Dream City: Race, Power, and the Decline of Washington, D.C., 1964-1994. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, April, 1994 by Mark Feldstein

Two years after he emerged from a federal penitentiary, Marion Barry is back. Decked out in African regalia, with a new wife at his side--his fourth, who is, like his second, a convicted felon--the former mayor plots his political comeback. From the D.C. Council he holds forth in his endless quest for respectability.

In their new book on the Barry era, Dream City, Harry S. Jaffe and Tom Sherwood remind us of how much damage Barry did to his adopted city, and especially to the poor he claimed to champion. Sherwood, who has covered him for nearly 20 years, first at The Washington Post and then at WRC-TV, and Jaffe, a writer for Washingtonian magazine, provide the first comprehensive political history of both the former mayor and the District of Columbia.

Along the way, the authors dish out some juicy tidbits. According to the book, Barry's own lawyer, Herbert Reid, said privately of the mayor, "If it walks, Marion fucks it. If it doesn't, he ingests it." Dream City is filled with stories suggesting Reid understood his client well. Once, Barry's second wife apparently got so tired of Barry's philandering that she put a pistol to his head, saying "Nigger, I'm tired of this shit. I'm gonna blow your fucking brains out."

But Dream City is more than a compilation of Barry's tawdry exploits. It is also a history of local Washington--black Washington-and its forgotten pain. The book weaves back and forth between the history of the city and the rise and fall of Barry, arguing that "Barry's descent... eerily mirrored the city's own decline." It's a compelling metaphor, but the authors never develop it, apparently unable to decide whether Barry's Washington is uniquely flawed or the victim of problems that afflict all of urban America.

The book's strength is the simple and real human drama of its story. It follows the "Chicken Express," the railroad cars that brought blacks north during the great migration from the South after World War II. Born in Itta Bena, Mississippi, Marion Barry was part of that migration. He began his life picking cotton in the Delta just as his slave ancestors did. He wore cardboard shoes. He never knew his father.

Barry's journey north took him first into the civil rights movement in Tennessee. About this time, his first wife divorced him, saying he "disappeared" and left her "impoverished." But Barry moved on. He adopted "Shepilov" as his middle name, after a Soviet propagandist. He became the first head of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, although his colleagues there say Barry ducked the Freedom Rides. In any case, political liberation became personal liberation for Barry, and he channelled his inchoate rage in a way that gave his life purpose.

In 1965, Barry moved to Washington and took over the city's fledgling civil rights movement. His "Free DC" campaign---hitting up white businesses for donations with the promise of protection from picketing--was virtually a shake-down racket. He used the same approach to set up Pride, Inc., the job training program underwritten by Lyndon Johnson's Labor Department after Barry maumaued the administration with threats of riots. "I'm going all the way to the top," Barry vowed at the time. "I'm going to control this city."

Not yet. Even some respectable Washington liberals thought that was still a job for whites only. Sherwood and Jaffe cite Joseph Califano, an LBJ lawyer and advisor who later represented the Post, who wrote that when the time came for District home rule, Post publisher Katharine Graham and her then-managing editor, Ben Bradlee, met with Califano to suggest that a white should be appointed mayor. Who did they have in mind? Averell Harriman, Edward Bennett Williams, Nelson Rockefeller, Dean Acheson, or Sargent Shriver. It was only after Roger Wilkins, then a young White House aide, pointed out how silly it would be to pass a home-rule bill and then name a white man mayor of a majority-black city that Walter Washington, a black, was appointed.

Meanwhile, Barry exercised his power from the street. He baited the police, fomented his own arrest, and then exploited it to make himself a hero in the black community. Soon, he was trading in his dashiki for a suit, winning election to the school board and then the city council.

District Crime

His drug use also allegedly began during this time--first marijuana with his movement buddies, then cocaine at swank bars. His political stock soared when he was shot by Hanafi Muslim militants in a siege at the District building in 1977. Afterward, in his hospital room, a catfight nearly erupted between his current wife and his steady girlfriend at the time, Effi Cowell. Barry married Effi shortly thereafter. (His advisor Ivanhoe Donaldson insisted on it to clean up Barry's image for his upcoming mayoral bid.)

In 1978, Barry was elected mayor in an upset, largely thanks to a series of election-eve endorsements by the Post. "He was a bit of a roughneck," said editor Phil Geylin, "but... I thought Barry could take people who might run amok, who might be hostile to society and to the government, and lead them in a healthy direction." Gracious in victory, Barry credited Graham with being "the lady that made me." "Yes, Marion," Graham reportedly replied, "and don't you forget it."