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During the Barry years, Frances Murphy, former publisher of the Afro American Newspapers, Calvin W. Rolark, former publisher of the Washington Informer, and black editorial writers, including Barbara Reynolds from USA Today, along with reporters from Howard University-owned, WHUR radio, forged a special bond with Barry to ensure that their audiences got the entire story unfiltered.
Whites and much of the nation thought Barry was guilty when they saw the FBI videotape of him lighting a crack pipe while in a hotel room with a former girlfriend, who cooperated with the FBI in setting up the rendezvous. Barry found sympathy, however, in the black community in D.C. One popular shirt sold at the time quoted Barry's response when the room was raided: “Bitch Set Me Up.”
Every afternoon after the trial there was a media show on “Barry Beach.” the area outside the courthouse where cameras were set up to interview lawyers, witnesses and observers. Rev. James Bevel, a veteran of the Civil Rights Movement, was one of the many ministers who came to the camera to address the media, following R. Kenneth Mundy, Barry’s defense lawyer. I made it a point to yell out the first question and Barry made it easy because he always looked my way.
Barry was convicted of misdemeanor drug possesion and served six months in jail. During this period he communicated to his constituents through letters and stories in the Washington Afro American. It was during this period that I earned a new respect for Frances Murphy, who personally reported and wrote the Barry stories. She even went to Petersburg, Va. for a jailhouse interview.
Two months after Barry’s April 1992 release from prison, he filed to run for the Ward 8 seat on the D.C. Council. Because he had lost an at-large race for the panel in 1990 and then-Councilmember Wilhelmina Rolark was a powerful incumbent, I didn’t think Barry had a chance. During an appearance on FOX 5 News, I said some people were calling Barry a “carpetbagger.”
It was sunset when the royal blue hearse carrying D.C. Councilmember and former Mayor Marion S. Barry finally arrived at the gates of Congressional Cemetery in Southeast Washington.
Even though there was a light rain, I stood without an umbrella--dressed in black suit, black tie and white shirt--in the middle of the street with my iPad to catch photos and video when a camera man yelled, “Get out of the shot.”
The first time I had something like that yelled at me was on an August afternoon in 1990. I was on the plaza of the United States Court for the District of Columbia. I was a reporter for the Washington Afro American newspaper and over my shoulders were rows of cameras and reporters covering Mayor Marion Barry’s drug and perjury trial.
From the night Barry was arrested during an FBI sting at the Vista Hotel to the verdict at the conclusion of his trial on August 23, 1990, his story was a big deal for broadcast, print and radio outlets around the country. As a reporter for the Baltimore-based Afro American Newspapers the assignment was even larger.
While objectivity is critical for any respectable news outlet, the spin, angle or focus often differs between mainstream news outlets and black-owned news organizations like the Afro American. It is a reality that dates back to the Reconstruction Era.
It is ironic that Barry is now buried in the same cemetery as J. Edgar Hoover, architect of the FBI’s infamous counter-intelligence program (COINTELPRO). He ordered wiretaps and surveillance of Martin Luther King and other black leaders during the 1960s because of a core belief in a communist influence in the civil rights movement.
It was Hoover’s FBI, coupled with segregation and the other remnants from Reconstruction like the Ku Klux Klan that caused many African American institutions from churches to black own newspapers to grow in the early 1900s because there was a such a need. Had it not been for the black press, the complete story of events on the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church or the lynching of Emmett Till might not have been told.