D.C.'s Demagogue-In-Chief
Powell, Michael
D.C.’s Demagogue-In-Chief How a potentially great black leader betrayed his promise, his city, and his people By Michael Powell NOT LONG AFTER 1 ARRIVED IN Washington two years back, notice...
...And the city remained segregated for years afterwards...
...Barry arrived in Washington at a propitious time for a young man wearing the epaulets of the civil rights struggle in the Deep South...
...Barras notes that ethnic politicians of many hues have constructed such political machines, and that corruption “moral and legal” is hardly a signal trait of Washington’s politicians...
...some ask...
...The Anansi is a wily, multifaced creature who survives by trickery and cunning, alternately infuriating and tickling his followers...
...He carried a largely white ward, and beat longtime establishment politicians...
...A stolid government town, Washington had not been a place of lynching and mobs...
...The welter of motivations that drives such paternalistic trade-offs is more completely captured and examined in books such as Jim Sleeper’s Liberal Racism...
...It’s a virtue of B a r d book to remind us that perhaps such boredom is a sign of maturity...
...Washingtonians used to explain their continued allegiance to Barry by talking of his symbolic resonance for the nation...
...The editorial board of The Washington Post played its own role, endorsing Barry in his first three elections...
...This trade-off cemented Washington’s division into two cities, and fed a cynicism that today erodes participation in the political life of the city...
...Where is the sizzle...
...They looked at the Democratic field, at an intellectually impressive former chief financial officer and three council members of reformist impulse and at least middlmg accomplishment, and found little fire and flash...
...He saw only a slim margin of victory and an unreliable political base...
...Few whites suffered when Barry’s cronies failed to train welfare mothers and left the Medicaid elderly to rot in city-funded nursing homes...
...And he was well-versed in the argot of the militant wing of the civil rights movement, which viewed government jobs and contracts as proper recompense for enduring life in a racist society...
...Barry, by contrast, constructed his machine in the 1980s, as the Great Society foundered on the shoals of the Reagan Revolution and middle-class sentiment turned against America’s cities...
...Finally, there is the terrible discredit the Barry era brought on those he claimed to succor: the city’s poorest...
...But to talk now of helping Washington’s poor as often summons memories of Barry’s sweetheart contracts and employment programs that produced few jobs...
...As Barry descended into farce in his fourth term (and Barras is far too optimistic about the miniscule reforms enacted by the mayor’s top aides in that final term), no one paid attention as welfare reform foundered in the District, as homeless men filled the streets, and as foster care and low-income housing decayed and crumbled...
...By doing so, she reminds us of Barry’s political genius, of his instinctive feel for the vernacular of the city and its politics...
...To question his empire building was to challenge the legitimacy of black political empowerment...
...When a reporter suggested that Barry’s budget, larded with monies for one dysfunctional program or another, might not gain the approval of the city’s financial control board, Barry loosened a practiced snarl...
...Posturing aside, Barry most often confined his militancy to the campaign stump and the corporate boardroom...
...They acquiesced in the downward slide of the public schools and tolerated growing corruption and incompetence in the police department...
...He claimed a patina of moral authority for all this...
...In a felicitous and earthy phrase, she writes: “Barry knew the District the way lovers know each others’ bodies...
...But Barras misses the quid pro quo embedded in that relationship...
...For years, leading white and black liberals failed to seriously question the growing size of city government and the contracts given to mayoral cronies...
...D.C.’s Demagogue-In-Chief How a potentially great black leader betrayed his promise, his city, and his people By Michael Powell NOT LONG AFTER 1 ARRIVED IN Washington two years back, notice arrived of a series of Marion Barry press events designed to sell his budget proposals...
...Some white liberals and ambitious developers of no particular ideology essentially ceded city government to Barry in the early 1980s, so long as he left alone their cloistered enclaves west of Rock Creek Park...
...Barry appointed powerful white attorneys and lobbyists to zoning and adjustment boards, and he was ever willing to allow white developers to extract vast sums from downtown development...
...But its Jim Crow segregation had been complete, if genteelly enforced...
...Whites paid for private security and snow plows, and white parents decamped to private schools or funded their own teachers and supplies to shore up their local public schools...
...Barras recognizes this...
...So she also wants her black audience to understand how their resentments and diminished expectations encouraged self-destructive political behavior by their leaders...
...Congress often fire up the passions of his black defenders...
...His first mayoral campaign in 1978 brimmed with hope...
...To watch Barry now, with his fatigued rhetoric, shriveled political base, and almost comic megalomania, is not unlike trying to describe a man by peering at his shadow...
...But when the riots came in 1968 (the city’s only Long Hot Summer), Barry became a peacemaker...
...Barras’ book encompasses far more than Barry’s recent political comeback, moving backward in time to examine his life in his poetically named birthplace of Itta Bena, Miss., and his work in the civil rights movement as well as in Washington...
...Moreover, Daley built his organization as the good times rolled in the 1950s and 1960s...
...But the bodies accumulated almost exclusively in black neighborhoods...
...Barry plunged into the fight for Home Rule as Washington’s very own angry young man...
...But she acknowledges the rub: Unlike a James Michael Curley in Boston or a Richard Daley in Chicago, Barry’s machine tendered jobs by the bushel but too rarely demanded work in return...
...But by indulging in such resentments, Barry’s supporters entered a political and racial culdesac...
...Barras envisions her book as an exercise in crossracial interpretation...
...So Barry built an old-fashioned race-based political machine, hiring thousands of people, agreeing to spectacularly generous union work rules and handing out contracts to friends and supporters...
...But Barras’ detailed examination of the complex relationship between Barry and the black community, and the toll taken on his leadership by his sexual crudities and chemical dependence, is incisive and brave...
...MICHAELP OWELLis a staff writer for The Washington Post...
...After his own desultory fashion, the mayor did not disappoint...
...Perhaps...
...By 1998, Barry was a political dinosaur and Washington was his swamp...
...To read of that victory now is to feel the weight of a lost opportunity, to sense how a braver leader might have sown a different seed...
...Barras’ book is not fully realized...
...She quotes political scientist Ron Walters: ‘We have elevated people who were defiant of the system . . . we’ve respected those people who can stand up to the system, and Marion has told almost everybody in this town where to get off...
...That was a fragile conceit...
...The corrosive emptiness of much of Marion Barry’s tenure as mayor, in particular his second, third, and fourth terms, is Washington’s burden...
...Her writing is elegant and metaphorical at one turn, choppy and repetitious the next...
...In District political circles, this was not unlike receiving the spring schedule at the Arena Stage: A show was guaranteed...
...A reader sometimes glimpses a still stronger book inside this one, wanting only for the hand of a good editor...
...These politics were embraced nearly as often by white liberals as by some blacks, to the mutual detriment of both...
...That said, Barry’s decline presents a problem for a newcomer such as myself...
...That fit a pattern...
...In her hands, the man’s power and appeal is evident, even if one is nonetheless more inclined to view Barry as closer to charlatan than fallen hero...
...And Jonetta Barras’ perceptive new book, The Last of the Black Emperors: The Hollow Comeback of Marion Bamy in a New Age of Black Leaders, amounts to an autopsy for that time, and for a brand of racially tinged politics that once dominated more than a few of the nation’s cities...
...Her examination of Barry’s relationship with the white community is less nuanced...
...The effect on black Washington was terrifymg...
...Two days later Barry advised The Washington Post editorial board that his threat was “just a generic street term.’’ And so dramaturgy fades into farce...
...Ever the natural politician, with hair dyed jet black in his seventh decade, Barry feinted and parried throughout the week, at ease if a bit bored...
...Beginning in 1987, the District, per capita, had more police than any city in the nation and the highest homicide rate...
...So smart, so charismatic, so threatening: thus Barry’s enduring appeal...
...Cut his programs, he said with voice artfully deepening, and there will be “blood in the streets...
...As Barras makes clear, Barry’s deceits and failures forever puncture the notion that there is a transcendence to be found in the politics of racial nationalism and resentment...
...But the threat made the evening newscasts and the next day’s newspapers...
...Such problems have deep roots in the black diaspora...
...Here we had a bit of antique racial mau-mauing, this notion that Barry, half militant and half mayor, was as Horatio at the bridge: Disregard him and his people will riot...
...She wants white audiences to understand Barry’s enduring appeal, to comprehend why exposure of his faults and the continual assaults by the U.S...
...This neglect, too, is part of Barry’s legacy...
...The city’s only public college teeters on the verge of dissolution, and burial benefits for the penniless are revoked...
...Where is the Marion of this political class...
...She skillfully limns Barry’s cross-racial appeal in 1978, his ability to inspire hope and fear in white voters...
...His coalition was multiracial and crossed class lines, as varied an effort as could be found in American politics...
...This past summer, some Washingtonians complained of their boredom with the crop of mayoral candidates in the first election of the post-Barry era...
...But her book offers a courageous assessment, and should be read as warning and signpost for the future...
...Barry, she writes, personifies Anansi the Spider, a mythic figure found in African literature...
...Barry did not see a new politics aborning...
...As a narrative device, Barry as Anansi is a bit overdone...
...What’s less clear is why Barry’s brand of politics held sway in Washington so long after voters in other cities moved on...
Vol. 30 • September 1998 • No. 9
