Growing up and learning about politics, I got the idea that Marion Barry was a standing joke based on coverage (the worst: upon seeing Samuel Pierce on the dais a few months after the inauguration, Ronald Reagan turned to his HUD secretary, nodded, shook his hand, and said, “Mr. Mayor.”). Because we’re taught in the media business to cover people based on the way they present themselves, probity ends the moment we can’t say someone is good or bad. Adam Serwer’s fine obit provides historical context, as usual the first casualty when reporting stories like this on air. For example, here was the state of race relations in DC not long after the Voting rights and Civil Rights bills passed:
President Dwight Eisenhower ordered the city’s public facilities desegregated in the 1950s, but racist Southern Democrats maintained their control of the city from Congress. Overcoming resistance from Republicans, Southern Democrats, and entrenched business interests, President Lyndon Johnson pushed a bill through Congress allowing an appointed mayor and city council that paved the way for home rule — the white elite in the city, including, Jaffe and Sherwood note, Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham and editor Ben Bradlee, urged Johnson to appoint a white mayor.
Johnson resisted that impulse and appointed Walter Washington, who was easily defeated by Marion Barry in the city’s second elections in 1978. Rep. John McMillan, the Dixiecrat who chaired the House Committee on the District of Columbia until 1973, sent Washington a truckload of watermelons to “celebrate” his receipt of Washington’s first city budget.
Now this is history not taught in schools. In Miami-Dade County the citizens of Hialeah kept Raul Martinez as mayor for years; in his second decade of power he was buying fridges and stoves for the working poor like my great aunt and great uncle. A veritable Huey Long, Raul was, and voters didn’t mind if he pocketed the boodle so long as they got some themselves:
For thousands of people in the District, Marion Barry was the reason they had a job, which meant he was the reason they could keep their home, feed their children, or keep their lights on. Poor and working-class kids in the city have been getting their first jobs from Barry’s summer jobs program for thirty-five years. His administration increased assistance to the elderly and the poor. If you didn’t personally benefit from the way Barry ran the city, you probably knew someone who did. People in D.C. loved Marion Barry because they felt like he made their lives better.
Neither this nor Serwer’s piece are attempts to obfuscate Barry’s record; they’re to remind readers that charity and corruption are often indivisible.
Humanizing The Vacuum 