He may have been venal and indifferent, but he was a rare champion of a beleaguered city
By J.F. | SINGAPORE
THE footage is grainy, poorly lit and almost indecipherable. Shot at the Vista Hotel in Washington, DC, on January 18th 1990, it shows a man and a woman, both standing in profile. The woman is active and talkative, the man stays in one place, leaning back, eventually taking something clear from his mouth and exhaling a plume of smoke. Suddenly, several other men rush in, the letters “FBI” visible on the backs of their jackets. They order the man to put his hands against the wall, and tell him he is being arrested for violating the District of Columbia’s narcotics laws: the plume of smoke came from the crack he was smoking. “That was a set-up," the man says, resignedly. "God damn, I shouldn’t have come up here.”
The woman was named Rasheeda Moore; she was an unemployed model. The man was Marion Barry, then nearing the end of his third term as mayor of Washington, DC, and long dogged by rumours of drug use. Mr Barry—who was first elected mayor in 1978, and who died on Sunday at the age of 78—would be tried on 14 counts of drug possession and perjury stemming from this sting. But in the public eye, his divided city was on trial: DC, capital of the world’s richest country, led American cities in rates of murder, black infant mortality and juvenile AIDS cases. Mr Barry, a one-time civil-rights hero, became a punchline, an embarrassment. The trial doomed his pursuit of a fourth mayoral term in 1990, and landed him in prison for six months on two charges, neither of them felonies. A subsequent race for an at-large city council seat delivered him his first-ever electoral defeat. Voters in seven of the city’s eight voting districts—or wards, as they are called in Washington—had had enough.
The lone district where Mr Barry still had fans was the isolated and poor Ward 8 east of the Anacostia River. A few miles and a world away from white-columned, federal Washington, DC, this was the part of the city where tourists dared not tread. It bore the brunt of Washington’s crack epidemic, which turned the city into America’s “murder capital”. The ward's mostly black residents lacked the functional schools and reliable city services enjoyed by the city’s wealthy white precincts. Much of it was undeveloped to the point of being rural. This is where Mr Barry began his redemption, bloodied but unbowed. In 1992 he defeated a long-time ally, Wilhelmina Rolark, to win Ward 8’s seat on the city council (with the slogan “He may not be perfect, but he’s perfect for DC”).
Cynics will claim that Mr Barry exploited the city's racial resentments. They have a point: he was not above racial politics. For the 1992 race he traded in the power suits he wore as mayor for African kente cloth and a kufi. But for decades, poor black Washingtonians had no voice in their own city’s politics. The city did not even have the right to elect its own mayor until 1974. Until then it was run by congressional committees chaired by men who also weren't above racial politics: Theodore Bilbo, a senator from Mississippi, advocated deporting black Americans to Africa. John McMillan, a congressman from South Carolina, sent a truckload of watermelons to the office of Walter Washington, the city’s last presidentially-appointed mayor. In 1969, when a younger Mr Barry declared that DC residents were “tired of living on the McMillan plantation”, he was right: they were.
Yet Mr Barry was no bomb-thrower. Born in Mississippi, he held bachelor's and master's degrees in chemistry, and had a sterling civil-rights pedigree: he was president of the NAACP at LeMoyne College in Memphis, Tennessee, and first came to Washington with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. White voters gave him his first mayoral victory in 1978. He won a ringing endorsement from the Washington Post and ran strongly in the city’s white precincts, while his two opponents split the city’s black vote. He also won the support of the city’s police and fireman’s unions. Once in office, he courted developers, leading to a downtown building boom, and he trimmed the city’s bloated budget.
In his second year in office he launched the Summer Youth Employment Programme, which gave summer jobs to any DC high-school student who wanted one. That programme still exists, and hundreds of Washingtonians credit Mr Barry with giving them their first real job. He also dispersed municipal offices around the city, which both made local government more visible and helped spur development in areas of the city still scarred by the riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King junior in 1968. And he was a superbly gifted retail politician: warm, attentive and shameless. During his first campaign, in discussing his transition from dashiki-clad civil-rights activist to pinstripe-suit wearing friend of the business community, he called himself “a situationist. I do what is necessary for the situation.”
And yet, despite his rhetoric and achievements, Mr Barry was a poor administrator with a wildly undisciplined personal life. Crime worsened while he was in office. That may not have been his fault, but his response seem rather blithe, particularly with statements such as “Outside of the killings, DC has one of the lowest crime rates in the country”. He failed to file income taxes, and tested positive for cocaine and marijuana as late as 2005. He had four failed marriages and a string of mistresses, some of whom claim to have supplied him with drugs. His ethics were also, alas, highly situational: Rasheeda Moore, the model who supplied him with crack in the FBI sting, also received $180,000 in city funds to run an “image consciousness” programme. While serving as councilman he was censured for steering a city contract to an ex-girlfriend and accepting cash from contractors.
His last term as mayor, from 1994 to 1998, coincided with the Republican takeover of Congress. In short order, they also seized control of the city’s finances, having already taken other municipal functions. Mr Barry howled, but the city was in disarray. His successor, Anthony Williams, was a bean-counter almost comically devoid of charisma. But he knew his way around a balance sheet, and in two terms as mayor he regained nearly all the home-rule powers Mr Barry had lost.
By the time he died, Mr Barry had long ceased to have any real impact on the city’s politics. He had become less an elder statesman than an old rogue: pitiable, lovable and never dull. Yet I found myself oddly moved, saddened even, at the news of his passing. I grew up in Mr Barry’s Washington. I was 14 at the time of the Vista Hotel sting. Death is always sad, but Mr Barry's demise evokes the larger, irrevocable passing of his DC—my DC, now gone forever.
No worthwhile city is static, of course; everything changes. But I’ve lived in a lot of places, and I am hard pressed to think of one that has changed as radically and in as short a time as Washington, DC. The increasingly dense, cosmopolitan, glass-and-chrome city bears only the slightest resemblance to the smaller, blacker, cozier city that raised me, and that I miss every time I go back home. I would not wish for a return of that Washington’s violence and dysfunction, any more than I would wish to live under a mayor as venal and indifferent as Mr Barry. But his venality and indifference ought not entirely eclipse his genuine concern for people that suffered without a champion for far too long.
