He’s Back and Feeling the Power : Once-Beleaguered Marion Barry Offers Hope to Residents of D.C.’s Downtrodden Ward 8

Tucked away in the lower-right corner pocket of the District of Columbia are the neighborhoods of Ward 8. Here reside more crime, poverty, unemployment and hopelessness than in any of the communities spanning the District’s seven other wards.

Here, also, lives Marion Barry.

Barry, the former Washington mayor, moved into this gritty slice of Southeast Washington earlier this year after serving a six-month prison sentence for smoking crack. And his relocation across the political boundary from his former neighborhood--an upscale, middle-class enclave--into Ward 8 represented the first step toward a Lazarus-like revival of his shattered personal life and tainted political career.

On Election Day, Barry is expected to easily defeat W. Cardell Shelton, a Republican with essentially no support in the ward, to reclaim a seat on the 13-member city council.

“People think the people in this ward are stupid,” Barry said, in one of the few interviews he has granted since winning the Democratic primary in September by an overwhelming 3-to-1 margin. “But they are very politically astute. They know what they’re doing and who will best represent them.”

Make no mistake: Though chastened, Marion Barry is back and unbowed.

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More than ever, say supporters such as ever-present adviser Cora Masters, Barry is like the bombastic, grass-roots leader he was nearly a generation ago, when he started out as a street activist among Washington’s impoverished blacks.

“Unlike other black politicians and elected officials, he doesn’t need a (black) specialist to explain things to the community,” says Masters, interrupting the interview in Barry’s office, located in the back room of his campaign headquarters. “He can talk to the people and tell them what’s going on.”

That draws a sly smile from Barry, knowing it is directed at Mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly and Council Chairman John A. Wilson, both of whom are black but lack Barry’s contacts with ordinary people.

But it hasn’t been long since Barry was dodging, not delivering, barbs. Almost exactly a year ago, he was about to be shipped off to federal prison, a fuzzy image videotaped in a police sting some 12 months earlier while inhaling cocaine from a glass vial.

That seems “like a decade ago, not only a year,” Barry says now, as he sits behind a huge wooden desk. It is a rare reference to that difficult time: Clearly uncomfortable with questions about his conviction or life in prison, these days he keeps tightly focused on the issue at hand--winning Ward 8. (And victory Tuesday is all but assured by his primary win, given that among the ward’s electorate are more than 27,000 Democrats and fewer than 1,000 Republicans.)

Still, Barry acknowledges candidly that he has a new life, one in which he has chosen a name that sounds African to many District residents--Anwar Amal, which is actually Arabic for “bright hope.” At the same time, he has taken to draping himself in Kente cloth and promising empowerment to residents of this neglected community.

“There will be 500 people from Ward 8 at City Hall when I’m sworn in,” Barry vows.

As if to underscore his point, he pulls his scarf up around his neck to display the woven threads of gold, green, black and red--and at the bottom of the Kente cloth is embroidered: “Ward 8. Second to None.”

“They will all be wearing these,” he says. “When I raise my hand (to take the oath of office), they will raise their hands. All 500 of them.”

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All across the District--indeed, across the nation, given the enormous publicity Barry’s downfall attracted--heads are shaking and tongues cluck at the idea that voters would actually pick a womanizing ex-mayor and convicted drug abuser as their city tribunal representative.

But that’s only because most people fail to understand Ward 8. To those who live and vote in the crescent-shaped ward bordered by the Potomac and Anacostia rivers and the Maryland state line, Barry’s misfortunes, ironically, have tempered the former mayor into the politician most well-suited to serve their needs.

It is no accident that Barry now considers Ward 8 his home. And, in return, Ward 8 embraces the former mayor as a parent would its own wayward son who was afflicted by wanderlust and seduced by the sins of the fast city.

Barry “is a rare man that everyone in this community can identify with because they’ve been in the same places--in jail and in trouble and downtrodden, as he’s been,” says the Rev. Willie Wilson, pastor of Union Temple Baptist Church as well as Barry’s personal minister and loyal defender. “But they can look up to him because he’s come back, and he represents hope.”

And in Ward 8, hope is in short supply.

This collection of middle-income and public-housing neighborhoods overlooks official Washington’s gleaming national monuments and affluent townhomes, but is hidden from most people who live and work there. Physically separated by rolling hills, two rivers and a four-lane expressway, the ward draws attention only for the frequency of its residents’ notorious deeds.

In the “murder capital” of the nation, Ward 8 is the scene of most of the District’s deadly crime. Described as “a world apart” from the rest of the city, its residents are more than 80% African-American, with a median family income of less than $17,000. Nearly a third are younger than 18, and about 1 in 3 never finish high school.

Although a number of middle-income families live in the District, this ward has the lowest percentage of homeowners (13%) and the highest rate (22%) of households living below the poverty line. Public services and jobs are sporadic to nonexistent, contributing to the dismal prospects for self-improvement. The ward’s largest employer, of about 1,700 people, is Greater Southeast Community Hospital, a 400-bed facility that specializes in gunshot wounds and other urban trauma cases.

“I’m not sure what specifically (Barry has) promised people here besides leadership and a sense of hope,” concedes Thomas W. Chapman, president and chief executive of Greater Southeast Community Healthcare System, which operates the hospital.

But that may be just what Ward 8 needs. On the rare occasions that it has paid attention to the ward, the District has behaved “irrationally,” says Roger Wilkins, a Washington resident and a history professor at George Mason University in suburban Virginia.

“The area is a total stepchild of this city,” Wilkins says. “I know lifelong residents who have never been in Ward 8. Sadly, I also know people who live their entire lives without setting a foot outside Ward 8.”

Such isolation breeds resentment and fear, Wilkins says, making it easier for Washingtonians to ignore the ward’s neighborhoods of Anacostia and District Heights.

“Every way into Washington--from Maryland or Virginia or by air into National Airport--you don’t have to see Ward 8,” he notes. “To get to Ward 8 requires a conscious decision. So if you don’t have business there, you don’t have to engage your psyche into Ward 8.”

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Marion Barry has business in Ward 8.

“The No. 1 priority here is jobs,” Barry says, quickly adding that it is unlikely he will be able to bring jobs to the ward immediately. “The residents of Ward 8 are the last ones people think of when they are hiring. That has got to change.”

Residents in the ward are quick to agree, saying they cannot find work no matter how hard they try.

“Jobs, man,” says one, standing on a street corner. “It don’t take no Ph.D. to see we need jobs here. But after looking for so long, I don’t look so hard anymore. There’s nothing out there for me.”

But even that defeatist attitude has to change, says Barry, who has campaigned on his pledge to lead the ward’s residents in taking charge of their lives. His own triumph over adversity, he suggests with the fervor of the born-again, can be a model.

Indeed, to Barry and his supporters, his victorious return to politics in this community represents what he calls “a new day,” heralding that empowerment of Washington’s poorest ward.

Not everybody agrees. “I don’t know how those people can ever expect anything good to come their way now after electing him,” says one Washington resident. “He’s just bad news and playing on the people’s fears. That’s the real tragedy.”

That view seems to be shared by Wilhelmina J. Rolark, 75, who had represented Ward 8 on the city council since 1977 but who lost to Barry in the primary. During her campaign, she argued that Barry did almost nothing to improve the neighborhood during his 12 years as mayor and charged that he was little more than a carpetbagger for crossing ward lines to run in her area.

Still, clearly, many of the people in Ward 8 love Marion Barry. And sometimes that love shocks and surprises even Barry himself.

Last week, for example, Barry was asked to deliver brief remarks at the funeral of a friend who was a Southeast Washington community activist. In spite of his campaign schedule, which is usually chockablock with visits to schools and community centers, he found it difficult to resist the widow’s pleas that he say something at the ceremony.

Other local officials, including Mayor Kelly, spoke first. But “to my surprise,” Barry says, when his name was announced, the mourners erupted into vigorous applause and cries of support.

“I had never seen anything quite like that,” Masters says. “It was a funeral, and they were applauding Marion Barry just because he was going to speak. In a way, it was kind of embarrassing, but it shows how people respond to him here.”

Such a scene, according to Washington political commentator Mark Plotkin, is unlikely to be replayed anywhere else--certainly not in the white-majority wards of Northwest Washington. Ward 8, says Plotkin, is the only political home Barry could find after his conviction.

“Nobody can get elected citywide without doing well in the white wards,” Plotkin says, adding that “white voters are the swing voters” in a city where about three-quarters of the population is nonwhite.

Barry tried once before to run citywide, losing a bid two years ago for an at-large council seat. That run came in the midst of his cocaine trial and fell about 20,000 votes short. But Barry did garner 5,900 votes in Ward 8, the only ward he carried in that election. That, Plotkin says, “was a dress rehearsal” for this round.

To win the September vote, according to spokeswoman Leona Agouridis of the D.C. Board of Elections, Barry persuaded enough people to register to produce “the highest turnout (in the ward) since 1974 for a council-member election in a primary.”

The Barry-inspired turnout, she says, was “very emotional . . . a people’s referendum on his trial.”

And people are still turning out for Barry, says Deputy Police Chief Richard Pennington. A recent monthly neighborhood meeting was notable, Pennington says, because Barry got 60 or more residents to attend--up from the usual 5 or 6.

“He called me up ahead of the meeting and said he would bring some residents to the meeting,” Pennington recalls. “I had no idea it would be so many.”

For his part, Barry promises that is just the start.

“God blessed me with an ability to motivate and inspire,” he says. “That’s what I want to do in this ward. Already, the people here are feeling their power and getting uppity. They have never spoken out or had anyone who would speak up for them. Now they do.”