A dream deferred; a black mayor betrays the faith - Philadelphia mayor - W. Wilson Goode

Washington Monthly, July-August, 1986 by Chuck Stone

After Congress increased District bus fares in 1966, hitting hard the system's mostly black riders, Barry used his SNCC training to organize a bus boycott. He then demanded that District stores display orange and black "Free D.C.' stickers in their windows and give money to the home rule drive or else he would organize pickets and boycott against their stores. He was accused of trying to extort money, and backed down. But Barry was making waves and William Raspberry, a columnist for The Washington Post, wrote in 1966 that Barry was "fast becoming the leading catalyst for change in Washington.'

By 1967, Barry had quit SNCC and started working with a federally-funded jobs program called Pride Inc. that put thousands of youths to work cleaning streets, painting buildings, landscaping, and operating gas stations. Barry quickly became a militant voice in D.C. politics. After the city's 1968 riots, for example, he warned that he had been given "the word that if the city is rebuilt the way it was, it will be burned down again.'

The home rule movement's first achievement was to win the right to hold school board elections. In 1971, Barry, frequently dressed in the uniform of the revolution, dark glasses and Dashiki, ran for the board, pledging to "get rid of some of those teachers who are not teaching' and telling high school students that "in order to get rid of unemployment in the United States, you must get rid of capitalism as it operates.' Later, as chairman of the board, he continued to display his activist approach by, among other things, sending elementary school children into the streets to protest President Nixon's welfare policies.

He stayed until 1974, when the city gained the right to a city council and mayor. He won an atlarge council seat with a campaign emphasizing greater financial independence from Congress and calling for free transportation for senior citizens and job training. He beat out a crowded field of opponents and soon became chair of the council's finance and revenue committee.

Suddenly he had to deal with the same white business community that had objected to his demands for money for the home rule movement. In a pivotal vote in 1975, Barry signaled a new willingness to accomodate the desires of the business community. He blocked a 1 percent increase in the gross receipts tax proposed by Mayor Walter Washington, which was ardently opposed by the business community. City council members had hoped the increase would fund textbook purchases and school renovations. Although some opposed the tax because it was regressive, Barry explained his decision was an effort to include the business community as part of his constituency. With campaign contributions from this new constituency, Barry was easily reelected in 1976.

In 1978, Barry launched an underdog campaign for mayor against the incumbent, Walter Washington, and then city council chairman, Sterling Tucker, who is also black. It was the city's first real election for mayor. Walter Washington had won the first election in 1974 after having served as the presidentially-appointed commissioner for the city; the popular sentiment had been to give him the honor of being the city's first mayor. But his gentle ways did not move the city's bureaucracy. Neither did it satisfy the black voters' yearing to see the city run by blacks for blacks. Walter Washington was black, but many blacks were suspicious that he was still too tied to the mostly white power structure that had run the city when he was a commissioner.