Marion Barry passed away this week. The former mayor of Washington, DC, Mr. Barry had a career that can only be called "colorful." Like all of us, he had his merits and his warts. When such an individual leaves us, you can tell if the warts were significant, because the obituaries mention them. Obviously, most don't, because, well, no one wants to dump on the deceased.
In Mr. Barry's case, the "warts" in the obituaries seem to be confined to his well-documented (and videotaped) escapade, smoking crack in a hotel room with a woman who was not his wife. Obviously he was very familiar with the process (I personally wouldn't have known which end of a crack pipe is "up"), which made it pretty evident this was a frequent habit of his.
That, though, is not the topic of this piece. The obituaries have that pretty much down.
No, here's the thing with Mr. Barry. Either racism is the worst sin an American can commit, as Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and the like repeatedly assure us, or it isn't. If it is, then we need to pause before canonizing the man, and remember that he was an unabashed bigot, and that is a sin that knows no race or color.
Mr. Barry, after his arrest and scandalous behavior surrounding the crack incident, was somehow returned to the D.C. City Council in what can only be regarded as a curious reflection on the moral standards of the voters of the part of the city that elected him. Councilman Barry, unfortunately, must have gotten so secure that he felt able to say things in public like this one, in regard to the awarding of a maintenance contract by the District to a campaign contributor and the pulling of that contract from a properly-awarded contractor.
The quote is from an editorial in the Washington Post in October 2011: "Not only was Joseph Lorenz, owner of the Baltimore-based firm whose
contract renewal was denied by [the mayor], subjected to
the third degree about his contacts with the media, but council member
Marion Barry (D-Ward 8) made the contemptible observation that 'a white
company in Maryland' shouldn’t expect to do business with the District".
This was not a young Marion Barry, frustrated at the difficulties of the civil rights movement of the '60s. This was City Councilman Barry, in 2011, corruptly trying to reward a campaign donor, and then compounding the sin by an amazing, bigoted remark toward a company that had provided contractor service for years, primarily because of the color of the skin of its owners.
Apart from the blatant racism of Barry's comment, two things make it even worse:
(1) It obviously stemmed from feelings that he had inside of him about white people and the companies that they own, contemptible, bigoted feelings that had to have been there all along
(2) He felt not a smidgen of concern about airing them at a City Council meeting, knowing all along, or feeling, that no matter what he said he would be immune from criticism or retribution.
I can tell you that the Post, where the comments were noted in the editorial, never mentioned them again. That, in itself, is amazing -- if we were talking about a Republican member of Congress saying anything like that in regard to an award of a Federal contract, that congressman would be forced out of office in a heartbeat.
But no, we will be subjected to a whitewashing of the record of Mr. Barry -- I expect schools to be named after him and statues built -- oblivious to the fact that the very racial animus we should be trying to remove from our society was an innate part of the fabric of the man.
Thanks to Al Gore's Amazing Internet, his bigotry will go remembered forever. We can only hope that before the first statue is designed, we'll think for a little bit. We can hope that no school where children are taught life lessons will bear the name of an example of a lesson he never learned.
Copyright 2014 by Robert Sutton
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