Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, July 5, 1990 TAG: 9007050091
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
In a parallel drama taking shape on street corners, talk shows and public rallies, the rhetoric has assumed a new and angry dimension. As the charges have piled up in court against 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 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 long an 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 in some corners can be heard both 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 would turn riotous. Some noted that activists have instead sought to direct energies toward an alternative work boycott, or "sick-out" if the verdict is against Barry.
Moreover, many blacks stop far short of supporting the mayor and express sadness, embarrassment and even bitterness about his failings. Many in the city's large middle-class black community seem often to wish the problem would go away, and cringe at mayoral conduct they fear will reflect on them.
The mayor has gone to great lengths, though, 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."
Many analysts said they believe there has been a fundamental change within much of Washington's black community since the trial began, as ambivalence about Barry's plight was replaced by the perception that he had 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 the single most important step in laying bare the frictions that surround the Barry case came late last week when Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson abruptly refused permission for controversial black ministers Louis Farrakhan and George Stallings to enter the courtroom as the mayor's guests.
Barry and other black leaders rejected the contention that their presence would be disruptive and have used the event to dramatize the trial's perceived racial aspects.
A spokeswoman for Barry, Lurma Rackley, denied the mayor was "doing anything to exacerbate tensions." But analysts including Walters, the Howard University professor, said that 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 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.
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 a more lasting impression about the determination behind the sophisticated sting operation that finally caught him, analysts said.
Among other things, the videotape suggested Barry had been reluctant to visit the room where FBI informant Rasheeda Moore stood waiting; that he had been more interested in sex than drugs; and that he refused her offer of cocaine seven times before finally agreeing.
"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.
by CNB