Marion Barry

The funniest, and most disheartening, portion of your article "Dixon at work behind the scenes" (July 13) about Sheila Dixon and her "comeback" (be afraid...be very afraid) can be found in Lester Spence's comparison of Ms. Dixon with Marion Barry. I mean, he actually seemed to mean it as a compliment! Herman Meyer, Rodgers Forge

Wednesday's paper contained the good news for fans of Sheila Dixon that she is working with those hoping to unseat Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake ("Dixon at work behind the scenes," July 3). Should any of those candidates prevail, we expect Ms. Dixon would carry considerable influence in city government in the coming years. Will Baltimore voters follow the example of voters in Washington, D.C., who keep returning Marion Barry to office? Alma T., Baltimore

Chapel Hill, N.C. -- THE RACIAL gulf that divides black and white America was never embodied more dramatically than by Marion Barry's victory in Tuesday's Democratic primary for mayor of Washington.I've known Marion Barry for 25 years. We served together on the 21-person board of directors of the Black United Front, founded in 1968 by the black nationalist Stokely Carmichael.Whatever his personal failings, Marion Barry has always been a clever Machiavellian who knew how to manipulate the levels of power.

The funniest, and most disheartening, portion of your article "Dixon at work behind the scenes" (July 13) about Sheila Dixon and her "comeback" (be afraid...be very afraid) can be found in Lester Spence's comparison of Ms. Dixon with Marion Barry. I mean, he actually seemed to mean it as a compliment! Herman Meyer, Rodgers Forge

Proper justice was not meted out in the trial, conviction and sentencing of Washington Mayor Marion Barry, now running for an at-large seat on the D.C. City Council.We said in August that the jury had before it enough evidence to convict Mr. Barry on more than a single misdemeanor count of "simple possession" of cocaine. That was injustice No. 1. Injustice No. 2 was the sentence Mr. Barry received last week. He should not have been given six months in prison. That is unduly harsh for this crime.

WASHINGTON -- I can't turn around, especially out of town, without facing a barrage of questions about the social and economic woes of this city.''What's wrong with the people there?'' ''How could they re-elect Marion Barry?'' ''Why doesn't Congress throw the crooks out?''This nation's capital, so atypical of the rest of the nation, is in fact a dismaying example of the worst things about all of America.The District of Columbia is a shameful amalgam of racial passions, endemic corruption, bureaucratic incompetence, unfairness in taxation, rampant crime amid police abuse, and more.

Washington's local establishment woke up to its worst nightmare Wednesday when former Mayor Marion Barry won the Democratic primary for the city council seat representing the District's poorest ward. The victory is tantamount to election, because Mr. Barry faces only token GOP opposition in November.That Mr. Barry was able to resurrect his political career only a few months after getting out of prison, where he had served a six-month term for cocaine possession, is a measure of the powerful anti-incumbent mood among voters.

WASHINGTON -- The formula used by former Washington Mayor Marion Barry in his startling comeback primary victory is an old and simple one that more than a decade ago propelled another black underdog candidate, Harold Washington, into the mayor's chair in Chicago.Both went out and registered thousands of unregistered black voters and won in a race in which the white vote was split between two other candidates.The major differences in the Chicago and District of Columbia primaries are that Washington helped put as many as 100,000 new black voters on the rolls, compared with an estimated 12,000 by Barry, and that Washington's two opponents were white, whereas both of Barry's, Mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly and City Councilman John Ray, are black.

LIKE HIS drug and perjury trial that ended with a hung jury on 12 of 14 counts, the disposition of l'affaire Marion Barry which was concluded Friday, when federal District Court Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson sentenced the mayor to six months in prison, will satisfy no one.On one side will be those who see sending Barry to jail for the single misdemeanor drug possession charge he was convicted of as too harsh, given that most first offenders convicted of...

LAST NIGHT I dreamed of a world without white folks. This was no science-fiction fantasy. There was no mysterious plague that affected only those without the immunity of excess melanin. There was no UFO that gathered and carried off all humans tracing their lineage to Europe. White folks simply vanished.This was no unconscious wish of violence to anyone. Rather, it was a dream of my own liberation, a metaphor for my independence. To think for myself and choose what I think TTC without reference to the sensibilities of white folks is simply to create a world without white folks.

I n what seemed a remarkable demonstration of integrity by an institution often viewed as ethically challenged, the District of Columbia City Council last week finally moved to censure its most famous member, former Mayor Marion S. Barry, for his well-publicized ethical misdeeds. The council acted after an independent investigator's report found Mr. Barry had improperly steered thousands of dollars in city contracts to his girlfriend, then pocketed part of the money himself.

After eight years of living in Detroit and 20 in Baltimore, I thought I knew quite a bit about local politics in predominantly African-American communities. After seeing HBO's "The Nine Lives of Marion Barry," a no-holds-barred yet deeply touching look at the career of the former mayor of Washington, I now appreciate how little I knew about this man and what he stands for to many of the residents he still represents as a city councilman at age 73. Don't get me wrong. The powerful film by Dana Flor and Toby Oppenheimer seems to cut Barry no slack.

With the raid of Mayor Sheila Dixon's house, the complicated financial investigation that has bubbled through Baltimore news cycles for years officially jumped the local threshold. Political and public relations experts say this whiff of scandal will likely be an investigative cloud hovering over Baltimore's executive office, taking time and attention from pressing city business and potentially thwarting Dixon's agenda for progress. Though Dixon has not been charged with any wrongdoing and an investigation involving government contracts hardly tips the public's meter for salaciousness - as has, for instance, the sex scandal involving Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick - political watchers say it doesn't take being caught in a hotel room with a crack pipe, as Washington's Marion Barry was, to tarnish a city's reputation or to hobble its renaissance.

A nonprofit group attempting to turn Washingtonians into Baltimoreans is using reporters of all things to sell Charm City. The Live Baltimore Home Center hoped to promote the city at a happy hour this week at the district's Front Page restaurant. The newspaper-themed location was a bit of a joke because the event - snowed out Wednesday, but now on the boards for early next year - had a lure besides drink specials and free appetizers: Washington journalists who live in Baltimore. "You read them every day in The Washington Post, the Washington Afro-American newspaper and The Washington Blade and hear them on National Public Radio and other media outlets," read an ad. "Now, hear the `tell all' stories about the benefits of living in Charm City from the journalists who live here."

EFFI BARRY, 63 Former first lady of D.C. Effi Barry, the District of Columbia's stoic former first lady who endured her husband's drug abuse and unfaithfulness during his years as the city's mayor, died Thursday. Ms. Barry died of leukemia at Anne Arundel Medical Center in Annapolis, said Justin Paquette, a spokesman for the hospital. Ms. Barry separated from Marion Barry in 1990, shortly after he was caught on videotape at a downtown hotel smoking crack cocaine with a former model and asking her to have sex with him. Throughout her husband's three-month trial -- during which federal prosecutors played the grainy 83-minute tape of the FBI sting -- Ms. Barry sat in the front row of the courtroom with a hook and yarn.

WASHINGTON -- Major League Baseball yesterday named a group headed by Washington native Theodore N. Lerner, a reclusive shopping mall and office complex developer, as owner of the Washington Nationals, but Lerner isn't quite getting the benefit of a fresh start. Lerner's group, which includes his son, Mark, and former Atlanta Braves president Stan Kasten, was neither the first choice of Mayor Anthony A. Williams nor of much of the D.C. Council. A few council members have criticized the group for not communicating with top city officials during the bidding process and not having enough racial diversity.

WASHINGTON -- Marion S. Barry Jr. is clearly in his element as he trolls for votes in the lobby of Marbury Plaza, a well-tended high-rise apartment complex in this city's southeast section."

Not many first-time drug offenders are sent to prison.For one thing, there isn't room for them all. And for another, not all of them deserve it.Sometimes people commit drug crimes through ignorance or foolishness, or through the influence of others. This does not make them innocent, but it might make them a candidate for probation.Marion Barry is a first-time drug offender. Which is not to say he hasn't used illegal drugs for years -- he has.But he was caught for the first time this year.

WASHINGTON - Icon. Ghost. Legend. Call him what you will, Marion S. Barry Jr. is back. Barry, 68, Washington's one-time "mayor for life," star of a videotaped FBI drug sting, a civil rights leader whose travails with drugs and womanizing were a staple of late-night comedy shows and front-page news stories, was effectively elected to the D.C. City Council last week by a large margin. His latest political comeback, in a town that rewards a dose of redemption in the voting booth, introduced a possible complication in the on-again, off-again matter of bringing Major League Baseball to the nation's capital, posted a footnote to a quarter-century-long career that has been as pliable as a Florida palm tree and offered city residents something new: an older, frailer Marion Barry.

I AM a proud and vigorous advocate of democracy. Democracy may not be the most rational, most efficient or least irritating form of government. But it is certainly the funniest. Nowhere is this more true than in the capital of democracy itself, the city that serves as a beacon of hope for people the world over: Washington, my hometown, our Interstate 95 neighbor to the south. Beside the broad boulevards punctuated by equestrian statues, inside the gargantuan pseudo-classical marble edifices designed to inspire awe in foreign tourists and American schoolchildren on their sixth-grade trips, lurk the James Traficants, the comedians of our greatness.