Marion Barry did not like me.
When I was a reporter at The Washington Post he once came to lunch and told the publisher he had protested to have the paper hire blacks. But “not like him,” he said.
I once wrote a story about how crime, unemployment and infant mortality increased while the stock of low-income and public housing decreased during his time as Mayor. I questioned whether he was failing the poor black people he claimed to champion.
My stories pointed to decreased congressional support of the city as the District government under Barry became the butt of jokes, some racist, about black people not being able to run “Chocolate City.”
There was a loss of middle-class taxpayers as Barry administration aides made deals to put money in their pockets and some went to jail. Former Sen. John Danforth (R-Mo.) later described Barry’s administration as “scandalously corrupt and hopelessly incompetent.”
All the while the mayor made a show wearing fancy suits while driving around in a chauffeured Town Car, going to Las Vegas fights and on Caribbean vacations.
I soon got a late night call about my stories criticizing Barry’s administration.
The man identified himself as a Barry supporter. He told me he knew where my children went to school and not to start my car. A few days later my house was burglarized. Nothing was taken, but family pictures were smashed, clothes thrown on the floor and a butcher’s knife left in the middle of my bed.
An editor called the mayor to let him know that if anything happened to me the paper would blame him.
But his many supporters, including some members of the Post editorial board, which supported him when he first won the mayoralty, asked why I was critical of another black man.
Some of his supporters reminded me that he had been in the civil rights movement in the early 1960s as a leader of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. The biggest point of defense for him was that his summer jobs program gave jobs to young people.
Other supporters pointed to more black people getting jobs in city government. They excused the deals he cut with girlfriends using city money as personal foibles — no big deal. They excused the strip clubs, the streets that remain clogged after snow storms and public schools that sank to among the worst in the nation. They said white politicians did the same.
My career went on to national politics. Barry continued as mayor, winning three more terms. He was convicted of cocaine possession, seen on videotape smoking crack. One judge described the city’s mayor as a man who gave “aid, comfort and encouragement to the drug culture.” His troubled administration led the courts to take over foster care, prisons and the city’s public housing. Problems with the city’s budget management led Congress to strip the mayor of control of the city budget.
None of it mattered to Barry’s supporters. They identified with him as a man of the people, a Southern boy who made his way to become mayor of the nation’s capital.
Recently I was with Sterling Tucker, the former chair of the D.C. City Council, and one of two black men who ran against Barry in his first race for mayor. Mr. Tucker and the city’s first mayor, Walter Washington, split the black vote. Barry won the white section of the city to narrowly claim the victory. Then he played on racial antagonism and class divides to secure his political base among poor black people, even though city services for the people who needed them most deteriorated on his watch.
In paying tribute to Mr. Tucker, who recently retired from the board of the National Theater, I said he was a leader who brought people together, whether in the theater, the church we attend, or across lines of race and class in the city.
“What a different city we would have lived in all these years,” I said “if Sterling Tucker had won that race instead of Marion Barry.”
Journalist and political commentator Juan Williams is a co-host of Fox News Channel’s “The Five” and author of the best-selling “Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965.”
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