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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]

Yes, as a life long resident of the area, this is spot on.   Yes, he was well liked because he "helped" people but he was more of a hand that held people down than helped them up. I think he had good intentions just very poor execution.

Sad that he has passed, he was a fixture in DC for sure and will be long remembered.[/quote]

I think this has to be put in context.  He was the son of a sharecropper who earned two degrees in science, but took up the cause of desegregation.  Then he took on the great social experiment that was DC home rule.  In a very short time they had desegregation, home rule, and the postwar decline of inner city manufacturing all at the same time.  There was no academic scholarship on how to handle those problems at the time.  The country barely understood what worked and what failed from the Great Depression.  So he put adults to work in government jobs, which were previously all white and middle class.  He put the kids to work picking up trash and killing rats.  That sounds straight up Newt Gingrich.  The constituency he won in his first election were the white voters across town -- people pretty much like DCUM except in the 1970s.

He had a big job, and I think that calling it "very poor execution" belittles the magnitude of what he had to do.[/quote]

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