Renaming F.W. Ballou High School to Marion Barry, Jr., Senior High School

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Are we able to start bashing Barry because I think this is an awful idea. Corrupt politicians shouldn't get their names on buildings.

You have to wait one more week.

[Anonymous]

Ah, so blacks resent having too many white folks around. Gotcha. Thanks for clarifying.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Ah, so blacks resent having too many white folks around. Gotcha. Thanks for clarifying.

SOME blacks resent that DC is no longer a majority black city (the only majority black "state" in the USA) Some resent that particular neighborhoods have changed not only in race but in culture. Some resent that the city has become less affordable for working class people.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:During's Barry's reign, MPD was accepting police recruits who had repeatedly failed the entrance exam. Barry insisted on personally approving all police promotions at the level of sergeant and above, which allowed him to build a loyal patronage operation at the expense of performance. DC government agencies say their main mission as provding jobs for Barry's supporters and network, rather than delivering quality services in exchange for DC's ever higher tax burden. DC's fiscal house of cards all came crashing down in Barry's last term. By then, a serious of court decisions had moved many DC agencies out from under the mayor's control into receivership. Finally, the federal goverment imposed the control board which basically made Barry a figure head until his term of office ran out.

Deng Xiao-peng famously said that it doesn't matter if a cat is white or black, so long as it catches mice. The DC corollary should be, it doesn't matter if you're white or black, you still want the garbage picked up. The problem was that under Barry, it wasn't and a host of essential city services were delivered very poorly or not at all. More affluent residents tried to keep their contacts with the DC government to the bear minimum. Poorer residents, who were more dependent on city services, got the shaft. Barry talked a good game, but he never did very much for the city's poorest residents. He can, however, claim some credit for having built a black middle class .... in Prince George's County!

I think if you got a job that moved you into the middle class, problems with garbage collection or lines at the DMV were not seen as big issues by comparison. That it involved a patronage machine of course did not make it different from what many other cities had had for generations under white mayors (though at least in many of those cities services were delivered more efficiently) As for the fiscal situation, at least in Barry's first term it was actually fairly good.

There are many ironies in retrospect. One of course, is that the movement of blacks to the middle class (whether Barry was a cause or not) means many of those who love him no longer live in DC, and DC will no longer elect someone with his approach to politics. Another is that the improvement of services after Barry has made the district more attractive to whites, and the changes this has led to are resented by many blacks.

The difference is that the old line city patronage machines both provided patronage jobs and deliered services. Barry knew how to do the former but neer figured out how to do the latter.

If it hadn't been for federal control board, DC would have wound up a lot like Detroit, maybe worse. Things didn't really start to turn around until Anthony Williams came in and put the city on a sound financial footing, put an emphasis on service quality and slimmed down the bloated DC workforce, and hired department heads after national searches and without regard to race and "DC ties." And that at first was controversial in some quarters!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:^ University of Barry? Maybe Chem major will be popular.

In the Breaking Bad sense.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I wish you all would go back to your respective racist states with your over the top generalizations. You people sound like the ones Barry dissed in Plantation DC when Barry took office. It is clear from the DCUM threads that you are in a race to bring it back.

Please. You're saying that criticism of a corrupt, crooked, crack-addicted, tax-cheating racist incompetent who ran DC government into the ground is... racist?!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Its pretty clear who is posting regarding their views of Marion Barry- likely non-native Washingtonians, nor those with any long-standing connection to the city. Regardless of what you think of him, reducing him to one foolish act, that he regretted openly, is unfair. Lets hope you never walk down a path that leads you to a mistake you can never outlive in the minds of some.

That being said, I don't think a school needs to be renamed for him. There are other things that will be built that can honor him, if it is decided to so.

I never really understood barry obsession. what good did he do?

He gave people jobs who were not qualified to have them and ran every city department and all the schools into the ground. Twenty years ago you couldn't even get your trash picked up. But I say let's name the school after him and as an additional honor, the school can open three weeks late every year like most of the schools used to.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Its pretty clear who is posting regarding their views of Marion Barry- likely non-native Washingtonians, nor those with any long-standing connection to the city. Regardless of what you think of him, reducing him to one foolish act, that he regretted openly, is unfair. Lets hope you never walk down a path that leads you to a mistake you can never outlive in the minds of some.

That being said, I don't think a school needs to be renamed for him. There are other things that will be built that can honor him, if it is decided to so.

I never really understood barry obsession. what good did he do?

He gave people jobs who were not qualified to have them and ran every city department and all the schools into the ground. Twenty years ago you couldn't even get your trash picked up. But I say let's name the school after him and as an additional honor, the school can open three weeks late every year like most of the schools used to.

And have no doors on the bathrooms, no toilet paper and no textbooks.

Textbook Barry era DCPS

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Ah, so blacks resent having too many white folks around. Gotcha. Thanks for clarifying.

SOME blacks resent that DC is no longer a majority black city (the only majority black "state" in the USA) Some resent that particular neighborhoods have changed not only in race but in culture. Some resent that the city has become less affordable for working class people.

DC only became majority black in 1960, before that it was majority white. And maybe now it becomes majority white again. Tides ebb and flow. Neighborhoods change, and change, and change. Nothing today is exactly as it was when we were kids. Pointless to obsess over something like that.

[Anonymous]

A piece on WAMU reported that there's a petition drive to rename a major street after Marion Barry. There's talk of H St (imagine the impact on property values for those who've purhased there) but the prize the organizers would most like is to rename Pennsylvania Avenue after the mayor for life. LOL.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Are we able to start bashing Barry because I think this is an awful idea. Corrupt politicians shouldn't get their names on buildings.

You have to wait one more week.

Just wait for some to suggest putting him under glass in a special mausoleum next to the District Building, Communist cult leader-style.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Are we able to start bashing Barry because I think this is an awful idea. Corrupt politicians shouldn't get their names on buildings.

You have to wait one more week.

Just wait for some to suggest putting him under glass in a special mausoleum next to the District Building, Communist cult leader-style.

Oh, yeah... Now we are talking... North Koreans are experts on that. Chinese are pretty good too.

[Anonymous]

I DO remember when you couldn't get your trash picked up, but things started getting better in the mid-90's. During the Barry years, I was more surprised than not when city services actually worked. And I dreaded going to the DMV...you were lucky if whatever you needed to do there took only one day, and you didn't have to make 2 or 3 trips to satisfy whatever whim of the last teller you spoke to told you to do, sneerfully. Damn, those days seem so long ago now. We've had a good string of Mayors since them (Gray's criminality aside, he kept things on the right track).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I DO remember when you couldn't get your trash picked up, but things started getting better in the mid-90's. During the Barry years, I was more surprised than not when city services actually worked. And I dreaded going to the DMV...you were lucky if whatever you needed to do there took only one day, and you didn't have to make 2 or 3 trips to satisfy whatever whim of the last teller you spoke to told you to do, sneerfully. Damn, those days seem so long ago now. We've had a good string of Mayors since them (Gray's criminality aside, he kept things on the right track).

The federal financial control board came into existence in 1995, stripping away basically all executive authority from Mayor Barry (that is, authority that courts had not already assumed over various DC government agencies put into receivership). That's when basic services began to improve, and especially after citizens drafted the control board's CFO, Anthony Williams, to run for mayor.

Yes, the Barry days were something: parking tickets on one's registration record that did not match the registrant's car; tax refund claims that never arrived and then turned into tax bills, recycling suspended (Barry thought of it just as a white person's issue), spotty garbage collection, hardly any snow plowing (Barry once said his plan to address a particularly bad storm was "spring"), surly, incompetent officers at MPD, no textbooks in the schools, buildings falling apart, etc.

[Anonymous]

Last time I check we are still a majority African-American populated city, so if the one -drop rule is in effect. Then by alll case and purposes are drop into the city spectrum makes this city a melting pot that is black.