That's what I heard a lot from locals. They loved Marion Barry cause he provided a lot of locals with jobs. You reminded me of something in your post years ago. I remember when a lot of people had stacks of stolen metro passes they were selling on the cheap. Thinking of it now that was a lot of money lost during that time.
I literally thought his Name was Mayor Barry.
There was all kinds of scams that nikkas pulled, people were getting salvaged cars that weren't roadwarthy and getting fake paper tags on them for years fake inspections so that they could drive My first 4 cars I had where these hoopties. I bought my first car when I was 12. I didn't get an official drivers license till I was 21.
The Public works people would use their trucks and equipment to do side jobs. Marion Barry would be in hood somewhere and people would just ask him to do some random shyt that one of the departments did and if you ran into him he would get it done. Dude had a remarkable memory I may have saw him maybe 5 or 6 times and he remembered my name and I was a teenager. I must say that I went to school with his son though.
Then there was the summer jobs program where they just gave teenagers jobs. You really didn't work per se it was free money. i knew a lot of kids who literally took the job so that they could flip the first check and cop some work.
I didn't even have to clean up a closed school building I was in something called the Mayor Barry Youth Leadership Institute. Basically they took us to colleges ( I went to American Univesity) we
stayed in the dorms and we took classes where they kicked knowledge to us. They literally had a Hotep University basically what Umar is trying to do.
As an adult I now know someone had to come up with the concept and Marion Barry used tax dollars to fund that shyt, All to get nikkas who was on the school to prison pipeline to at least think about college. They actually has us go on a panty raid. the conselors took us to the girls dorms and the chicks mooned us Then they let us run up in there and we took their panties. Nothing else happened but now looking back on that that had to have been staged our ghetto asses didn't know what a panty riad was. Anything could've went wrong, I guess the point was to get us at least thinking about College.
That being said I can see why some middle class person would object to their tax dollars being funnelled to ghetto youth on the hopes that they wouldn't die in the streets or go to a million years in the joint.
