Dream City: Race, Power, and the Decline of Washington, D.C.

Elected mayor of Washington, D.C., in 1978, sharecropper's son Marion Barry Jr., a leading civil rights activist, began a descent into cocaine and alcohol addiction and demagoguery that mirrored the racially polarized city's decline. Jaffe, an editor of Washingtonian magazine, and WRC-TV political reporter Sherwood suggest that nearly two centuries of congressional domination of the capital, disenfranchisement and white racism have stunted local political traditions in Washington, creating a vacuum filled by power broker Barry. They blame the former mayor (sentenced in 1990 to six months in jail after a drug bust) for whipping up racial animosity, setting whites against blacks and scuttling a prime opportunity for advancing racial harmony. Their chronicle of the dream city turned urban nightmare sweeps from the riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., in 1968, and the real estate boom and crack epidemic of the 1980s to the beleaguered administration of Barry's successor, Sharon Pratt Kelly. (May)