Remembering Mayor Barry on the 10th anniversary of his death

I have no distinctive memories of Tom Bradley, who served as mayor of Los Angeles in the mid-to late-1980s when I worked as a reporter in my home city. Bradley. a Black former LAPD lieutenant was calm, dignified, and devoid of charisma.

Now and then, as a journalist for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, I’d cover Bradley at a community or City Hall event. He was as exciting as a soccer game that ended in a 0-0 draw.

Across the country, DC Mayor Marion Barry was another matter. I’ve wondered about Barry lately, on the 10th anniversary of his death at age 78. Barry was everything Bradley was not — exciting, charismatic, unpredictable — and deeply polarizing.

The first time I saw Barry as a Washington resident was in mid-September, 1989. I’d just arrived in DC to take a job as a night police reporter with The Washington Post. I was still settling into my new home, a row house converted into apartment units, in Shaw, just east of downtown. A day or two after a street festival in Adams Morgan, I flipped on my 15-inch TV, mounted atop a box of books, to watch the local news. The local station aired a video from the festival showing Barry strutting across the stage to catcalls and boos.

With a bemused expression, Barry raised his arm and flipped off the crowd.

The video clip was mesmerizing, and, for a journalist, oddly thrilling.

Although I wasn’t hired to cover city politics, I had a hunch that working in D.C. was going to be a blast.

It was.

A few weeks later, early on Halloween night, I got my first glimpse of Barry in person. The Post dispatched me to Potomac Gardens, a forbidding public housing complex on the southeastern edge of Capitol Hill.

At the time, Barry was fending off accusations of drug use. Hizzoner dropped by to make nice with residents and generate good press.

Clad in a suit and hard dress shoes, Barry shrugged off his suit coat, grabbed a basketball, and launched a couple of set shots toward a goal set up in the courtyard. He bricked both attempts, then spoke to residents and reporters, claiming that Potomac Gardens was safer than it was a year ago. I stifled a laugh. Bodies were dropping every night amid a violent crack epidemic, and the city was hurtling toward a record number of annual killings.

After advising young people to stay away from drugs, Bary launched into an impromptu rap: “My mind is a pearl / I can do anything in the whole wide world!”

Less than three months later, in January 1990, a team of FBI agents and D.C. police investigators proved it, with the famous sting at the downtown Vista Hotel. That summer,  in August 1990, a jury convicted Barry of one misdemeanor count of cocaine possession.

By then, Barry had already announced he would not run for a fourth mayoral term. That fall, Sharon Pratt Dixon, a PEPCO executive, won the mayor’s race by campaigning as a reformer. A judge sentenced Barry to six months in prison.

That would have been the end of an ordinary politician’s career. But Barry was anything but ordinary.

On the day he was released from prison in Pennsylvania, in April 1992, Barry returned to the city like a conquering hero. About 250 supporters piled into a six-van caravan to escort him to D.C. “I come out of prison better, not bitter,” Barry told his supporters. Two years later, in 1994, Barry completed a remarkable comeback by winning the mayoral race, besting the incumbent decisively.

Barry returned to lead a city in crisis. D.C.’s finances were in shambles. Congress, which has the final say on the District’s budget, voted to slash $150 million from the city’s allotment for fiscal year 1995.

Even before the crack bust, many Whites who lived west of 16th Street Northwest, which before widespread gentrification marked the city’s racial dividing line, reviled Barry. The sentiment was shared by many suburban whites. In May 1989, Washingtonian Magazine published an infamous cover depicting Barry in clown makeup, with the legend “Jerk in the Box.”

Many whites couldn’t understand Barry’s enduring appeal to Black voters, particularly poor and working-class people.

Barry was a brilliant, flawed, complicated man.

After graduating from college with a degree in chemistry, Barry started his career as a stalwart in the civil rights movement. As mayor, he launched a summer jobs program that gave many young Black DC residents their first steady job and paycheck. Barry knew every neighborhood in the city and seemingly remembered every voter’s name. He also used crack, drank heavily, and womanized.

Barry’s legacy is complex, says Tom Sherwood, a white former Post and local TV news journalist who covered Barry for almost 30 years.

“In the decade since his 2014 death — and even through much of his life as mayor — Barry uniquely has been the butt of jokes for his personal behavior and hailed as a transitional figure who smashed open political doors to help expand opportunity and the Black middle class of the District of Columbia.

Both views are grounded in truth.

Barry faced personal demons – drug use and a flamboyant lifestyle — but he never was personally charged with any government corruption, despite aggressive investigations by two U.S. Attorneys.

Barry was both a child of the ’60s Civil Rights Movement and a politician who learned how to be effective in the streets and the corporate suites of white power.

The one thing he lacked was personal discipline. He used a great deal of his negotiating and leadership skills to get out of personal trouble.  In meetings with me, he would complain how his political appointees were messing up, how they got government contacts and he got all the negative public and media criticism when they failed to do good work,” Sherwood said.

Sherwood recalled a meeting he had with Barry in the mayor’s office in 1989.

“He vowed he was going to get tough with those appointees who were not doing their jobs because he was planning to run for mayor again in 1990,” Sherwood recalled. “A few weeks later, in January 1990, days before he was to kick off his next reelection campaign, Barry was arrested in the infamous FBI sting at the Vista Hotel.  (I was the first reporter on the scene for NBC4 and we broke into programming about 10 p.m. to report the arrest.)”

Many Blacks identified with Barry’s ups and downs and his resilience, said Ron Moten,  a Black community organizer in DC.

“Many people in our community resonate with him because he showed us that you can fall down, but get back up to be a productive citizen for your community,” Moten said.