Give him this: Marion Barry was the most vivid local politician in the history of the District of Columbia. Like Earl and Huey Long, of Louisiana, he was a kaleidoscopically strange and contradictory political beast: a man of civil rights, a man of fallen character, a cunning operator, an arrogant hack, a builder, an underminer, a spokesman for the dispossessed, a bullshit artist. When Marion Barry was running the city as mayor, and then in his wilderness years—as prisoner, outcast, and councilman—what you thought of him depended largely on who you were, what ward you lived in, what your advantages and disadvantages were, what you were willing to tolerate and forgive.
Barry, who died Sunday at the age of seventy-eight, did not play by the customary rules of modern political rhetoric. When he was asked once about an evening revel, he replied, “First, it was not a strip club. It was an erotic club. And, second, what can I say? I’m a night owl.” In 1989, he remarked, “Outside of the killings, D.C. has one of the lowest crime rates in the country.” When he failed to file tax returns, he shrugged it off, saying he had been “distracted.” When he was arrested, in 2002, with a white substance under his nose and traces of cocaine in his car, Barry said, “They made all this up to justify questioning me. It’s all made up.”
Of course, his path to Bartlett’s, his immortal line, came in his abrupt self-analysis of his misadventure at the Vista International Hotel, in January, 1990.
Barry was serving his third term as mayor. For years, he had been known to be using drugs and drinking heavily—a sorry example for a city that was in the vortex of the American crack epidemic. The repeated incidents of his “night owl” behavior—falling asleep at official functions; chasing young women with sexual offers; keeping company with unsavory types on government-funded trips to the tropics—became so routine that the Washington Post assigned a reporter to “cover the body” at all times. His administration, after beginning as an effective creator of new minority-owned businesses, was increasingly tainted with reports of kickbacks, expense-account fraud, and the like. But, until that winter night, Barry believed he really was, as the weekly City Paper had dubbed him, Mayor for Life.
“I’m gonna be like that lion the Romans had,” he told a reporter for the Los Angeles Times during a night on the town. “They can just keep throwin’ stuff at me, you know? But I’ll be kickin’ their asses every time! In the end I’ll be sittin’ there, licking my paws!”
In an F.B.I. sting operation, Barry’s girlfriend, Rasheeda Moore, offered him a crack pipe in Room 727 of the Vista. Barry, who was eager to get Moore into bed, accepted the pipe and took a drag—and was soon surrounded by federal agents who had been watching via hidden camera.
“Bitch set me up,” Barry said. He was sentenced to six months in prison. When he was released and vowed a return to politics, he counseled the white community thusly: “Get over it.”
Barry was born in Itta Bena, a small town on the Mississippi Delta. He was the son of a sharecropper and a housemaid. He picked cotton. He studied at Fisk University. He got involved in the civil-rights movement, organizing lunch-counter sit-ins and bus-desegregation demonstrations, as early as 1960, throughout the South. He became the first chairman of the SNCC, the Student Non-Violent Coördinating Committee—a central organization in the movement. He studied chemistry as a graduate student at the University of Kansas and the University of Tennessee, coming just short of a doctorate. After moving to D.C., in 1965, he opened a chapter of SNCC and was elected to the school board. Then, the year after D.C. finally achieved home rule, in 1974, he was elected to the city council. He was the first civil-rights figure to be elected mayor of a major American city. His achievements as mayor were not insignificant. They included downtown economic development, minority contracts, summer-jobs programs in the poorer neighborhoods, and, in a city that had been treated like an afterthought, like a kind of capital plantation, an over-all sense of empowerment, particularly for the disadvantaged.
Barry was determined that his humiliating fall from grace would not define him, finish him, or make him historically ridiculous. In 1994, he ran for mayor—for a fourth term. His theme was redemption and forgiveness. He gave up his conservative business suits and wore kente-cloth outfits. He left his traditional Baptist church for an Afrocentric church, the Union Temple Baptist Church, led by Willie Wilson, who preached in front of a mural featuring a black Christ figure and twelve apostles: Rosa Parks, Nelson Mandela, Elijah Muhammad, and so on.
During that mayoral race, I went to D.C. to write about Barry for the magazine; I had lived in Washington, as a Post reporter, for much of his earlier incarnation as mayor. I thought, at the time, that if Barry were to win it would be more incredible than Richard Nixon’s return after failing to become governor of California; it would be the equal of James Michael Curley’s return to the Boston mayor’s seat after going to jail for mail fraud. In his first incarnation as mayor, Barry enjoyed support from white liberals in Ward 3, as well as African-Americans, and from the Post editorial page. In the mid-nineties, he campaigned most heavily in the city’s black neighborhoods and combined the rhetoric of twelve-step recovery programs, religious forgiveness, and conspiracy theories. In his terms the F.B.I., Congress, the Post, and the district attorney’s office—the “power structures”—had done him in.
One day I was sitting at lunch with him in McComb, Mississippi, where he had gone to celebrate a civil-rights anniversary with some old SNCC comrades. Over green tomatoes, mac and cheese, greens, ribs, and sweet potato pie, Barry talked about why he was returning to politics.
“Some people say it’s too soon, from a recovery point of view, to take on the mayor’s office,” he said. “But what they don’t know is that we recover by doing things that make us happy. What dragged me down was not being mayor—it was insecurity, the need to be accepted by everyone, the pleasure syndrome. That’s what brought me down. Alcohol and drugs—they make you feel good. They give you a sense of power that you don’t really have. So you have to do something that’s satisfying. I love serving people. I love helping people empower themselves. Even some friends think it’s too soon. Some genuinely think I’ll go back. But it’s been four years. To them, it seems like yesterday.”
Barry told me that his political model was Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., the Harlem congressman who fought against accusations of corruption and finally lost his seat to Charles Rangel. Barry refused to downplay his fall; fall, and redemption, was, in effect, his theme, his campaign slogan. Going to prison, he said, “was one of the best things that ever happened to me.” And yet he was sure that he had been exploited unfairly. “The government found a personal weakness. They’d tried everything else. I was under surveillance for years. … [They] went through my trash, they did tax audits, looking for everything they could find. So they found this weakness and they exploited it.”
Barry won. And he won largely because there were enough people in the city who were willing to accept his self-forgiving narrative (who among us is not fallen?) and had at least some memory of the city’s plantation legacy. This was the city that had been run by Theodore Bilbo, a Klansman who, as the chair of the Senate committee that ran D.C., suggested that thousands of black residents be driven out of town to work on farms, shipped to Africa, or sequestered in a stadium. This was a city where the N.F.L. franchise, the Redskins, was so white for so long that Shirley Povich, a sports columnist for the Post, wrote that the team colors ought to be burgundy, gold, and Caucasian. Barry knew this history, knew the sense of lingering anger, and played on it.
The fourth term was divisive and a fiscal disaster. Barry’s health deteriorated. After he left office, he worked for an investment bank, represented Ward 8 on the city council, and got himself into more tangles: drugs, delinquent taxes, conflict-of-interest charges, and, as recently as 2012, a preposterously racist public remark: “We’ve got to do something about these Asians coming in, opening up businesses, those dirty shops. They ought to go; I’ll just say that right now, you know. But we need African-American businesspeople to be able to take their places, too.”
Washington has changed enormously since Barry’s peak years as mayor. There’s more and more downtown development, more money. Developers and political technocrats run the city, for the most part. Neighborhoods like the H Street corridor, in Northeast, and U Street N.W., are now increasingly gentrified. Many African-Americans have moved to Prince George’s County, in Maryland. To the end, for all his countless faults, Barry continued to speak up for the poor, many of whom lived in his ward, Ward 8. But he could never quite overcome his demons. As recently as 2009, he had the extraordinary experience of a political supporter donating a kidney to him, saving his life. And then**,** in a matter of months he was in trouble again for stalking an old girlfriend. Things were never simple or easy with Marion Barry. “Love is very fleeting with me,” he told Courtland Milloy of the Post. “I don’t know why.”
