There is hope after O.J.: D.C. Mayor Barry still tries to cover up his incompetence with cries of racism, but some Black Washingtonians have finally had enough.

• Author: Aizenman, Nurith C.
• Position: Sandra Seegers spearheads the move to recall Mayor Marion S. Barry

It's a sweltering late-summer day and Sandra Seegers has already spent several hours trekking through Washington D.C.'s middle-class Crestwood neighborhood collecting signatures for her campaign to recall D.C. Mayor Marion Barry. Still, as she heads home, Seegers can't resist the opportunity to recruit one more foot soldier. Leaning out of her car window, Seegers calls over to a black man driving his three children up to a church. "What's going on over there today?"

"A fish fry," he answers conversationally.

They bat around favorite fish recipes for a few moments before Seegers gets to the point. "So, you wanna sign my petition to recall the mayor?"

"No," says the man, his smile fading.

"Why not?" Seegers demands.

"Because," he answers, "only white people don't like Barry"

"Well, am I white?" asks Seegers.

"Yes," he replies, driving off.

But she's not. Sandra Seegers not only looks African-American, but for nearly all of her 40-plus years, she has lived east of the Anacostia river in the poorest, most neglected part of Washington. Seegers' neighborhood comprises the city's eighth electoral ward, and it is the foundation upon which Barry has built his formidable popular following. For the last four months, however, this area has also served as the base from which Seegers has been leading an alliance of more than 200 volunteers bent on unseating Barry.

To appreciate how unprecedented--and felicitous--a development it is for a black woman from Ward 8 to be heading a recall attempt against Marion Barry, you need to understand just how deeply race has polarized and perverted the local politics of our nation's capital. This is a majority black city that until as recently as 1974 was effectively ruled by white Southern segregationists in Congress. And Barry, the second elected mayor and the first to align himself with the city's disenfranchised black underclass, was long ago anointed the living symbol of black Washington's struggle for political emancipation. Thanks to this status, Barry has managed to hold onto power through four elections--even as he amassed a record of mismanagement and corruption that would have spelled political death for any other leader in any other city. (This is, readers will recall, the town that re-elected Barry mayor in the very next election after he completed a prison sentence for smoking crack with his mistress at a downtown hotel.) Washington's generally liberal white voters, whose initial support for Barry faded years ago, express frustration and disbelief at the black community's continued devotion to him. After all, it is the blacks in Washington's poorer neighborhoods who have suffered the most at Barry's hand. They are the ones, for instance, who are most affected by the city's astounding rates of new AIDS infection, tuberculosis, and infant mortality--the highest in the nation. Yet until 1996, Barry's government failed to spend $89 million in federal grant money earmarked for solving those problems. But such evidence of Barry's incompetence is brushed aside by his black champions. Any failures on the mayor's part, they retort, are the result of a concerted effort by white racists to sabotage his administration in order to prove that blacks are incapable of self-government.

The black community's unwavering support has rendered Barry seemingly invincible. He won the last election with less than 10 percent of the vote in the city's white areas, and D.C.'s weekly City Paper has been referring to him as "Mayor-for-Life" for more than a decade. Thus the irony was rich this past August when everyone from Jesse Jackson to D.C. congressional delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton joined Barry in denouncing a $1 billion aid package from Congress as a "rape of democracy" and characterizing Sen. Lauch Faircloth, who had orchestrated the bailout, as a white Southerner plotting to "recolonize the citizens of the District" To be sure, Congress had exacted a heavy price for its largesse. Major mayoral prerogatives, such as the ability to hire and fire top local officials, have been taken from Barry and given to the unelected financial control board that Congress appointed to supervise D.C.'s budget back in 1995--when the city first began teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. But if a democracy is defined as a system in which leaders are held accountable to the people they serve, D.C. ceased to be one long before Congress and the control board stepped in.

Which is precisely what makes the latest movement to recall Barry such welcome news. True, their number is small, and they face an uphill battle, but at long last, some of the people who have been most harmed by Barry are exercising their constitutional right to try to `throw the bum out.' In the process they are taking the first step toward re-establishing the basic formula of democratic government that--far more than an unaccountable control board--is the key to the city's salvation.

Doing the Right Thing

The effort to recall Barry originated not with Sandra Seegers, but with a group of D.C. cab drivers who were angry at Barry for supporting an overhaul of the city's taxi rules that they feared would force them out of business. Barry has since backed down, but at the time, the drivers felt betrayed because they had been at the forefront of Barry's last mayoral campaign--even providing his supporters with free transportation to the polls. Last May, the taxi drivers registered their recall drive with the D.C. board of elections. They were then given until October 28 to collect at least 33,475 signatures--10 percent of the city's registered voters--in favor of holding a recall. Their petition had to include the signatures of at least 10 percent of the voters in at least five of the city's eight wards. If the effort was successful...