Marion Barry
In March of 1977, while working as as legislative assistant to Washington, D.C. Mayor Walter Washington, Perry Wallace found himself in the D.C. City Council building when a group of armed Hanafi Muslims stormed into the building, fired shots and took hostages. Wallace eluded the terrorists and was uninjured, but D.C. councilman Marion Barry was shot in the chest. Barry, who was soon elected D.C. Mayor, passed away yesterday, leaving behind a long, accomplished and controversial legacy in civil rights and politics. Here are Perry Wallace’s thoughts on this complicated figure:
“Marion is a metaphor, in many respects, for the history of black people in America. He is hated here in D.C. with an intensity that you couldn’t imagine from outside this city. But many blacks (and a few whites) defend him as one who, overall, did much for D.C. and America. Some others (precious few) have actually been able to be objective about “the good, the bad and the ugly” of Marion Barry.
Marion worked in the civil rights movement, including the Nashville Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. I was too young to have known him then. But by the time we both came into the D.C. Government in the mid-1970s to help make “black self determination” and Home Rule work, I got to relate to him personally how I was in Nashville when he was there and how his contributions helped pave the way for what I did. He was The Marion Barry, City Council Member/Chief Black Activist, and I was only a lowly Legislative Assistant to Mayor Walter Washington. But we did have some occasion to talk. We even played some basketball together. After I left city government, he actually appointed me to serve on a business task force–during his first term, when he was in control and doing wonderful things for the city.
My composite picture of him takes into account these experiences and also the observations of my sister Jessie’s late husband Charles–who was a high school classmate of his in Memphis. This is one story of a man’s battle with himself and his early childhood–one of poverty, discrimination and abandonment by his father. While it is indeed a black story, Marion had a twin–Bill Clinton grew up during about the same years just a few miles away over the Memphis-Arkansas bridge; had a father he didn’t know; an abusive step-father; a strong, supportive mother; and through his struggles found great success as a government leader in Washington, D.C., but had intense personal needs and inadequacies that played out in a determined (and flawed) quest for power and women.”