of matching federal dollars fell by the wayside...
...The colorful Barry is the straw that stirs the drink of D.C...
...they love him...
...Jaffe and Sherwood report that for about a year before the feds brought Barry down, he had to be awakened mid-morning at his house by his security detail...
...Donaldson, a close friend whom the mayor named employment services director, was arrested within eight months for failing to pay his personal bills...
...Jaffe and Sherwood do a wonderful job of detailing Barry's rise to power, and one imagines that the shenanigans that took place after his election almost wrote themselves...
...0 72 The American Spectator September 1994...
...Charged with destroying government property, Barry—already a respected figure for his civil rights efforts—organized a phalanx of ministers to vouch for his record of nonviolence and his general good character...
...It is a sordid tale, but the decay of the city's infrastructure and the oppression of its citizens is but the half of it...
...he would fall asleep at meetings, excuse himself for a toot in the bathroom, and come out reinvigorated...
...today the population of 600,000 is 25 percent smaller than four decades ago...
...he simply repeated the promise, mantra-like, during re-election campaigns...
...the price of corn flakes to the public schools went up almost six dollars a carton, and the city's budget ballooned two billion dollars in his tenure...
...T hose who would read Barry's even- tual fall from grace as a triumph of our political system, a morality play in which democracy catches up with the despot in the end, risk misunderstanding the peculiar nature of city politics in Washington...
...A dark-skinned sharecropper's son from Itta Bena, Mississippi, he humped and hustled his way up from the beginning...
...The crowds cheer him on...
...How Washington degenerated into its present morass of corruption, crime, and disarray is the ostensible subject of Harry S. Jaffe and Tom Sherwood's Dream City, but the real subject is unmistakably Marion Barry...
...Barry made his youngest sisters sing for change at the bus stop, and in fifth grade sold sandwiches with the extra meat his stepfather brought home from the slaughterhouse...
...And all the while, she has spent non-existent funds on frivolities and sops—$65 an hour for her personal make-up artist, and hundreds of thousands to bulletproof the windows to her office, which the authors remind us, could only be attacked by helicopter...
...His savvy political instincts told him that if poor and lower class blacks could be mobilized to displace the civic-minded bourgeois establishment, the city was his for the taking...
...residents were lowed to vote for their own leadership after a hundred years of congressional supervision, it was only a matter of time before Barry assumed the top position...
...White flight soon enough was joined by black flight...
...Barry used the powerful seat to consolidate the support of white business, and when he finally ran for mayor, was elected in a landslide...
...For in addition to the sloth and corruption, this is also a story about race and racism, and though the authors hint at the topic in their subtitle, they never quite get down to brass tacks...
...Barry signed up for graduate school in chemistry at Nashville's Fisk University to avoid the draft, but his courage and energy impressed so many in the burgeoning civil rights movement that he was elected the first chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee...
...he founded Pride, DREAM CITY: RACE, POWER AND THE DECLINE OF WASHINGTON, D.C...
...Clutching at straws during his trial, Barry embraced Louis Farrakhan in a last-ditch effort to save his behind...
...Barry promised to "take the boards off' closed-down public housing, but never did...
...He made a mockery of his populist campaign by hopping into bed with the sleaziest developers, who bankrolled him as he eased their way to purchase prime city land during the 1980s real-estate boom for pennies on the dollar...
...When Barry announced his comeback bid for the mayoralty, newspapers around the globe picked up the story: The man videotaped by the FBI sucking on a crack pipe—while mayor of the capital of the free world—was running for re-election...
...Having moved to Memphis in 1940 when he was four, his family—mom, stepfather, two sisters, two half sisters, three stepsisters—lived in a shotgun shack on the unpaved streets of the South Memphis projects...
...He walked, and the trial made Barry a household name citywide...
...He became one of the first black Eagle Scouts in Memphis, and made the National Honor Society in high school...
...And it is here that Jaffe and Sherwood write least convincingly about the wretchedness that has plagued the city for decades...
...Near the end, during an interview with a Los Angeles reporter, he went off to the bathroom for ten minutes, then returned to tell her that prosecutors would have loved to get hold of his urine sample...
...Crack cocaine was his smoke of choice, but at least one mistress maintained that he would sprinkle it on her erogenous zones to ingest the drug orally...
...Harry S. Jaffe and Tom Sherwood Simon & Schuster/ 352 pages / $24 reviewed by M.D...
...It's an amazing and fascinating tale, but the bloody fifth act remains to be played out...
...Once behind bars, he was transferred to a different facility after prison officials discovered a female visitor had fellated him—right in front of everyone else in the visitation room...
...I'm just a night owl," he told the press, as reports circulated that his limousine was spotted outside strip clubs and along streets full of hookers in the wee hours...
...The school dropout rate soared above 40 percent...
...Those familiar with the virulent animosity in this element of black racism can read between the lines to get a fuller picture, but those who do not are likely to come away not understanding what fueled Barry's heady rise to the top...
...CARNEGIE The American Spectator September 1994 71 Inc., a self-help organization whose director (his first wife) was later jailed for a laundry list of fiscal improprieties, including pocketing some of the cash to buy herself a Cadillac...
...At the city's LeMoyne College, he was so radicalized by two white, liberal professors that he earned the nickname "Shep," after Dmitri Shepilov, a Soviet propagandist...
...when locals talk about the mayor, it's even M.D...
...He purposely jaywalked in front of a police car to get arrested, then kicked out the windows of the paddy wagon...
...Carnegie is a contributing writer for Washington CityPaper...
...She has mismanaged the budget crisis so poorly that the city edges ever closer to the edge of collapse...
...Elected first to the school board, he used his position to make contacts and construct a base of power...
...And though Jaffe and Sherwood offer some background on the racists in Congress who opposed home-rule for so long because they refused to believe blacks in Washington could govern themselves, the authors fail to come to the obvious if unpleasant conclusion—in fact, they haven't been able to...
...He says he's sober, and makes his public appearances in kente-cloth, traditional African garb that has become a politically charged symbol, like the black fist of the sixties, as the tragic gulf between whites and blacks once again begins to widen...
...She has flirted with the embarrassing idea of asking the National Guard to police the streets...
...Friends bilked the city for uncountable millions...
...Local racists burned a cross on his mother's lawn after he delivered a fiery speech senior year about "the Negroes' fight against the forces of bigotry," and a civil rights activist was born...
...Eventually Washington had more government workers per capita than any other city or state, including New York and Chicago, and per capita expenditures ran about twice the national average...
...We're going to show everyone that black people can really run something," Ivanhoe Donaldson said when Barry was elected to his first term in 1978...
...Now Barry is on the rise again...
...Present mayor Kelly, a judge's daughter and a member in good standing of the light-skinned aristocrats, has done nothing to stem the city's sad decline...
...He moved up to the city council, where the elected chairman appointed him head of the finance and revenue panel...
...He, of course, is Marion S. Barry, Jr., a pol who makes Bob Packwood look like Fulton Sheen, Ted Kennedy like a latter-day Lycurgus...
...they're on the eleventh floor...
...Barry took street-dude lessons from hoodlum Rufus "Catfish" Mayfield on how to walk the walk and talk the talk...
Vol. 27 • September 1994 • No. 9
