The Last of the Black Emperors: The Hollow Comeback of Marion Barry in a New Age of Black Leaders.

• Author: Powell, Michaell

How apotentially great black leader betrayed his promise, his city, and his people

Not long after I arrived in Washington two years back, notice arrived of a series of Marion Barry press events designed to sell his budget proposals. In District political circles, this was not unlike receiving the spring schedule at the Arena Stage: A show was guaranteed.

After his own desultory fashion, the mayor did not disappoint. Ever the natural politician, with hair dyed jet black in his seventh decade, Barry feinted and parried throughout the week, at ease if a bit bored. When a reporter suggested that Barry's budget, lamed with monies for one dysfunctional program or another, might not gain the approval of the city's financial control board, Barry loosened a practiced snarl. Cut his programs, he said with voice artfully deepening, and there will be "blood in the streets!" Here we had a bit of antique racial mau-mauing, this notion that Barry, half militant and half mayor, was as Horatio at the bridge: Disregard him and his people will riot. But the threat made the evening newscasts and the next day's newspapers.

Two days later Barry advised The Washington Post editorial board that his threat was "just a generic street term" And so dramaturgy fades into farce.

The corrosive emptiness of much of Marion Barry's tenure as mayor, in particular his second, third, and fourth terms, is Washingtons burden. And Jonetta Barras' perceptive new book, The Last of the Black Emperors: The Hollow Comeback of Marion Barry in a New Age of Black Leaders, amounts to an autopsy for that time, and for a brand of racially tinged politics that once dominated more than a few of the nation's cities.

These politics were embraced nearly as often by white liberals as by some blacks, to the mutual detriment of both. As Barras makes clear, Barry's deceits and failures forever puncture the notion that there is a transcendence to be found in the politics of racial nationalism and resentment.

What's less clear is why Barry's brand of politics held sway in Washington so long after voters in other cities moved on. Washingtonians used to explain their continued allegiance to Barry by talking of his symbolic resonance for the nation. That was a fragile conceit.

By 1998, Barry was a political dinosaur and Washington was his swamp. That said, Barry's decline presents a problem for a newcomer such as myself. To watch Barry now, with his fatigued rhetoric, shriveled political base, and almost...