Perceptions of Barry Trial Stir Anger in D.C. Blacks

The nation’s capital sits transfixed as its embattled mayor listens to courtroom accusations that he tied contracts to sexual favors and as he watches a videotape showing him smoking crack cocaine.

In a parallel drama taking shape on street corners and talk shows and in public rallies, discussion has assumed a new and angry dimension. As the charges have piled up in court against Mayor Marion Barry, his supporters have grown proportionately restless.

Stirred by accusations that the drug and perjury charges against Barry were racially motivated and that the prosecution is overly zealous, a chorus of protest has inflamed local tensions and has provoked new fears of a summertime flash point.

“This trial is causing problems for which there is no judicial relief,” declared Sam Smith, publisher of the Progressive Review and longtime observer of District of Columbia politics.

Added Ronald Walters, a professor of political science at Howard University: “You’ve got the conditions for the kind of thing that turns public anger into violence.” Already, he warned, “the chasm between the races has been widened.”

Examples of the intensity of the anger can be heard on the streets and on radio talk shows, particularly on black-owned stations that hold their fingers to the pulse of the community.

“If something happens to the mayor,” an anonymous caller recently told WOL host Cathy Hughes, “this city’s going to be burning!”

Analysts stressed that it would be premature to predict that new tensions could lead to riots. Some noted that activists have sought to direct energies toward an alternative work boycott, or “sick-out,” to be staged in the event of an adverse decision against Barry.

Moreover, many blacks stop far short of supporting the embattled mayor and express sadness, embarrassment and even bitterness about his apparent failings. Many in the city’s large middle-class black community often seem to wish that the problem would go away and cringe at mayoral conduct that they fear will reflect on them.

But the mayor has gone to great lengths to reach out to his core constituency--the poorest and most disenfranchised blacks. And here he has found a particularly receptive audience for his complaint that he is facing a “lynching.”

And most analysts said that they believe there has been a fundamental change within much of Washington’s black community since the trial began, with ambivalence about the mayor’s plight replaced by the perception that he has been unfairly singled out.

“It’s reached a very, very explosive point,” said H. R. Crawford, a black member of the District of Columbia City Council. “It’s almost back to the way it was in 1968. All we need is just one tiny incident to ignite this--and my heavens!”

Observers said that the single most important event in laying bare the frictions that surround the Barry case occurred late last week when Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson abruptly refused permission for controversial black religious leaders Louis Farrakhan and George A. Stallings Jr. to enter the courtroom as the mayor’s guests.

Barry and other black leaders rejected the contention that the visitors’ presence would be disruptive and have used the event to dramatize the racial aspects of what the mayor once termed his “political lynching” by white-dominated judicial systems.

At a Sunday morning service, Barry stood by approvingly as Stallings warned of “hell on Earth” if he and Farrakhan continued to be barred from the trial. “The judge must know that he will only increase the racial tension,” Stallings declared.

Barry appeared with Farrakhan also at two weekend rallies in which the Nation of Islam leader warned that the mayor was “under attack” by the white Establishment. And Barry himself left the federal courthouse during a recess Monday to make that case before 300 supporters.

“Let the people speak about what is happening in Washington, D.C.,” Barry said. “Not just here but for the other black elected officials all over the land who have misfortunately been harassed and arraigned by U.S. prosecutors.”

Lurma Rackley, a spokesman for Barry, denied that the mayor was “doing anything to exacerbate tensions.” But analysts, including Walters, the Howard University professor, said that the tactic appeared deliberate.

“He is exploiting a vein in the black community which is very deep, and that is the sense of victimization,” Walters said.

The observers said that the charges of racial persecution have struck a potent chord because they came on the heels of testimony that dramatized the lengths to which the government had gone to build its case against the mayor.

Defense attorney R. Kenneth Mundy declared in opening arguments that the seven-year investigation into the mayor’s affairs demonstrated that the federal government “was going to any length and any expense . . . exorbitant expense, to make a case against Mr. Barry.”

And an FBI videotape that incontrovertibly showed Barry smoking crack cocaine in a Washington hotel room may have left as its most lasting impression the determination behind the sophisticated sting operation that finally caught him, analysts said.

Among other things, the videotape suggested that Barry had been reluctant to visit the Vista hotel room where FBI informant Rasheeda Moore was waiting, that he had been more interested in sex than drugs and that he had rejected her offer of cocaine seven times before finally accepting it.

“All it did was infuriate the black community to the point where it’s ready to lash out,” said Crawford, the D.C. council member, who represents heavily black Southeast Washington.

The jury hearing the case is composed of 13 blacks and five whites. The judge will designate six as alternates when the case is given to them.

Most analysts warned that the danger of violence would be greatest if Barry were convicted of the charges against him, but some said that tensions had reached the point that even mass celebrations of a Barry acquittal could turn riotous.

Any prospect of public disorder in the nation’s capital evokes in many minds memories of 1968, when block after block in residential areas was left in flames and the National Guard was deployed throughout the city.

Maj. Gen. Calvin G. Franklin, the local National Guard commander, said that the force had taken no new steps as a result of the Barry trial. “All of our contingency plans are in excellent shape and are evaluated continually,” Franklin said through a spokesman.

Although some observers said that they believe the new sympathy for Barry extends to sectors of the white community, a recent Washington Post story suggested that perceptions of the case remain starkly divided along racial lines.

According to the poll, which was taken before the trial began, two-thirds of whites in the District believe that Barry had “only himself to blame” for his legal troubles, but only 1 in 4 blacks felt that way. One in three blacks surveyed by the Post agreed with the statement that prosecutors were “out to get Marion Barry any way they can.”

The city’s black community, which ranges widely in income and political orientation, is by no means unanimous in its sympathy toward Barry. But experts and residents said that they believe the mood of even Barry’s most fervent critics had softened since he abandoned his bid to seek reelection to a record fourth term as mayor.

“Even those people who had withdrawn their political support from Barry now don’t want to see him crucified,” said Walters, the Howard University professor.