There is Hope After O.J.
Aizenman, Nurith C.
There is Hope After O.J. D.C. Mayor Barry still tries to cover up his incompetence with cries of racism, but some black Washingtonians have finally had enough BY NURITH C. AIZENMAN IT'S A...
...during the ’60s and early ’70s’ Martins views Barry as an embodiment of the civil rights struggle...
...Why not...
...They live in D.C...
...It was Barry, says Martins, who first gave her the idea of embarking on her current career...
...She’s already put her older daughter through college and has the younger one enrolled in a pre-engineering program at Dunbar High...
...It’s NOT a Black Thing As far as cab driver Vernon Humbles is concerned, Seegers could not have done so a moment sooner...
...There is a brief scuffle as the policeman wrests away the sign...
...And if they can stand up to do the recall, I’ll take them anywhere...
...Seegers signed up to help...
...Two reasons stand out...
...If he don’t take you out, we will...
...Any failures on the mayor’s part, they retort, are the result of a concerted effort by white racists to sabotage his administration in order to prove that blacks are incapable of self-government...
...Until the mid’60s, Washington was largely ignored by the activists fighting for civil rights in places like Mississippi and Alabama...
...As a divorced mother of two, her financial circumstance...
...And it’s our responsibility to hold him accountable...
...Sensing a need-and an opportunity -for leadership, young Marion Barry, a civil rights activist from Mississippi, moved to D.C...
...As of mid October, twoanda-half weeks before the deadline, the recall drive is stuck at 24,000 signatures and Seegers’ optimism is fading...
...As a result, they provide a window onto both the source of his lasting strength, and the seeds of his possible demise...
...Seegers’ last recall effort, against Whittington, proved to be, as she put it, “a delayed reaction...
...He looks confused...
...government has collapsed to such an extent that those services are no longer reliable in even the wealthiest parts of town...
...Seegers’ neighborhood comprises the city’s eighth electoral ward, and it is the foundation upon which Barry has built his formidable popular following...
...too,” she says...
...Mayor Barry still tries to cover up his incompetence with cries of racism, but some black Washingtonians have finally had enough BY NURITH C. AIZENMAN IT'S A SWETERING LATE-SUMMER DAY AND Sandra Seegers has already spent several hours trekking through Washington D.C.’s middleclass Crestwood neighborhood collecting signatures for her campaign to recall D.C...
...I still love him as a brother...
...It was black voters like Muriel Martins and Sandra Seegers who saved Barry back then...
...each year occur here...
...I was brought on as a consultant,” she sighs...
...Barry lives in a smallish mansion, minutes from Sandra Seegers’ home...
...asks Seegers...
...Yet the notion that Barry was the first-and the only-political leader to really care about them, has a powerful hold on lowerincome blacks...
...Lauch Faircloth, who had orchestrated the bailout, as a white Southerner plotting to “recolonize the citizens of the District...
...Nevertheless, D.C...
...Still, thanks to the influx of cash that washed over D.C...
...But if that is the message Barry carries away from a failed recall attempt, he may be deluding himself...
...Seegers and Co...
...This is a majority black city that until as recently as 1974 was effectively ruled by white Southern segregationists in Congress...
...Muriel Martins is endeavoring to add one more name to the list...
...Barry’s explanation to police at the time of h‘is arrest was even more succinct: “Goddamn bitch set me up...
...But to Martins, then a teenager living with her mother and three brothers in a working-class neighborhood of Northeast D.C., Barry was a hero...
...But as authors Harry Jaffe and Tom Sherwood note in their book Dream City, Barry’s approach was theoretically no different from the patronage system employed by mayors elsewhere...
...Have you got 40,000...
...Barry has since backed down, but at the time, the drivers felt betrayed because they had been at the forefront of Barry’s last mayoral campaign-even providing his supporters with free transportation to the polls...
...Except for one detail...
...Leaning out of her car window, Seegers calls over to a black man driving his three children up to a church...
...Yes,” he replies, driving off...
...We knew we had to achieve against the odds,” she remembers...
...they scream...
...Seven years ago the government made a determination that it would get Marion Barry,” the mayor’s lawyer told the jury at his trial, “and it would go to any lengths, any extremes to get him...
...it is the cocoon in which he began his metamorphosis from disgraced pol to Barry-the-Unbeatable...
...Although he lives in the strongly pro-Barry Ward 7, Humbles represents a third, smaller group of working-class blacks-those who never liked Barry...
...In 1992, almost immediately after his release from prison, Barry jumped back into politics...
...But Seegers’ group has just barely collected the minimum needed in racially mixed Wards 1 and 2; it is still 800 signatures short in Ward 6 and 3,000 short in Ward 4. Seegers is still hopeful about Ward 6, pointing out that her group is gathering about 700 signatures a week there...
...I felt betrayed by him for placing himself in that situation,” she explains, “but I also felt betrayed by my government for spending millions of dollars to arrest one man...
...Just one year shy of a Ph.D...
...So they say, ‘I won’t sign your petition, and I’ll let him finish his term of office...
...Barry rained contracts on his friends, asked little in return, and often looked the other way as they gouged d o n s of dollars in city funds without performing services...
...Anything else you put in the paper that ain’t right, I have a Jew lawyer that will sue y’all...
...in chemistry, Barry was hardly a man of the street...
...What’s more, over 70 percent of D.C.’s blacks-even those in Southeast-said he should not run a p n . And just because they’re not rushing to sign recall petitions doesn’t mean Barry shouldn’t take them seriously...
...True, their number is small, and they face an uphill battle, but at long last, some of the people who have been most harmed by Barry are exercising their constitutional right to try to ‘throw the bum out.% the process they are taking the first step toward re-establishing the basic formula of democratic government that-far more than an unaccountable control board-is the key to the city’s salvation...
...council member and Barry protigi Eydie Whittington...
...but I will not vote for him in 1998...
...The second obstacle has been the local news media’s apathy...
...But although, as Seegers puts it, “I’ve never seen Barry walk on water,” until his arrest, she was disinclined to oppose him...
...We prayed that whatever his problem was that he could get through it, and that his faith in God would not diminish...
...Not surprisingly, it didn’t take much persuading to get Humbles to join the recall movement...
...cab drivers who were angry at Barry for supporting an overhaul of the city’s taxi rules that they feared would force them out of business...
...An African musical troupe in native costume pounds out a steady drumbeat, and the smell of barbecued chicken wafts through the air...
...I remember him really fighting apnst the way the African-American man was being harassed...
...the woman rants...
...Nonetheless, she made sure to obtain an absentee ballot and fill it out for Barry...
...The mayoral election was still two years off, but Ward 8’s seat on the D.C...
...Barry Beware He has a point...
...Most significan+, the black Washingtonians in Seegers’ movement are in many ways representative of the people who have kept Barry in office in the first place...
...b d you make sure you put that in your paper right...
...Voters turned out in record numbers, and he won the race by 3 to 1. But when he decided to throw his hat in the mayor’s race just one year later, Seegers began to fear Barry was merely using his Ward 8 seat as a launching pad for a full political comeback...
...To appreciate how unprecedented -and felicitousa development it is for a black woman from Ward 8 to be heading a recall attempt against Marion Barry, you need to understand just how deeply race has polarized and perverted the local politics of our nation’s capital...
...The calm atmosphere outside belies the danger within...
...Still, local political analyst Mark Plotkm thinks Seegers must share some of the blame for the recall’s slowdown...
...She urged him not to run and says she agreed to work on his campaign only reluctantly...
...Oh, ma’am, that’s not a good place to go,” he says shaking his head...
...ceased to be one long before Congress and the control board stepped in...
...Without them the recall could easily be written off as just another racist crusade to unseat a powerful black leader...
...congressional delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton joined Barry in denouncing a $1 billion aid package from Congress as a “rape of democracy” and characterizing Sen...
...Of course, it was those minorities who happened to be buddies of the mayor who were the real beneficiaries...
...When I came back, and saw that a control board had been put in place . . . and I saw that he could no longer effectively lobby on the Hill, I said to myself, there’s no sense in having him as mayor...
...By the end of July, the group had collected 13,000 signaturesmore than a third of the 33,475 they need...
...Their petition had to include the signatures of at least 10 percent of the voters in at least five of the city’s eight wards...
...I agree that the white man wants to see Barry fail, but he’s assisting in his own demise,” says Humbles...
...It was the shock of what she discovered upon her return to Washington that finally turned Martins off...
...of Washington’s black citizenry by dramatically increasing the number of minority-owned firms that were awarded city contracts...
...Seegers demands...
...The night after Barry was detained, Martins joined a candlelight vigil outside his home...
...They took his power...
...provides a preview of just how isolated this area is from the rest of the city...
...Martins continued to admire Barry throughout his first three terms, largely because she still associated him with the spirit of idealism and self-reliance that animated her generation...
...A petite African-American with a gentle smile and a soft voice, Martins is standing in the parking lot of a Safeway supermarket in racially mixed, middle-class Ward 4, trying to coax a passerby into endorsing her petition...
...I’m just glad Sandra finally woke up,’’ he says...
...I was at a workshop with him and I was aslung a lot of questions, and he said, You know, I think you’d make a great teacher,”’ she remembers...
...are allowed to stay, but their sign remains locked inside a patrol car...
...Because,” he answers, “only white people don’t like Barry...
...And Barry, the second elected mayor and the first to align himself with the city’s disenfranchised black underclass, was long ago anointed the living symbol of black Washington’s struggle for political emancipation...
...Sandra Seegers not only looks African-American, but for nearly all of her 40-plus years, she has lived east of the Anacostia river in the poorest, most neglected part of Washington...
...As for Barry, he has limited wiggle room...
...So it wasn’t until Barry was arrested for using crack that Muriel Martins began to question his actions...
...Thanks to the abundance of federal jobs in D.C., the city had a sizable black middle and upper class-and it was deemed too beholden to the white power structure to be worth trying to organize...
...Naturally, it was the poor who suffered the most...
...Recreation Department (one of the few agencies still under Barry’s control) holds one Saturday in a park adjacent to the mayor’s house in Southeast Washington...
...Meanwhile, Barry has ventured out of his mansion to see what the commotion is about...
...In 1994 he won by 56 percent-his lowest showing ever, made all the less impressive by the fact that his opponent was a white Republican in a town that is two-thirds black and over 90 percent Democrat...
...Meanwhile, Ehrry was practicing something altogether different from what he preached...
...We’d sit up all night studying...
...When he first took office in 1979, Barry vowed to use his power to help improve the live...
...The validity of each signature must be confirmed by the D.C...
...That’s because Seegers was never quite as taken with him in the first place...
...Ironically, today the D.C...
...This time around, blacks constitute two-thirds of the core group, so as Seegers puts it, “no one can say it’s all white people...
...You need 34,000 certzfied ones,” Barry says smiling...
...This scenario presents a problem in poorer wards where people move frequently...
...I hail a taxi and give the driver the address...
...As we embark on the half-hour journey, it’s hard to believe we are not leaving the city altogether...
...I thought, even though he’s a criminal, he could still help Ward 8. He’s experienced, he’s got the contacts and the clout...
...Seegers soon found herself in charge...
...Today, Martins teaches American history at Dunbar High School...
...Seegers has provided some energy,” he explains, “but I don’t think the group has the resources and the organizational skills to pull it ofr And Plotkin worries that if they fail, the group will only confirm Barry’s sense of invulnerability as he ponders another run in 1998...
...The ride there from downtown D.C...
...If anyone is betraying the black community, it’s Barry...
...In 1978, the year Barry was elected, one of Seegers’ brothers was shot four times in the head in a drugrelated murder...
...You want to go where?’ “It’s near the corner of Martin Luther Eng and South Capitol Street,” I offer...
...Yet until 1996, Barry’s government failed to spend $89 million in federal grant money earmarked for solving those problems...
...And Martins feels good to be malung a difference in her community-after all, “that’s what Mayor Barry used to advocate...
...Get him out...
...The lack of media coverage has been particularly crippling to the recall because, compared to the white parts of town, D.C.’s black wards-even the middle-class ones-have fewer public gathering places, such as shopping centers and restaurant strips, where many people can be solicited at once...
...She waves hello to friends from the neighborhood and stops to hug someone at every turn...
...They hardly bolster Seegers’ effort to convince potential recruits that the recall is not a white-driven movement, but she says she wouldn’t dream of leaving the whites at home...
...We were in tune with the Christian value of forgiving your brother...
...The point is, can the citizens survive...
...Which is precisely what makes the latest movement to recall Barry such welcome news...
...B8arry’s ign in a park right by his house...
...For the last four months, however, this area has also served as the base from which Seegers has been leading an alliance of more than 200 volunteers bent on unseating Barry...
...Barry donned a dashiki and took to the streets preaching the virtues of redemption and black pride...
...But apart from a few minor stories early on, D.C.5 TV stations and major newspapers have given the recall scant attention and offer little explanation for their indifference...
...The recall folks aren’t the only ones promoting a cause...
...Humbles says it makes his blood boil when other African-Americans tell him not to “betray a brother...
...The bulk of the 400-odd homicides committed in D.C...
...She was just a few years too young during the late ’60s to be swept up in the spirit of that era...
...In a May Washington Post poll, 50 percent of blacks voiced disapproval of Barry-up from 31 percent just a year earlier...
...The longer he stays in it the worse everything gets...
...Unfortunately for Martins, the woman, who is also black, is far more enraged by Congress’ imposition of the financial control board than the transgressions of Mayor Barry...
...They are the ones, for instance, who are most affected by the city’s astounding rates of new AIDS infection, tuberculosis, and infant mortality-the highest in the nation...
...1 reason it lists for opposing the jail: “The citizens of Ward 8 should not be a party to a process that has systematically failed to rehabilitate our black men...
...If the effort was successful, the city would hold an up-or-down vote on Barry...
...elections board-and it doesn’t take much to be disqualified...
...How many signatures you got...
...This is the neighborhood that first embraced Barry upon his release from jail...
...By the time Barry had been released from prison and launched his re-election bid, Martins was in Estonia on a Fulbright teacher scholarship...
...government...
...They have private schools to go to, they have their own street cleaning crews, they don’t have this murder problem...
...Six years later, 19 percent of the city’s housing remained boarded up, as the list of families waiting for subsidized homes reached 11,000...
...We obviously know that he can survive anything...
...That’s a state secret,” she answers...
...Martins is simply proud to have pulled her family up to a new social and educational level...
...The man refuses to let go-pointing out that this is a federal park and he has every right to express his opinions...
...For instance, if a voter has failed to notify the board of a change of address, his signature is of no use-even though this mistake will not impede him from voting in the next election...
...and I would like to see them hauled off,” Smith explains after the uproar has subsided...
...I spent so much time caring about, and worrying about, and doing for others,” he soberly explained to parishioners at a church service several days later, “I’ve not worried about or cared enough for myselfl’ And Barry and his lawyers did their best to portray his arrest as a conspiracy by the white establishment...
...Recognizing that they had a long road ahead of them, the drivers enlisted the help of Seegers, who had had prior experience with a similar campaign against former D.C...
...In the process, he earned the undying gratitude of the mostly black residents of poorer wards like Seegers...
...Even then, her first instinct was to support Barry...
...He’s no longer effective...
...But she concedes that Ward 4 will probably prove to be the recall’s Achilles heel: Although Seegers and the others continue to petition the ward every day, their efforts are only yielding about 75 signatures a week...
...And our philosophy is, if a brother is down you do not injure him further...
...As Muriel Martins, so recently a Barry supporter herself, explains, “They feel like Barry’s been hurt and ill...
...But she’s not...
...The crowd cheers wildly...
...We cross over a wide bridge spanning the Anacostia river, and traverse a long stretch of open highway-a rarity in D.C., where most neighborhoods are connected by residential streets...
...The threat of “diminished property values” barely makes it to the bottom of the list...
...Seegers, decked out in a burgundy “RECALL Barry” T-shirt, is clearly in her element...
...Well, am I white...
...It’s mid-September, and the recall group has gathered about 22,000 signatures...
...It’s just time for him to go...
...But getting rich was never her goal...
...But while the participation of Humbles and other blacks who hail from Barry strongholds is a momentous development, the challenge facing the recall campaign should not be underestimated...
...But if a democracy is defined as a system in which leaders are held accountable to the people they serve, D.C...
...The woman in green turns out to be Florence Smith, a member of the local Advisory Neighborhood Commission and, as such, an elected official of the I1.C...
...Once in the heart of Southeast, the landscape is dominated by block upon block of dull-colored public housing complexes...
...Although she is committed to removing Barry, she can relate to the woman’s anger...
...Little did I know they just planned on getting it started and letting the citizens take over...
...I really thought he was the better candidate...
...For instance, after promising to renovate 3,000 uniE of public housing in 1979, Barry simply handed the contract over to a couple of pals who didn’t bother to do the work...
...I think it’s very disrespectful for them to be walking around with a ‘Remove Mr...
...No,” says the man, his smile fading...
...h d he’s failing us, he’s not failing the white community...
...But I would like to see him retire, write a book, and get out of this political mess...
...To get a sense of what Seegers and her fellow petitioners are up against, I accompany them to a community picnic that the D.C...
...And there is evidence that Martins and Seegers are not the only ones who’ve changed their minds since...
...This was something you could defineit needed some drama, some theater...
...Martins nods sympathetically...
...Doing the Right Thing The effort to recall Barry originated not with Sandra Seegers, but with a group of D.C...
...But such evidence of Barry’s incompetence is brushed aside by his black champions...
...So in order to get the word out in black wards, petitioners have had to resort to the time-consuming and less effective door-to-door approach...
...When Barry ran for mayor in 1978, Martins gladly gave him her vote...
...They bat around favorite fish recipes for a few moments before Seegers gets to the point...
...They were then given until October 28 to collect at least 33$75 signatures10 percent of the city’s registered voters-in favor of holding a recall...
...council was up for election in November, so he moved into the neighborhood and launched his campaign...
...What is he trying to prove that we don’t already know...
...You’d think a group that is gathering thousands of signatures against one of the nation’s most controversial mayors would merit frequent progress reports...
...Like many African-Americans who lived in D.C...
...Still, as she heads home, Seegers can’t resist the opportunity to recruit one more foot soldier...
...during the real estate boom of the 1980s, major parts of the city were revitalized and new buildings started popping up all over town...
...We need someone who can inspire us-and lobby Congress...
...also had a large black underclass that was too poor and uneducated to benefit from the federal government’s presence...
...The handful of whites in the group couldn’t be more conspicuous, if they were standing on stilts...
...Among those shrieking the loudest is a woman in high heels and a lime-green lycra pantsuit who had earlier tried to knock the clipboard out of the hands of one of the other white petitioners...
...These voters are now more interested in bashing Congress for usurping their democratic rights than in protesting Barry’s incompetence...
...Welcome to Barryland...
...And he says he’s never been seduced by Barry’s claim that the fault lies with the white establishment...
...he asks one of the petitioners...
...What’s going on over there today...
...Thus the irony was rich this past August when everyone from Jesse Jackson to D.C...
...Other mayors have “demanded that the cronies do the work, provide the service, and complete the job...
...In fact it was for precisely this reason that back in 1989, the late homeless advocate Mitch Snyder, who was white, decided to abort a planned recall against Barry...
...So, you wanna sign my petition to recall the mayor...
...Some of Barry’s tactics during those early years raised eyebrows, most notably the way he threatened to picket local businesses that didn’t contribute money to his group, or the time he provoked tlie white police into arresting him so he could star in a police brutality case...
...First, Congress’ decision this August to strip Barry of most of his remaining power caused many black Washingtonians to shift the focus of their anger from Barry to the Hill...
...He died on Gayland Street, Southeastnot far from Frederick Douglass’ old home...
...Last May, the taxi drivers registered their recall drive with the D.C...
...The No...
...And Ward 8 can only go up...
...Despite the gross inefficiency of his government, upon coming to office, Barry made sure that Washington’s poorest neighborhoods finally received basic services, like regular trash collection, street repair, and accurate water billing, that other areas of town had long taken for granted...
...How could a movement that began so promisingly have taken such a disappointing turn...
...Herein lies a second source of Barry’s power...
...He was the one I was closest to,” she says softly...
...The black community’s unwavering support has rendered Barry seemingly invincible...
...But it is the working- and middle-class blacks that Seegers has brought into the movement who are the most important...
...Seegers says she doesn’t want to get burned again, so she’s concentrated the petitioners’ activities in the better-off Wards 1, 2,3,4 and 6. At first, her strategy seemed to be working...
...Barry’s a man under siege...
...Washington’s generally liberal white voters, whose initial support for Barry faded years ago, express frustration and disbelief at the black community’s continued devotion to him...
...Even Seegers, who was disgusted to hear that Barry had been arrested for smoking crack-“of all things, he had to do the ‘nigger drug,’” she sighswas willing to give him one last chance...
...Humbles’ decades-long struggle to stay afloat as a cabbie and an ice cream truck driver has convinced him that “Barry doesn’t give a damn about the little people...
...Someone hands me a flyer protesting a recent proposal to build a new prison in the area...
...Major mayoral prerogatives, such as the ability to hire and fire top local officials, have been taken from Barry and given to the unelected financial control board that Congress appointed to supervise D.C.5 budget back in 1995-when the city first began teetering on the edge of bankruptcy...
...resident, including Barry, would be free to compete...
...And it was the main reason why Seegers’ 1995 campaign to recall Eydie Whittington (Barry’s hand-picked successor to his Ward 8 council seat) was unsuccessful...
...Bany made the most of their indulgence...
...We only need 34,000...
...At the picnic next door the party is in full swing...
...to help galvanize that underclass...
...If he lost, a special election would be held, in which any D.C...
...he presses...
...llus is, readers will recall, the town that re-elected Barry mayor in the very next election after he completed a prison sentence for smoking crack with his mistress at a downtown hotel...
...but he quickly persuaded some of the local hoodlums to teach him how to talk the talk and walk the walk...
...Not surprisingly, the recall has done well in the white bastion of Ward 3, attracting 1,000 more registered voters than the 10 percent required...
...Mayor Marion Barry...
...To be sure, Congress had exacted a heavy price for its largesse...
...That’s not to say Martins isn’t still a Barry fanin fact when she speaks of him she sounds more like a concerned family member than an outraged constituent...
...To keep the ball rolling, Seegers has assembled a patchwork coalition that includes members of D.C.5 Green Party, the local Reform Party, and various other white folk...
...But things slowed in August, and the movement has had a hard time regaining momentum...
...And by her midtwenties, Washington was already a much darker place...
...are not much better than her own mother’s were-in fact, Martins still lives just blocks away from the meet on which she grew up...
...board of elections...
...Low Expectations Sandra Seegers’ response to Barry’s arrest was far less charitable than Martins...
...Suddenly a policeman grabs the “Recall Barry” sign being carried by one of the white members of Seegers’ group...
...I kept hearing that he was on drugs, and I thought ‘he probably is,’ but I also figured he was still doing an okay job-he’s making sure the city services get done...
...He won the last election with less than 10 percent of the vote in the city’s white areas, and D.C.’s weekly City Paper has been refer,ring to him as “Mayor-for-Life” for more than a decade...
...Not long after Barry was inaugurated, Seegers soured on him for good...
...Get him out...
...After all, it is the blacks in Washington’s poorer neighborhoods who have suffered the most at Barry’s hand...
...How DARE they...
...Thanks to this status, Barry has managed to hold onto power through four elections-even as he amassed a record of mismanagement and corruption that would have spelled political death for any other leader in any other city...
...We felt we had a responsibility to do well, to lift ourselves up...
...Despite collecting 1,100 more signatures than she needed, Seegers ultimately came up 700 short...
...Though the recall itself was unsuccessful, Whittington’s opponent beat her by 9 percentage points in the next election...
...fish fry,” he answers conversationally...
Vol. 29 • November 1997 • No. 11
