Editorials and Opinions

Georgetowner • July 2, 2014

Dear Georgetowner,

Thank you for raising the question of how traffic flows on the streets of Georgetown. I am sure everyone who lives here and those who drive on the streets have opinions, including those who do it for a living. Certainly having more one way streets would make driving here easier and with much less property damage to everyone’s automobiles.

Sincerely,

Anne Armstrong Thompson

Gary Tischler •

In the summer of 1978, I attended an alley party, a gathering of neighborhood friends on Capitol Hill near the Eastern Market Metro Station. Toward mid-afternoon, there was a buzz of energy in the crowd and you could see a thirty-forty-something black man in a summer suit making his way through the people, shaking hands, announcing himself. “Who’s that guy?,” I asked a friend. He came our way and stretched out his hand. “Hello,” he said. “I’m Marion Barry, and I’m running for mayor of Washington.” He looked me straight in the eye, no blinking, straight up.

Back then, not even Barry—who is neither humble, modest nor shy about his achievements and talents—had any idea of just how far he would go, how much of an impact he would have on his adoptive city, for better or worse, just how far he might rise and how low he might fall, or how much he would seep into the lasting imagination of the city’s residents, black and white.

Some 36 years later, here we were again. He walked into the Four Seasons Hotel in Georgetown, and at first glance—walking carefully, but straight up, splendid gray suit and tie—he still had some of that charisma that makes you pay attention. But he was also, at age 78, a little diminished—by health issues and by time.

But we were all here together because of the book.

There is no end to the story of Marion Barry, or as the title of his book goes “Mayor for Life, The Incredible Story of Marion Barry Jr.”

The book—long anticipated and long put off—is what it’s all about now in Barry’s life: interviews, an appearance at the National Press Club, an unusual sit-down, “on-the-record” dinner with journalists at the Look Supper Club on K Street, a forum cum-love fest sponsored by the Washington Informer at the Congress Heights school on Martin Luther King Avenue in Ward 8, all part of a here-there-and-everywhere mini-book tour. The book getting its share of knocks from the media, and others, but also praise from fans. Wherever Barry goes, his story goes with him.

If you’ve lived in the Barry age, you get instant flashbacks encountering him. You remember the flamboyant first-time mayoral candidate, the politician in the dashiki, the job-maker for the city’s struggling African-American population, presiding over a construction boom, charming some but not all CAG members at their meetings; the infamous crack-smoking Vista Hotel tapes, the trial, coming back from a six-month prison sentence, getting re-elected to a fourth mayoral term, getting elected to the Ward 8 council seat, where he remains to this day, still drawing attention, still getting into trouble, still a force.

The book tour is bringing out almost every Barry incarnation we’ve seen—as well as the familiar tropes in reaction to the book by his critics. Modesty is never an issue. At the book dinner he said, “Courage, tenacity and vision, that’s Marion Barry in a nutshell.”

Face to face over lunch, he’s a little quieter, although no less full of certainty. “I don’t want my life to be just about the Vista thing, it was a life of accomplishment, where I helped people get a fair share of what they’ve been denied, in terms of jobs, in terms of work, in terms of participating in the business of this city. When I came here in 1965, this was still a sleepy Southern town. It was segregated, and black people weren’t a part of the economy the way they should have been, and when I was elected mayor I changed all that.” Asked if he had any regrets, he almost scowls. “Sure, of course, I’ve got regrets, who doesn’t,” he says. “When it comes to that, I sure wouldn’t have gone up to that hotel room if I had to do it over.”

The book is a kind of freight train, going full speed around the curves, dropping cargo and information, with some empty cars on it. If you want Vista, it’s there in detail, according to Barry, if not according to other accounts and observers, often graphically.

But the book, written with novelist Omar Tyree, does touch on his early years, where you get a better sense of what may have formed Barry. He was born in Itta Bena, Mississippi. “I grew up poor,” he will tell you. His father was a sharecropper who died when Barry was four. “I didn’t have a role model,” he said.

He grew up in Mississippi, in Arkansas, in Tennessee, during his formative years. Those were also the years of real segregation and Jim Crow in the south, where blacks and whites drank at different water fountains were. “I tried it once, I wanted to see what it was like to drink water from the white fountain,” he says. “You just didn’t do that.”

In the end, Marion Barry became his own role model. Barry pursued science, has a master’s degree in Chemistry and became an organizer and leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) during some of the most dramatic years of the civil rights movement.

“My mother [Mattie Cummings] picked cotton, but she later became a domestic. She insisted to the people who she worked for that she would come in the front door, not the back door. She said to them “If I’m good enough to teach and raise your kids then I’m good enough to come through the front door. And she did.”

His vision about himself is heroic, in terms of the difference he made in the city for its black residents. “I knew what needed to be done and I did it,” he says. From the moment he came to town as a SNCC organizer with the reputation of a go-getter and firebrand, he kept moving forward. “People liked me, people followed me. I ran for the school board and won, I ran for the city council and won, I ran for mayor and won.”

“You want to know why I came back after all that, I was on the council again, but I went to Safeway on Naylor Road, to get some groceries, and I couldn’t get out of there for two hours. It’s true.” People said, “why don’t you run again, Marion? The city, the people need you. So I ran,” he says. That was his last mayoral run, in 1994, when he beat both Council member John Ray and Mayoral incumbent Sharon Pratt Kelly, who ran a distant third. That was also, after his victory, when he told disgruntled white voters “to get over it.”

The segregated South framed Barry’s political context. In the book and in conversation, he often refers to white folks and the white establishment as a kind of political antagonist, against himself and African-Americans in general.

He is asked about Mayor Vincent Gray’s campaign platform of “One City,” of bringing the city together racially and ethnically. “It’s not real,” he says. “Can’t be done. It’s just not real. It’s a slogan, that’s all, a pipe dream.” Barry endorsed Gray in the Democratic primary earlier this year, in which Gray, operating under a cloud, was beaten by Ward 4 Council member Muriel Bowser. Barry said he’ll be supporting Bowser.

Talking about the new demographics of the city and its neighborhoods in which the black population is declining, he says it’s “gentrification, pure and simple, that’s driving people out of the city, the people who made up the backbone of this city. It’s a disgrace. ”

“I’m not done,” he said. “I’m going to continue fight for economic empowerment. If you don’t have capital, you don’t have power.” [gallery ids="101797,140715,140713" nav="thumbs"]

Georgetowner •

As someone who lives on 29th Street between Olive and M, I cannot disagree strenuously enough with your editorial calling for 28th and 29th to be turned into one-way streets. There is no doubt that traffic flow in the area results in damaged mirrors, but “solving this problem” – which I would argue, having suffered a couple of these incidents myself, is just an unfortunate reality of street parking in an urban area – in this manner will only exacerbate a bigger one.

My mirrors notwithstanding, I am far more concerned about the threat to life and limb posed by the reckless driving that routinely occurs on both 28th and 29th with cars traveling far in excess of the speed limit and barreling through stop signs without regard to the signs themselves or pedestrians that are in the crosswalks. It is simply a matter of time before we witness a terrible tragedy as things currently stand. Removing oncoming traffic as an obstacle to these wannabe Mario Andretti’s would take away the one thing that actually forces them to slow down.

The mirror problem is also a reckless driving problem and the way to address this issue is straightforward: actually enforce existing traffic regulations by issuing tickets to violators. The word would get out.

Matthew Perl

Georgetowner • June 30, 2014

To the Editor:

I am the owner of Georgetown Tobacco, a store I established in 1964 and now celebrating our 50th year. I would like to be in business for many more years. However, I and the owners of Curtis W. Draper established in 1880 and Signature cigars in Washington are faced with the most serious threat imagined.

In January of this year, the D.C. Tax Revision Commission approved tax reform measures “to increase fairness, broaden D.C.’s tax base, promote competitiveness, encourage business growth and simplify the tax code”.

As a result of the commissions recommendations, the D.C. Council has approved yesterday a tax of 7 million in option #5 of Bill B20 750. This 7 million was calculated out thin air as a line item guess but we are now faced with the reality that if this tax is finally approved at the June 11 District Council meeting, my company and the others small businesses would be forced to close our doors.

The tax raises all tobacco products to the level of cigarettes which is 80 percent of the wholesale cost, as an example, a cigar that retails for $5.00 in Washington will have to sell for $9.00, two-ounce package of pipe tobacco would increase the same along with all other tobacco products. In Virginia, there is a 10-percent tobacco products tax, and in Maryland it is 15 percent of the wholesale.

We are also faced with stiff competition from discount mail order firms across the nation, which offer many of the same products with no tax. In addition to the tax on sales the probability of a floor tax on products we now own could be beyond any of our abilities to pay. The tax, if finally approved, would go into effect Jan. 1, 2015, at the latest. Georgetown Tobacco and others like me will not be in business then.

— David Berkebile, president of Georgetown Tobacco

Post script to editor, re: tobacco tax — At press time it has been discovered that the tax exemption for premium cigars is back in the 2015 budget, and its removal was done by a drafting error. Therefore the 80-percent tax will apply to pipe tobacco, small premium cigars, cigarettes and rolling tobacco and snus. Georgetown Tobacco is hopeful that pipe tobacco and small premium cigars may be exempted as well for our customers of 50 years.

Georgetowner • June 20, 2014

A powerful, emotional slice of America was on display June 17 at a naturalization ceremony at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History and presentation of the James Smithson Bicentennial Medal to designer Ralph Lauren. On hand was Hillary Clinton, former Secretary of State and potential 2016 presidential candidate, along with Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, the Smithsonian’s Wayne Clough and John Gray and Sarah Taylor of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

The 15 new Americans — from 15 different countries and 15 for the stars and stripes of the Star-Spangled Banner flag – were told by Johnson that from this point on they could say, “I’m an American, just like you.”

Lauren was cited for his multi-million-dollar contributions to conserve the tattered Star-Spangled Banner, the flag which inspired Georgetowner Francis Scott Key in 1814 to write the national anthem. In the late 1990s, Lauren worked with first lady Hillary Clinton’s Save America’s Treasures. He is “the embodiment of the American spirit,” Clough said.

Clinton cited Lauren’s parents who left Belarus and made a home in the Bronx, N.Y., where the businessman was born. America offers “the freedom to create,” she said. As for the flag, Clinton said Lauren “stepped up” and added that she could not “think of anyone more deserving” of the Smithson Medal.

Lauren spoke of stopping at the Lincoln Memorial the night before and said, “I started with nothing but good parents, a good family.” America gave him the opportunity, he said, and still continues to give him opportunity every day. The work for the Star-Spangled Banner, he said, “came from the heart,” not public relations. Lauren accepted the medal with tears of humility and patriotism. [gallery ids="101771,141195,141197,141182,141187,141190" nav="thumbs"]