Doug Patton, a lawyer and lobbyist with deep roots in D.C. politics, recalls a conversation over lunch one recent afternoon in his firm’s conference room. It was mid-February. Marion Barry was in the news.
“What’s with your former mayor?” one lawyer from out of town asked. “I read an article about his not paying taxes. Is he above the law?”
A client chimed in: “Is he still addicted to cocaine?”
Others piled on. How could D.C. residents have voted him onto the city council? Hasn’t his time passed?
Patton listened and waited. He had known Barry for more than three decades. He had worked on his first mayoral campaign in 1978. He considered Barry a friend. “Tell me,” Patton said after the others had said their piece, “is there anyone around this table, including myself, who has a friend who would give them a kidney?”
Dead silence.
In that moment, Patton crystallized the essential Marion Barry conundrum: Those who don’t know him, or who observe him from a distance, see him as a personally and politically corrupt scoundrel. Many who know him, or who have been touched by his largesse, love him. That’s why Kim Dickens, one of Barry’s friends, offered up her kidney when she found he was suffering kidney failure.
Marion Barry is in the twilight of his career. He’s 72, living alone in a small apartment in Congress Heights, a tough neighborhood east of the Anacostia River. His four marriages have failed. His $125,600 salary is being garnished by the IRS to the tune of $1,350 every two weeks.
Even in his dotage, Barry can be a potent and divisive force on the city council, to which he was re-elected by Ward 8 voters last fall. But he’s not aging well, physically or mentally.
Last week’s hearing in U.S. District Court over Barry’s failure to pay taxes provided a striking bookend.
In the summer of 1990, then-Mayor Barry cut the figure of a brash, defiant politician facing 14 counts surrounding the infamous cocaine bust at the Vista Hotel. Wearing a blue pinstripe suit and red tie and a carnation in his lapel, he would stride into the courtroom like a mafia don.
On Thursday morning, Barry was the elder gentleman who ambled gingerly into Courtroom 4. His thin bones seemed to rattle around in his pale gray suit with each tender step. He had to be helped to and from his seat at the defendant’s table. A few close friends, mostly women and godchildren, watched from the wooden benches.
The prosecutor said Barry deserved jail time for not paying federal or local taxes for years, for missing deadlines to repay them, for his “recalcitrance.”
Arguing against incarcerating Barry, defense attorney Fred Cooke reeled off his maladies: heart congestion, hypertension, diabetes, renal failure, dialysis, prostate cancer. Add decades of hard living and hard drinking and you can see why Barry now evinces more pity than fear.
The one constant in Barry’s personal and political lives is his ability to polarize people on matters of race. He is one of the most racially divisive politicians in America. Though less potent, race is still his means to an end.
Born March 6, 1936, the son of a sharecropper in Itta Bena, a tiny town on the Mississippi Delta, Barry always excelled in school. He grew up in Memphis. He was an Eagle Scout. He graduated from LeMoyne College and planned to be a chemist before he was swept away by the student civil rights movement in 1961.
Four years later, Barry arrived in the nation’s capital. He immediately demonized white cops and congressional overlords and “moneylord merchants.” The white establishment saw him as smart outsider who could control local blacks. With federal funds, he started a jobs program called Pride Inc. to occupy inner-city blacks during the hot summer of ’65.
When blacks burned parts of D.C. after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, Barry emerged as conciliator. He entered politics, first on the school board then on the city council, where he built bridges to white developers. In 1978, he was elected the second mayor of Washington, D.C., by a thin margin in a three-way Democratic primary. He went on to two more victories in 1982 and 1986. He was running for a fourth term in 1990 when D.C. cops and FBI agents busted him for crack possession.
Barry was convicted of one misdemeanor count and served six months in jail. He returned, cast himself as a flawed man and ran for the city council in Ward 8, the city’s poorest and mostly African American ward. Two years later, in 1994, he won a fourth mayoral term and said to his opponents: “Get over it.”
Congress interrupted Barry’s term when the city neared bankruptcy in 1995, and a federal control board took power.
After serving four terms as mayor, six months in jail on a cocaine rap, and currently as Ward 8 councilman, the question is still relevant: Why do the people love him so?
“He talked the ‘black talk,’ he wore a dashiki, he swaggered around,” says Sandra Seegers, a Ward 8 neighbor who has run against Barry. “Black people wanted to see someone who would stand up against ‘the man.’ He gave people summer jobs. They still love him for that. That lets him get away with murder,” she says.
Says Bill Regardie, whose magazine often skewered Barry in the 1990s: “He represented the hopes and dreams of the African-American community. He was a marvelous politician — still is. That’s why he gets re-elected.”
Indeed, there is no question that Barry opened the D.C. government and bureaucracy and contracts to blacks. His human frailties brought him low.
“I always compared him to Bill Clinton,” says Chuck Conconi, a former journalist who covered Barry from the 1960s on. “Both are talented, brilliant men with tremendous political acumen. Both were personally undisciplined, which was their downfall.”
The young Barry and the aging Barry will always be judged through a two-way, racial prism; I prefer to assess his work for the neediest Washingtonians, the ones he purports to champion, his constituents in Ward 8.
Mayor Adrian Fenty’s constituent service office says he’s done little for his ward, and calls for service come directly to them. He will show up for news conferences announcing new programs or fresh developments, but he rarely initiates them or works to complete them. Barry tends to use his seat to advocate for citywide issues, such as affordable housing. After years with Barry’s representation, Ward 8 is still the drug and murder capital of the city.
But Barry still works hard for longtime cronies. Next week he is scheduled to try to put through emergency legislation that would give a tax break to H.R. Crawford, a black developer whose projects have depended on public funds.
Barry’s legacy will be mixed. Most whites will see him as a scoundrel and scam artist. Most blacks will remember him as a political savior who represented their hopes and dreams, gave them jobs, and connected with them heart to heart.
That was evident during a recess in last week’s hearing. Barry took a seat with his friends. Women hovered and put cream on his hands. He beckoned to Martinez Raynard, his 9-year-old godson. Barry stroked his head and face. They locked eyes. Barry kissed the boy and wrapped him in his arms. If Barry runs for office in nine years, he has another vote.
