The 1990 FBI videotape of Washington, D.C. mayor Marion Barry smoking crack transfixed television viewers nationwide. Shouting now-notorious obscenities at the woman who helped agents trap him, Barry was publicly disgraced, his personal and political life apparently wrecked. But in 1994, following his release from federal prison, Barry was elected once more to serve as mayor of the nation's capital. How did Barry pull off his political resurrection? Why are African-Americans so enamored of him? And why, despite his return to power, has Barry's story so dramatically lost promise? In The Last of the Black Emperors, author Jonetta Rose Barras explains the many paradoxes of Marion Barry's career, and documents the growth of his racial and political identities parallel with those of his largely black constituency.
"In Washington Times columnist Barras's hard-hitting assessment, Marion Barry, mayor of Washington, D.C., is "a chief purveyor of African-American-extortionist politics... squeezing whites for as much as possible." Barras, who is African American, charges that Barry's divisive brand of race-based politics has fostered black dependency on the white establishment instead of building coalitions withi
Publishers Weekly
"Barras, a columnist and former reporter for the conservative Washington Times, offers here an intriguing account of the rise and fall from grace of the beleaguered mayor of Washington, DC. She presents a scathing indictment of a "master" politician who gained fame in the 1960s as a Civil Rights activist and as the first chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Barras details
