The DC government is seriously planning to erect a statue of Marion Barry. A long-time white DC city councilman on Tucker last night answered Tucker's question about Marion Barry's legacy by saying that he promoted the middle class in DC. Tucker laughed and said that Barry was Mayor of DC during one of the biggest eras of white flight ever in DC. The City Councilman then said that lots of people held Marion Barry in high regard. This interview was almost unreal.
Out with George Washington; in with Marion Barry. /s
The DC City Councilman you mentioned is Jack Evans, a nice guy typical liberal with a terrible memory. He has to play both sides of the street in order to keep getting elected though he’s from a significantly, if not, largely white constituency.
Barry was a crook, a crack-user, possibly an adulterer, and as a FR special, reportedly beat his second wife Effie so badly that she had to go secretly to a hospital in Baltimore to get her face repaired. I had an acquaintance who knew Effie and went to see her in the hospital. We often shared a train-ride together so I got some good gossipy news about Barry and DC.
Barry’s first wife, a nasty piece of work, and all the other key leaders of OIC, Inc. (a poverty ripoff project), went to jail except Barry, who was also one of their key officers.
His third wife, Cora McMasters or Masters, kept his nuts in a lockbox (or so she thought). She was one tough broad, but smart.
I assisted my local congressman in 1970 or so, with his probe into Barry’s extracurricular activities regarding his possibly buying guns with which to train black youth at a farm in nearby Virginia. Unfortunately the probe was cut short when the congressman lost reelection and the records were destroyed before I could get to them.
However, the key man I worked with was one of the IRS agents who took down Al Capone. His name was John Yates Little and he was good.
We did help expose the communist takeover of the Washington Teachers Union by a Marxist group from Michigan led by William Simon and his aides including Charles Cheng and I believe David Elsila (who is still found among Marxist groups today). [There was a hearing on the WTU possibly held by the House Committee on Education or House Committee on DC. Not everything we found was in there but if you read between the lines, keeping in mind what I have written, I think you’ll get the drift of what I have said].
The bulk of the WTU teachers who literally controlled the WTU were from the Trotskyite “Socialist Workers Party” (SWP) and/or their youth arm, the “Young Socialist Alliance”. This included Marilyn Lerch, Erich Martel and Maude White, among others SWP/YSA teachers.
It took many years before a new school administrator came in and destroyed Simon’s machine’s hold on the WTU.