Like most American cities, Washington has been grappling lately with the issue of historic monuments and statuary, public and private, and whether they ought to be displaced and discarded. The good news this past week is that, in a departure from recent custom, a new statue—eight feet high, encased in bronze—was raised and dedicated in a place of honor along Pennsylvania Avenue. The bad news is that it’s a statue of Marion Barry.
To the extent that Americans outside the nation’s capital know anything about the four-term “mayor for life,” who died in 2014, it is that Barry presided over a fleetingly competent and glaringly scandal-ridden government and in the middle of his third mayoral term (1990) was arrested in a sting operation at a downtown hotel while smoking crack in the company of a woman who was not Mrs. Barry.
There are very few notable quotations associated with Mayor Barry; the best-known, by far, is his rueful comment while being handcuffed in the hotel room: “Bitch set me up.”
Like most successful demagogues, Barry had considerable personal charm—I was exposed to it on various occasions—which disguised a wholly disorganized and disordered private life. And unlike most politicians of his type, Barry did not seem to profit financially from public office. What he sought was power and acclaim. What he had was the indefinable appeal we call charisma and, in his time and place, he was hero to a sizable segment of the city’s African-American population.
For the latter half of the 20th century, Washington was a “majority black” city—it ceased being so after the 2010 census—and the dedication of Barry’s monument was described by the Washington Post as an elegy, of sorts, for “Chocolate City,” when the nation’s capital “went from a federal protectorate to independence, and the region became home to a large African American middle class.”
In one sense, I felt a certain sympathy for the Post reporter, who was treading on sensitive soil. But at the same time, the Post’s description of the District of Columbia’s transition from congressional protectorate to (limited) home rule was only approximately accurate—and the Post knows it.
For the fact is that credit for the aforementioned transition belongs not to Marion Barry but to his predecessor Walter Washington, who was appointed mayor-commissioner when the District was granted a measure of self-government (1967) during the Johnson administration. It was Mr. Washington who organized most of the agencies of city government and was elected to the office of mayor, in his own right, in 1974. Under Barry, by contrast, the corruption and chaos in the midst of his fourth term—to which he was elected after a sojourn in prison—was such that Congress reasserted control of the District government and placed it in receivership for a number of years toward the end of the century.
Indeed, the difference between Walter Washington and Marion Barry is a story in itself. Barry was a civil-rights “activist” who arrived in Washington in the mid-1960s and achieved local renown for his skill at exploiting Great Society programs and political street theater. Washington was a classic product of the city’s old black bourgeoisie, a Howard Law graduate whose career was spent in federal housing agencies and, briefly, in the Lindsay administration in New York City.
I suspect it was the comparative absence of charisma in Walter Washington that recommended him to Lyndon Johnson; a conscientious and largely competent public servant, he reassured the city’s commercial and political establishment in ways that the populist Marion Barry would not. That, at any rate, was the Washington Post’s rationale when, in the 1978 Democratic mayoral primary, it abandoned Washington and embraced the insurgent Barry—a strategic boost that the Post, no doubt, would prefer to forget.
Which brings us full circle. In a city full of neoclassical monuments and equestrian generals, the Barry figure is a kitschy depiction of the smiling mayor-for-life waving his hand in the fashion of Chairman Mao. But just down the avenue, in a less conspicuous spot, is a late-Victorian statue of Alexander Shepherd (1835-1902), a post-Civil War city commissioner and governor in an earlier incarnation of District self-government.
The Washington of Shepherd’s day—he was something of an urban autocrat, 19th-century style—was a sleepy enclave of such primitive character that Congress briefly contemplated relocating the capital to St. Louis. It was Shepherd who drained the swamp (literally), paved the streets and sidewalks, dug the sewers, planted water and gas mains, put up street-lamps, installed streetcars, and laid track.
In that sense, to the extent that Washington, D.C., is a modern metropolis, credit goes almost exclusively to “Boss” Shepherd. But in 1979, when the Boss and his works were all but forgotten, Marion Barry had his statue removed to make way for a vast concrete enclosure set down in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue and called Freedom Plaza. The Shepherd statue was deposited in a public works lot at the edge of the city where, at one point, it lay on its side in the mud and languished for decades.
Until, that is, a dozen years ago, when a local historian undertook a campaign to rescue the statue—and Alexander Shepherd’s repute—from oblivion. And so he stands, once again, on the same granite pedestal where he used to be seen before Marion Barry arrived in town. Unlike the mayor-for-life, Shepherd-in-stone isn’t waving; but then again, there’s no need for it.
