Blacks in Washington are increasingly turning away from Mayor Adrian Fenty, who promised to be a “post-racial” politician but who many black D.C. residents say has become imperious and out of touch.
“It’s like he turned his back on the African-American community,” said Wendy Glenn, of the Rosedale neighborhood. “I don’t think he has the respect that a mayor should have for all his constituents.”
A Clarus poll released in November put Fenty’s approval among blacks at 29 percent and 60 percent among whites. A recent Washington Post poll put Fenty’s approval at 29 percent among black voters and 57 percent among whites.
This wasn’t news to Hillcrest resident Ralph Chittams.
“I never liked Adrian Fenty,” Chittams said. “I thought he was a lousy city council member and I knew he was going to be a lousy mayor.”
Chittams’ opinion of Fenty appears to be spreading. Fenty carried every precinct in the city in 2006. Both the Clarus and Post polls now have him losing in Wards 5, 7 and 8.
“People are just tired of being lied to, being disrespected by someone who just seems above them,” Ward 5 Democratic Councilman Harry Thomas Jr. said. “The government is run with a sense of arrogance it’s never had before.”
“Arrogance” is a common refrain among many of Fenty’s critics. Many cite the city’s spiraling unemployment and then immediately contrast it with a mayor who squabbled over baseball tickets with the D.C. Council and who had a special heater installed at a public pool so his afternoon workouts could be more comfortable.
“He treats this as if it’s a plantation and he’s the master,” said Jeri Washington, a Penn Branch resident.
Bishop Harry Jackson, who is leading a fight against gay marriage in D.C. and who sees political potential in the social conservatism of black churches, says Fenty’s support of gay marriage was “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
“The church is at the heart of the black community. He’s not connected to nor does he have high respect for the church or the clergy,” Jackson said.
The divide is not cleanly racial. Two of Fenty’s most vigorous and most successful critics — Mary Cheh, D-Ward 3, and Phil Mendelson, D-at large — are white. And not all black Washingtonians have soured on Fenty.
“Change agents are not liked,” said Lowell Duckett, a retired D.C. police officer who challenged the city’s personnel policies for years. “I think he’s doing one hell of a job.”
For Duckett, Fenty’s calls for “accountability” and his willingness to take on the “old guard” — the old black machine run by Marion Barry — are just the right medicine.
“I marched and protested and pushed the police department not so that the department would be all white or all black but so it would be all excellent,” he said. “When we had the old guard in charge, we had the highest unemployment in the black community, we had the highest level of violent crime in the nation. I found out black wasn’t black enough to solve black people’s problems. What you need is leadership.”
University of the District of Columbia professor G. Derek Musgrove that Fenty is “a technocrat” whose promise to make government leaner and more agile is a threat to many middle-class black Washingtonians, many of whom owe their economic stability to city government jobs.
“It seems to me in most cases those fights revolve around jobs that have been by and large the property of the black middle class, or were even the creators of the black middle class,” Musgrove said.
