Reply to Anyone been here since the 80s / early 90s? How did smart locals react to Marion Barry

Forum Index » Metropolitan DC Local Politics

Reply to "Anyone been here since the 80s / early 90s? How did smart locals react to Marion Barry"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The ignorance of continued devotion to Marion Barry honestly makes me so mad.  What he did to people of color is disgusting.  Barry sentenced an entire generation to a high chance of poverty by failing to provide quality public education.  He also literally sentenced to death so many young men and women by not getting the crime in our city under control.

Barry saw his role as using the city's coffers and power to build a black middle class.  He bloated every city office and agency to ridiculous proportions, often creating unnecessary and redundant jobs, and there were often no qualifications needed for hiring beyond skin color and, at the higher levels, the right connections.  Public services here were a total joke.  You think they're bad now?  Multiply that by 50, and that was the District in 1990.  The irony is that a huge number of those lazy, incompetent city employees moved out of the city to Maryland because even they were fed up with the schools and the crime!

But, he created a summer jobs program, which you know was so daring and original.

Thank God we were blessed enough to have Anthony Williams save our butts.  He laid the foundation to turn this city around and I will forever be grateful for his leadership, which I feel has sadly been unsung. [/quote]

I grew up in MoCo and have lived in DC since the early 1990s. I agree with much of this statement. Understood within the context of newly-granted Home Rule, Barry's first years were exciting and liberating for African Americans in DC. However, the short-term political gain of employment for a large number of city residents came at the expense of those on the receiving end of city services such as students, the elderly, children in the welfare system, the mentally ill, the sick, etc. I don't believe that Barry ever set out to harm his constituents but that, indeed, was the end result and we are still grappling with its lasting impact on residents today.

[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics