D.C. City Council Censures Marion Barry

This past Tuesday, March 2, 2010, the Washington, DC City Council voted unanimously (minus the targeted member, of course) to censure Ward 8 Councilman Marion Barry and remove him from his committee assignments. Oh...what...a...surprise. That meant he lost the chairmanship of the Housing and Workforce Development Committee and his membership on the powerful Committee on Finance and Revenue.

As we all expected he would, Barry assured his Ward 8 constituents that the loss of his committee posts would make him an even more powerful advocate for their interests, absent all those committee distractions. And, of course, as all political scoundrels do, he fessed up to "bad judgment," but admitted to no illegal behavior.

The whole fracas started when Barry was arrested last July for stalking his ex-girlfriend, Donna Watts-Brighthaupt. He will have to answer that charge in court this coming July 9^th-a little over a year after his arrest.

The incident was grounds enough for the D.C. City Council to appoint a special attorney, Robert J. Bennett, to look into the incident. What Bennett discovered, beyond the alleged stalking incident itself, was that Barry procured a useless, make-work grant for the lady, back when she was his girlfriend. To make matters worse, he apparently went with her to the bank, whenever she got paid from the grant, and took his "cut" right from her hands. Barry claims it was repayment of a loan. Sure it was.

In addition to protesting his innocence throughout this affair, Barry spoke frequently about-here we go again-a conspiracy against him. Poor Marion Barry! He seems to have been surrounded by "conspiracy" throughout his political career. The most famous one was his 1990 drug bust, in which he was caught smoking crack with a lady friend. Barry's first words upon his arrest? "The bitch set me up!"

Before that, when he was in his second term as mayor of Washington, D.C., he announced there was, according to a newspaper headline, a conspiracy to ensure he would be the last black mayor of D.C. I happened to live in the city at the time and the headline came on a poker-night Thursday. I hosted a low-stakes poker game every other Thursday for ten years. There were a couple of black fellows who sat in on the game from time to time, but this night, it was all white boys around the table. I threw that day's paper onto the table, pointed to the "conspiracy" headline and said: "All right, guys, who blabbed?"

As a politician, Marion Barry has a long, sordid record of unethical and outright dishonest conduct. Neither you nor I have the time to go into the whole sorry tale. Give him his due, though, he is one hellaciously-good campaigner.

After his release from prison, Barry ran for mayor again. Now, keep in mind, in the city of Washington, the Democratic Primary is the election. Yes, there is always a joke of a general election in November, where a Republican makes a pretense of running for office, but it never amounts to anything.

At the time, I lived in Ward 3, a generally-democratic, but heavily Caucasian area. Marion Barry was about as popular in that ward as a flu epidemic. Several months before Mr. Barry's comeback run, I went to cast my totally useless vote for W. Jefferson Clinton against Bush, Sr. I say it was totally useless, because, even if I had stayed in bed, dead drunk (something I had not done for several decades), George H.W. Bush still had about as much chance of carrying the District of Columbia in the election as I did of winning the Heavyweight championship from Evander Holyfield.

When I got to the polling place to cast my needless vote, people were lined up outside the door, down the steps and around the block. It took me a good hour and a half, just to get inside the door. On the other hand, in the Democratic Primary for mayor of the city in 1994, when Barry was running against an honest black attorney named John Ray, I walked right into the polling place and, at that very moment, found I was the only person in the room who wasn't a poll-worker.

But it was more than the stupidity and short-sightedness of the Ward 3 voters that put Barry back in office. In his home Ward 8, Barry volunteers were shuttling the aged, the poor and the infirm to the polls in van after van. Barry played the race card expertly against his black opponent, branding him the tool of the evil white establishment. He won the primary in a landslide, and then the election.

There is something very sad about this story-not just the recent censure, but all the political scrapes this man has created throughout his career as a politician. That is because, in his youth, Marion Barry was a staunch and effective civil rights leader. He was the first chairman of SNCC, The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, back when it was largely an organization that lived up to its name. By the time Barry left SNCC, H. Rap Brown was in charge and people had begun calling it "The Non-Student Violence Coordinating Committee."

Barry's SNCC activities took him to Washington, DC, where he became a strong and effective advocate for home rule. The District of Columbia is not yet an entirely independent entity, but, thanks to people like Barry, it is no longer the exclusive fiefdom of Congress, as it had been in the past.

Barry got elected to the D.C. City Council and achieved some heroic status when he was seriously wounded trying to moderate with the armed Hanafi Muslims (They're the ones who blew Malcolm X away for insufficient hatred of white people) after they had attacked City Hall.

When he made his first run for mayor of the District of Columbia, the Washington Post endorsed him and many voters, even Ward 3 residents like me, voted for him in the primary and general election. He won easily. After that it became the same sad story: power corrupts.

Sources

www.washingtonpost.com

Wikipedia