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Chapter 10. The Limits of Social Protest Politics
- University of Pennsylvania Press
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The Limits of Social Protest Politics M 7 e want to freeD.C. from our enemies,the people who makeit impossiblefor us to do anything about lousy schools,brutal cops,slumlords,welfare investigators who go on midnight raids, employers who discriminate in hiring and a host of other ills that run rampant through our city Marion Barry, speaking for the Free D.C. Movement, 1966 The restoration of an elected city government in 1974 and the subsequent election of civil rights and home rule activist Marion Barry as mayor brought promise that at last issues of socialjustice would gain the attention they demanded in Washington. Barry established an ambitious social welfare program for the city and recruited talent from around the country to put it in place. Continued federal meddling made Barry's task particularly difficult, but such interference served at least to help maintain his political support. By appealing both to local antagonism against the government and to racial solidarity, he continued to dominate Washington politics, even when he strayed far from his socially progressive agenda. Rather than effecting social change or building local consensus, however, he left Washington even more bitterly divided by race and class than he found it. Shortly after his election as nonvoting delegate to Congress, Walter Fauntroy achieved one of his most important political victories. By directing funds and attention to an intense primary race in South Carolina in 1972,Fauntroy helped upset House District Committee chairman John L. McMillan, thereby removing the single most entrenched opponent to home rule for Washington. Even Republican president Richard Nixon endorsed home rule for the city,and, with voter approval in 1973,Washington finally gained back the right, denied since 1874, to elect its own local officials. There were, however, several crippling limitations to local authority Congressspecificallyprohibited one potentially important source of revenue to the District, a commuter tax, while retaining control over the city's budget and court system. Congress also retained the right to override District legislation, and Washington remained without voting representation in Congress. Home rule thus did not bring with it complete independence from federal oversight, but it gave local leadership its first opportunity in a century to take the initiative in setting its own policy agenda. Although Fauntroy participated in shaping Washington's new era, the most important role fell to the executive officer of the new city government , the mayor. With the election of Walter Washington, the incumbent mayor-commissioner, to that position ini974,the city entered a transitional period. As a career civil servant, who had served both on the National Capital Housing Authority and on the appointed city council when it was first named in 1967,Washington was well known to both federal and local organizations. His ability to navigate federal-city relations and his adeptness in dealing with the immediate crisis of the 1968riots gained him considerable respect. Washington, however, found it difficult to turn the new city bureaucracy to long-term local needs. His appointments-many like him with federal credentials-were drawn largelyfrom the city's comfortable black elite. Lacking the sense of urgency felt in the inner city, the Washington administration provoked criticism from neighborhood activists for failing to address a host of unmet social problems. In 1978both city council chairman Sterling Tucker and at-large council member Marion Barry challenged Washington's reelection in the Democratic primary. In a particularly close race, Barry managed to win with just over a third of the vote. Endorsed by the Washington Post, Barry appeared to carry with him somethingof an establishment blessing. But his role as a civilrights activist, as a staunch home rule supporter, and as an advocate for reordering priorities to assist the inner-city poor promised a very different direction for the city. The son of a Mississippi sharecropper, Barry was the first in his family to attend college, where he entered the civil rights movement through involvement in the campus chapter of the NAACP. "I took a chance on losing a scholarship or not receiving my master's degree," Barry said of his first sit-in at a segregated lunch counter while a graduate student in chemistry at Fisk University,in Nashville. "But to me, if I had received my scholarship and master's degree, and still was not a free man, I was not a man at all."' A founder of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and its first chairman, Barry moved to Washington to open a branch office in 1965as...