The Nine Lives of Marion Barry Illuminates the Role of Race in DC Politics

by Latoya Peterson

Riding back from a family reunion in South Carolina, we were all bored and half-listening to the news when the latest Marion Barry scandal broke. Marion Barry had been accused of stalking his ex-girlfriend. All the adults in the car listened intently to the newscast, then started to laugh uncontrollably.

“That damn Marion Barry,” my dad said, chuckling.

“This is like ‘Bitch Set Me Up!‘ 2.0,” I added.

Even my grandmother got in on the ribbing: “Oh, that Marion…I wonder if I still have that old ‘Bitch Set Me Up’ tee-shirt I bought the first time around.”

Marion Barry is a complicated character to say the least. Many love him, many hate him. Some see him as a crusader for justice, other see him as a rank opportunist. In my family, Marion Barry is supported, but not revered. While there the acknowledgment that Marion Barry did a lot of amazing things for the black community, he’s regarded kind of like an uncle who just can’t get right, no matter how he tries to improve his life.

So, when HBO broadcast the documentary “The Nine Lives of Marion Barry”, I knew I had to tune in.

Checking out some of the reviews of the documentary, I was struck the most by a quick summation in review by The Root:

Traditionally, there have always been three Washingtons: The mainly white Northwest D.C. that controlled the purse strings and the power; the bourgie Gold Coast D.C. of the so-called mulatto elite; and the disenfranchised regular black folks who made up the bulk of the city. In the past decade or so, D.C. has morphed into other incarnations as well: Ethiopian D.C., Salvadoran D.C., South Asian D.C., West African D.C. and, most recently, boutique city D.C., with the $3,000-a-month rents, Barneys Co-op and sustainable seafood restaurants. Those are not Barry’s people.

Now, I would replace “so-called mulatto elite” with a more generic “light skinned elite,” but it’s the same basic principle.

Marion Barry has a hotly contested legacy in the city. There are those who love him and those who abhor him, and both camps of people are shown in the opening montage of the credits. The story follows his re-election campaign to capture a City Council seat in Ward 8.

The film rewinds to Barry’s initial interaction with politics, when he first burst onto the scene in the mid-1960s. Some quotes from those who remember that time:

• “For a black man [to run] during that period, you really had to have balls to have them.”
• “White representatives, white power ruled the city.” [A note on the screen explains DC was 70% black in 1965.]
• “The city was like a plantation…we couldn’t vote.”

Some of the comments revolved around John McMillan, the senator from South Carolina. Over the course of the film, he was called a “racist”; and accused of “us[ing] political power to use enact racism.”

Another activist noted the prevailing attitude in DC at the time:

“Politics is white people’s business. We should never agitate white people

But agitate they did:

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