ABSTRACT

Title of Document: PRIDE, INC.: BLACK POWER AND BLACK CAPITALISM IN WASHINGTON, D.C., 1967- 1981

Susan Philpott

Directed By: Associate Professor, Dr. George Derek Musgrove, Historical Studies

Pride, Inc., a nationally- recognized youth jobs program in Washington, D.C., put young men from the city’s poorest neighborhoods to work killing rats, collecting trash, and cleaning alleys. Pride promoted these “hard-core unemployed,” the street kids with criminal records who were affectionately called “dudes,” as leaders and change agents. This thesis explores the evolution of the program’s structure and philosophy as it grew from a clean-up effort into a network of social services and for- profit companies while other programs initiated under the War on Poverty were stripped of funding or fell apart in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As Pride expanded, its leaders sought to remake the economic landscape of the city by developing profitable businesses run by the dudes; they emphasized community self-reliance and black capitalism. Through the history of Pride, I explore the tension experienced by many in the Black Power Movement who sought to overcome poverty and racism

from within existing economic and political systems rather than challenging structural oppression and inequality.

PRIDE, INC.: BLACK POWER AND BLACK CAPITALISM IN WASHINGTON, D.C., 1967-1981.

By

Susan Philpott.

Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in History 2018

© Copyright by Susan Philpott 2018

Dedication

This thesis is dedicated to Keon and Jerda, two young men from Washington, D.C. who might have been called “dudes” if they had been born fifty years earlier. Having the opportunity to work with them and the other young people in the Youth

Conservation Corp at the National Mall during the summer of 2013 was one of the most rewarding experiences of my career.

And, as always, to my husband Ronnie, whose support and love make everything possible.

ii

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my advisor, Dr. Derek Musgrove, for his unwavering support, understanding, and dedication to excellence throughout this process. I am doubtful that I ever could have completed this work without his encouragement. I know that I am a better scholar because of the opportunity to work under his guidance. Thank you also to Dr. Denise Meringolo and Dr. Michelle Scott for your expertise and support. I aspire to follow your examples as scholars of the struggles for equality and justice.

My deepest gratitude to those who assisted me with my research, especially

Joellen El-Bashir in the Manuscripts Division at the Moorland-Spingarn Research

Center at Howard University, Dr. Ben Houston of Newcastle University, and Anne

McDonough and Jessica Smith at the Historical Society of Washington, D.C. Thanks to Dr. Lauren Pearlman for allowing me to access her dissertation, “Democracy’s

Capital,” before its publication. The expertise and encouragement of all the scholars and archivists who assisted me along the way kept me going when I thought I would never be able to complete this work.

Any success I have achieved, I owe in no small part to my amazing network of family, friends, and co-workers who cheer me on. I am forever grateful for the friendship, love, and support of (in no particular order): Jana, Mannie, Zach, Lauren,

Wendy, Kenna, Greg, Matt, Talbot, Jessi, Cole, Celso, LaQuanda, and Jenn. Special thanks to Nichole for sitting with me while I waited nervously for my defense and for helping with the final formatting.

iii

This work was fueled by endless cups of tea served with love by my children

Aaron, Emily, and Jesse. I hope they still like me when I finally return to the world of family interaction. And, last but not least, thank you to our family dog, Chester, who never let me forget that long walks in the sunshine are essential to the writing process.

iv

Table of Contents

Dedication ...... ii Acknowledgements ...... iii Table of Contents ...... v Introduction ...... 1 Literature Review...... 5 Methodology ...... 25 Chapter Organization ...... 27 Chapter One ...... 27 Chapter Two...... 27 Chapter Three...... 28 Chapter 1: Locating Pride Within the Evolving Civil Rights Movement, 1965-1967 30 Washington Heats Up ...... 32 Barry in Washington ...... 35 From Bus Boycott to Free D.C...... 40 Pride Takes Shape ...... 51 Chapter 2: Pride’s First Year: From Rat Patrol through Riot Recovery into a New Philosophy, September 1967-August 1968...... 63 The Psychology of Pride ...... 65 The Organization and Structure of Pride ...... 77 Uprising: Pride Emerges from the Ashes...... 93 Chapter 3: The Rise and Fall of Pride, 1969-1981 ...... 99 The Pride Business Model ...... 101 The Problems of Pride: Black Capitalism’s Flaws ...... 110 Pride and Legitimacy ...... 122 The Fall of Pride ...... 129 Conclusion ...... 139 Bibliography ...... 148

v

Introduction

In 1967, Pride, Inc., a youth jobs program in Washington, D.C., captured national attention for its approach to combating poverty and unemployment in the inner city. Pride members made their mark wearing army-style dark green denim uniforms while pushing brooms through neglected city streets. The young workers who spent the last month of the summer killing rats, collecting trash, and cleaning alleys in the city’s poorest neighborhoods received visits from Vice President Hubert

Humphrey and presidential hopeful George Romney. Over the objection of some

Southern congressmen, the Department of Labor, pleased with Pride’s success, expanded the initial $300,000 grant that funded the project start-up to $2 million to keep the initiative going through the fall and winter. Ebony magazine chronicled the upstart organization while the FBI sent special agents to monitor Pride activities for signs of black militancy. Despite having many critics in law enforcement and on

Capitol Hill, while other programs initiated under President Johnson’s War on

Poverty were stripped of funding or fell apart in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Pride,

Inc. expanded and continued to operate with federal support until 1981.

The full story of Pride has been overshadowed in previous scholarship by the charismatic personality and sometimes sordid political career of its co-founder,

Marion Barry. Such a framing ignores the historical context in which the project was conceived and in which it operated for years before Barry’s political career began.

The Pride philosophy of black capitalism and self-respect celebrated rather than condemned the culture of “ghetto” youth. Through ambitious and wide-ranging endeavors, the leaders of Pride put the so-called “hard-core” unemployed to work—

1

including in leadership positions—with the intention of capitalizing on the street- smarts of their members, affectionately and respectfully called “dudes.” “Pride, Inc. was organized to provide solutions to problems created by the larger society and festering within the lower-economic black community of Washington, D.C.,” an early

Pride description paper explained. By channeling the energy of the discarded and marginalized young people of the District, Pride intended to “demonstrat[e] to the larger community that these people want to and will work.”1 Through meaningful employment, young men could transform themselves and their communities.

Pride was not unique in the Nation’s Capital as a government-funded program designed to address social ills, unemployment, and crime in the inner-city. The

Report of the President’s Commission on Crime in the District of Columbia released in 1966, the year before Pride’s creation, described a plethora of available resources for city residents, including an extensive network run by the United Planning

Organization (UPO).2 In addition, several youth employment programs, many operating on a much larger scale, had already been developed prior to the creation of

Pride.3 Why then was Labor Secretary Willard Wirtz willing to fund another endeavor in August 1967, when Pride, Inc. received its first grant? The founders of

Pride, Inc. promoted the program as distinctive because of its focus on youth as

1 “Pride, Inc.” undated, in Box 11, Folder 10, Youth Pride, Inc. papers (unprocessed), Moorland- Spingarn Research Center, Howard University. Emphasis in the original. 2 Report of the President’s Commission on Crime in the District of Columbia (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1966), 762-768. 3 For example, the Opportunities Industrialization Center (OIC), created by Leon Sullivan, opened in January 1964 in Philadelphia through donations received from corporations and a local businessman. Although the Department of Labor originally rejected the program’s application for a grant, the Office of Economic Opportunity eventually used the OIC as a model to expand the initiative to additional cities. In June 1967, Lyndon Johnson declared the OIC “an example of how successful the whole war on poverty can be.” See Matthew J. Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 112-115.

2

change agents. Unlike other assistance agencies that coached clients to conform to white establishment expectations, Pride, Inc. leaders claimed that the young inner-city residents developed and managed the program themselves. As described in the Pride publication Dig Your BLACK Self, “Pride has not taken the dude off the street, but has brought the street with him. Imaginative use of the equation of an economic development thrust hooked to a manpower base provides financial independence and social dignity in addition to black ownership.”4 Pride offered more than job training, they said; it affirmed the inherent worth of the people it served and the community in which they lived. Pride promised success because of the dudes’ life experience, not in spite of it. Wirtz was enthusiastic about what he saw as a bold experiment in youth empowerment and civic responsibility.5

A study of the origins and development of Pride, Inc. expands the narrative about the history of Black Power initiatives in the years following the Selma march and the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In Where Do We Go From Here:

Chaos or Community? Martin Luther King, Jr. marked 1965 as a crossroads in the struggle for racial justice. The “white allies” of the movement who stood with black activists against “brutality and unregenerate evil” were reluctant to take the next step towards the elimination of white supremacy. “The paths of Negro-white unity that had been converging crossed at Selma, and like a giant X began to diverge. Up to

Selma there had been unity to eliminate barbaric conduct. Beyond it the unity had to

4 Youth Pride, Incorporated, Dig Your BLACK Self, Washington, D.C., 1969 in Youth Pride, Inc. Papers (unprocessed), Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C. 5 See, for instance, W. Willard Wirtz, Secretary of Labor, Letter to Rufus Mayfield, Chairman, PRIDE, INC., Washington, D.C., August 2, 1967; Reading Files “Departmental” July-Sept 1967, Records of the Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz 1962-1969, Box 541, General Records of the Department of Labor, Record Group 174, National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

3

be based on the fulfillment of equality, and in the absence of agreement the paths began inexorably to move apart."6 The divergence occurred within the civil rights organizations as well. Younger activists like Marion Barry and Stokely Carmichael questioned the effectiveness of nonviolent demonstrations as a tactic and integration as a goal. As Hasan Kwame Jeffries discusses in Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and

Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt, these young members of the movement, disillusioned by what they saw within existing political structures, began to look to the poor black communities that supported their efforts as a model for the path forward. “Black cultural values” among the rural poor emphasized “the importance of community self-reliance and solidarity” which would become the activists’ focus in the freedom struggle. They were also inspired by anti-colonial efforts in Africa and the Caribbean, a particularly apt model in Washington, D.C. where the black majority population did not have the vote and segregationists in Congress managed the city’s affairs.7 The resulting “uncompromising quest for social, political, cultural, and economic transformation” over the next decade has been the focus of recent scholarship but, as Peniel Joseph notes, there is still much work to be done.8 The

Pride story is one component of that missing scholarship.

The Pride agenda was militant but not revolutionary. It sought the redistribution of wealth and power but within the existing government and economic framework. Pride did not seek to eliminate the world of white bureaucracy,

6 Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 4. 7 Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 56-7. 8 Peniel E. Joseph, “The Black Power Movement: A State of the Field,” Journal of American History 96, issue 3 (December 2009), 753.

4

capitalism, and justice; its leaders believed that African Americans could operate within these systems while rejecting their structural oppression. To an extent, they accepted the white sociological diagnosis of cultural damage in the black community resulting from centuries of oppression, but they rejected its accompanying assumptions of black inferiority and criminality. The Pride programs attempted to marry the self-determination ideology of capitalism with the Black Power emphasis on connection to community, encouraging the dudes to use what they learned to improve the inner-city rather than escape it. Unlike most other anti-poverty programs around the country, Pride, Inc. functioned in the federal district, a city with an elected local government, so they emphasized economic rather than political power. What started as a month-long cleanup program expanded to include numerous business undertakings under the Pride umbrella. Nevertheless, they remained dependent on federal grants to continue operations. As the Pride organization grew to pursue solutions to entrenched problems of education, housing, political power, and economic viability, the Pride leadership had to resolve sometimes-conflicting goals of black self-sufficiency and success in a capitalist system.

Literature Review

The full history of Pride, Inc. has not been explored in a meaningful way in the existing scholarship; however, there are numerous works available to inform the study and place it within its historical context. Pride developed during the convergence of several emerging movements; its trajectory was shaped and informed by all of them. The Department of Labor funded Pride as part of the Great Society,

Lyndon Johnson’s effort to eradicate poverty through federal health, education, and

5

social welfare initiatives that supported community leadership and involvement.

Emerging concurrently with the administration’s commitment to a War on Poverty was an increasingly punitive response to a perceived rise in crime. As federal dollars flowed into impoverished communities, critics of the expanded government role demanded that those individuals who responded to the conditions of poverty through violence, narcotic use, and other illegal activities be incarcerated at greater rates. The developing “war on crime,” a phrase first uttered by Johnson, had its origins in the time period in which Pride supported employment for the “hard-core” which included those with criminal records. The rising effort to exclude criminals from society, in direct opposition to the work of programs like Pride, was also fueled by white

America’s fear of the rising Black Power Movement. The ever more impatient, sometimes confrontational, young black activists of the late 1960s and early 1970s were frustrated that the legal gains of the Civil Rights Movement failed to effectuate real equality and opportunity. The men and women who crafted the Pride vision of self-sufficiency and economic empowerment shared the Black Power Movement’s emphasis on addressing systemic racism, although they sought to effect change from within the capitalist system rather than through its overthrow.

The attempt to alleviate poverty and its repercussions on society has a long history in the United States, though the effort became central to national domestic policy with Johnson’s 1964 declaration of a “War on Poverty.” Identifying the causes of economic inequality, and thus finding effective solutions, has been perpetually elusive. As Alice O’Connor demonstrates in Poverty Knowledge: Social Science,

Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth Century U.S. History, reformers have

6

continually viewed the problem of poverty through ideological lenses; attempted remedies have therefore been shaped by political perspectives. “Most fundamentally,”

O’Connor posits, “…poverty knowledge reflects a central tension within liberal thought about the nature of inequality…whether it is best understood and addressed at the level of individual experience or as a matter of structural and institutional reform.”9 The shifting focus between self-sufficiency and the interconnectedness of community pulled the Pride programs in different directions, as did the struggle with opposing methods of “knowing.” So-called scientific or objective studies are shaped by the power dynamics in which they are developed, O’Connor argues; the remedies proposed by a group of scholars educated within a system in which white middle- class values are normalized will tend “not just to reflect but to replicate the social inequalities” which perpetuated the economic conditions in the first place.10 One of the prevalent theories produced in this atmosphere was the assertion that the deprivations of poverty damaged the social structure of communities in which it perpetuated, imprinting a cultural malaise on succeeding generations. Once this

“cycle of poverty” was diagnosed, the solution involved “reforming the culture” of the problem group, a remedy that discounted any rectification of structural factors that systematically denied people of color opportunity for economic success.11 Guian

A. McKee analyzes Lyndon Johnson’s language in recorded conversations to conclude that the champion of the Great Society subscribed to this theory. The

9 Alice O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth- Century U.S. History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 8-9. 10 O’Connor, 11. 11 Guian A. McKee, “’This Government is with Us’: Lyndon Johnson and the Grassroots War on Poverty,” The War on Poverty: A New Grassroots History, 1964-1980, ed. Annelise Orleck and Lisa Gayle Hazirjian (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2011), 35.

7

problem was too many young men without motivation or job skills; once they were put to work, poverty and social unrest would be resolved.12 McKee asserts that War on Poverty leaders such as Sargent Shriver did not truly support the concept of

“maximum feasible participation,” wording included in anti-poverty legislation which encouraged active involvement of citizens in the community. While the idea appears to solicit the wisdom of the intended beneficiaries, “the phrase… [was invoked] as simply a way to ensure that African Americans would not be completely excluded” from programs rather than to any belief that the community had any expertise to contribute.13 McKee alludes to one Johnson official who may have been a true believer in grass-roots involvement as the path to poverty solutions: Secretary of

Labor Willard Wirtz, the champion and initial funder of Pride, Inc.14

Despite the Johnson administration’s skepticism about challenging the structural causes of poverty, as well as the lack of support for programs designed and managed by non-professionals, scholars have argued that the Great Society programs

12 McKee, 37. In his 2015 article in The Atlantic, “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” Ta-Nahesi Coates traces the perpetuation of this perception to the 1965 report by Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. According to Coates, the report initially included a list of recommendations that were subsequently deleted from the final version; his ideas included guaranteed minimum income, improved access to birth control, recruitment efforts to bring more African Americans into government jobs and the military, and residential integration. Moynihan feared that inclusion of the action items would subvert the report’s impact. Coates argues that absent such policy recommendations, the dialogue the report provoked left unchallenged Moynihan’s core assumption that racist policies had primarily damaged Black men, and in turn destroyed the proper familial hierarchy. “In essence,” the report claims, “the Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it is so out of line with the rest of American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole and imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male and, in consequence, on a great many Negro women as well.” Absent a robust discussion about solutions, the inherent patriarchal bias and misogyny of the analysis was accepted in the public square. The void left by the lack of actionable items was filled by those who read the report as an indictment of Black culture. Particularly as urban uprisings spread through several northern cities, opponents of social service programs used the report’s diagnosis to proclaim the moral failings of ghetto residents. In this worldview, riots were just the latest manifestation of the inferiority of a race of people mired in sexual immorality, violence, and corruption. 13 McKee, 36. 14 McKee, 39.

8

became the mechanism for the continuation of the Civil Rights Revolution. Susan

Youngblood Ashmore demonstrates that in places like rural Alabama, “[l]ocal people…saw these federal programs as an opportunity to create communities that reflected their sense of democracy and social justice.”15 In Carry It On: The War on

Poverty and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama, 1964-1972, Ashmore provides analysis of Great Society programs that in fact “addressed the structural issues associated with poverty” and “destabilized traditional race and class relationships” in the economy, in politics, and in cultural norms. She also examines the ways that this structural reorganization provoked opposition among those invested in the old power structures; through her work, we have a fuller picture of the causes of the persistence of poverty and the development of the conservative backlash to the Great Society.16

Although the structural obstacles of a racially exploitative economic system and political corruption were too entrenched to be uprooted by the grassroots efforts supported by the War on Poverty, black people in the South made tremendous political and social gains during the period which should not be discounted, Ashmore asserts. Most significantly, the anti-poverty initiatives were “the first federally sponsored programs that intentionally tried to incorporate African Americans into the country’s mainstream,” progress that is often overlooked in the history of the Great

Society.17

Washington, D.C. exists in the liminal space between North and South, containing but not fully representing elements of both sensibilities. Therefore, a study

15 McKee, 36; Susan Youngblood Ashmore, Carry It On: The War on Poverty and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama, 1964-1972 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008), 10. 16 Ashmore, 13-15. 17 Ashmore, 284-285, 294.

9

of the black freedom struggle in the District, particularly in the post-Civil Rights Act era, must include a reflection on developments in northern cities as well. Although the concept of Black Power encompassed a wide spectrum of beliefs and activities within each community, a central precept according to Komozi Woodard is that

“[w]hite racism and group antagonism are not temporary distortions of American democracy; they are fundamental features of U.S. society.”18 Opposition to every aspect of society which perpetuates the racist dynamic is therefore necessary.

Survival and ultimate reversal of this condition required “the attainment and maintenance of autonomy and individuality” known as black nationalism.19 This consciousness solidified in the segregated ghettos of northern cities, says Woodard, as urban populations swelled with migrants from the south and new communities formed with shared cultural elements such as food, music, and language. This “new black ethos of the 1960s” rebelled against the “gross inequities in the racial allocation of power, authority, and wealth” endemic in the urban economy.20 Although criticism of capitalism was an important component of the resistance, including studies of

Marxist ideology, Woodard contends that black nationalism in the Black Power era never truly embraced communism as some activists in previous decades had.21 In fact, among the experiments in Black Power activism were programs like Pride designed to foster economic success for the black community within the capitalist system.

18 Komozi Woodard, A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power Politics (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 8. Although this work focuses on the political development of Amiri Baraka in Newark, New Jersey, the introduction provides a brief history of black nationalism in the United States. 19 Woodard, 9. 20 Woodard, 32-34. 21 Woodard, 36-38.

10

In his comprehensive survey of the black freedom struggle outside of the former Confederacy, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North, Thomas J. Sugrue describes a rich history of activism among northern

African Americans who spoke out against economic and political exclusion. Their efforts expanded the concept of rights beyond “the lifting of negative restraints” such as restrictive housing covenants or discriminatory hiring practices and pushed for

“equality of results,” particularly in the areas of education and economic prosperity.22

In the late 1960s and 1970s, these efforts often took the form of economic development programs similar to Pride which were designed to uplift impoverished city neighborhoods. They enjoyed support across a spectrum of political ideologies from “black power advocates… [to] the Nixon administration” but were often stymied in their ability to effect real change since they could not possibly reverse systemic problems “they ultimately did not have the capacity or resources to solve.”23

In Philadelphia, black activists already disillusioned by the 1960s with the failure of liberalism to ensure equal opportunity developed privately funded efforts that attempted to counteract local and national policies which “institutionalized white privilege.”24 Philadelphians used the ground-up organizing strategies of southern movement groups like SNCC and the self-empowerment ideology of Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam to address educational and vocational deficiencies in the inner city while seeking to avoid white usurpation of black leadership, much as Pride would

22 Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008), xviii. 23 Sugrue, 402. 24 Matthew J. Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 5-6.

11

attempt five to ten years later in Washington, D.C. using federal funds.25 In Up South:

Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia, Matthew J. Countryman posits that the same liberal idealism that supported programs like Pride and the Philadelphia organizations also reinforced tax and suburbanization policies that doomed their efforts long before the conservative backlash against the War on Poverty. Like

Sugrue and Ashmore, Countryman lauds the political gains in the 1970s made possible by black liberation activities, although he believes the accomplishment came in spite of, and not because of, the liberal agenda.26 While political accomplishments are also a crucial component of Washington history during the same era, this study will refocus attention on the intention of Pride and programs like it to get at the root of the problems of poverty and crime in the inner city, and the effort to address those structural obstacles plaguing poor black city-dwellers.

Early scholarship of the Black Power era did not concentrate as fully on the ineffectiveness of liberal policies to alleviate poverty as it did on the destructive force of the Black Power movement on the liberal agenda. In this analysis, the purity of both the civil rights activists and the Great Society idealists was corrupted by the vitriol and militancy of angry black men with guns.27 University of Texas professor

Peniel E. Joseph has written extensively on the subject, exploring the stories that have been told about the Black Power era. Joseph acknowledges that powerful images have defined Black Power in the public’s imagination but argues that the rich history of the movement’s radical challenges to systemic racism are best explored not through

25 Countryman, 111-115, 185-189. 26 Countryman, 9. 27 Peniel E. Joseph, “The Black Power Movement: A State of the Field,” The Journal of American History 96, no. 3 (December 2009), 751-752.

12

shouted slogans and raised fists, but on a small scale, at the local level. “From this vantage point the movement becomes less about iconic leaders, with the focus shifting instead to its role as a new avenue for community organizing, featuring previously overlooked and understudied groups and activists.”28 This study of Pride, a federally-funded Black Power organization in the Nation’s Capital, will contribute to the locally-focused scholarship Joseph sees as essential to more fully developed

Black Power Studies while also offering insight into the tension between black empowerment and government support. Devin Fergus undertakes a similar study in

North Carolina. His book Liberalism, Black Power, and the Making of American

Politics, 1965-1980 challenges the contentions that liberalism either failed or was corrupted by Black Power. Fergus argues that cooperation between the liberal establishment and black nationalists coaxed activists away from the more extreme aspects of their ideology. "Liberals' policy of engagement helped to reform Black

Power. Black nationalists assented—toeing the political and constitutional line, and adjusting their programs and agendas to fit within the pluralist order."29 Fergus agrees that the long history of Black Power is integral to the political and cultural evolution of postwar America, as Joseph claims, rather than an isolated, discredited anomaly.30

He challenges the assumption that liberalism failed because it accommodated black nationalist extremism "by showing how liberalism helped to bring a radical civic ideology back from the brink of political violence and social nihilism” demonstrating

28 Peniel E. Joseph, “Rethinking the Black Power Era,” The Journal of Southern History LXXV, no. 3 (August 2009), 714. 29 Devin Fergus, Liberalism, Black Power, and the Making of American Politics, 1965-1980 (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2009), 2, 5. 30 Fergus, 10; Joseph, “Rethinking the Black Power Era,” 715.

13

"liberalism's capacity to reform revolution."31 In staving off upheaval, however, the partnership with liberalism may have also neutralized the piercing Black Power critique of structural oppression.

Bringing the new black consciousness to economic development did not always offer the same revolutionary fire as other Black Power initiatives and could be fraught with troubling compromises and alliances. This ambivalence resulted in somewhat disjointed efforts in various communities; it also contributes to a dearth of scholarship on the subject, since the rhetoric condemning capitalism by Black Power figures is more memorable and prominent in the existing literature. In The Business of

Black Power, editors Laura Warren Hill and Julia Rabig have begun to fill the gap through their collection of essays highlighting several business models during the

Black Power era. Through their study, Hill and Rabig seek to answer the question:

“[W]ould the business of Black power serve or undermine the goals of Black freedom?”32 It is a complex problem to solve. In their opening essay, “Toward a

History of the Business of Black Power,” Hill and Rabig demonstrate that although economic justice has long been a key concern in the black freedom struggle, the issue became more complex in the wake of the Civil Rights Act and its elimination of legal segregation and job discrimination. War on Poverty programs failed to create the jobs for which they provided training. Black communities long starved of the means of wealth creation could provide neither the capital necessary for economic development nor sufficient income to support the businesses that were introduced. Many Black

Power advocates believed that once they were able to bring black consciousness to

31 Fergus, 10-11. 32 Laura Warren Hill and Julia Rabig, “Introduction,” The Business of Black Power (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2012), 1-5.

14

the mechanisms of capitalism, they would be able to reform its exploitative nature from within.33 However, corporate or municipal partnerships could end up with initiatives that failed to help either individual workers or the community, as white decision-makers only provided training for low-level jobs or invested in what one

Rochester organizer termed “apartheid businesses: grocery stores, dry cleaners, gas stations, garages” and other low-profit employment that kept black workers and business owners from advancing. These kinds of disappointing developments led many involved in black business development initiatives to conclude that “Black capitalism controlled by white capital could never benefit the Black community."34

Once in office, Richard Nixon co-opted the framework of black capitalism as a politically palatable way to gain support from black voters while still dismantling

Johnson’s Great Society programs. Dean Kotlowski contends that when Nixon proclaimed support during his first presidential campaign for “black pride, black jobs, black opportunity, and yes, black power in the best, the constructive sense of that often misapplied term,” it was a position that served many purposes. Black capitalism provided a means to back away from integration, to promote the free market and individualism, to counter criticism that he was weak on civil rights, and to condemn violence and militancy while providing investment in black communities meant to suppress uprisings. The Office of Minority Business Enterprise (OMBE) established during his presidency was poorly organized and funded, so progress with the

33 Laura Warren Hill and Julia Rabig, “Toward a History of the Business of Black Capitalism,” The Business of Black Power, 15-26. 34 Hill, “FIGHTing for the Soul of Black Capitalism: Struggles for Black Economic Development in Postrebellion Rochester” The Business of Black Capitalism, 58-59.

15

initiative was minimal.35 Robert E. Weems, Jr. and Lewis A. Randolph extend

Kotlowski’s argument, tracing Nixon’s position back to his anti-communist past.

They argue that Nixon capitalized on the dissention among black leaders on the proper way to address economic and political disparities; his support of a separate black economic sphere operating within the value system of capitalism was a means of wooing Black Power advocates while silencing those promoting a “redistribution of wealth” and an upending of the capitalist system, as Martin Luther King had called for in the months prior to his assassination.36 One of the supporters Nixon was able to cultivate was Floyd McKissick, who undertook a huge experiment in federally- sponsored black capitalism in North Carolina. With support of the Nixon administration, McKissick sought to create an entire planned community in rural

Warren County called Soul City. The mixed-use development was designed to provide an alternative to the inner city for southern migrants and a laboratory for the cultivation of black-owned business enterprises. Neither the incubator for black capitalism nor the partnership between Black Power and the Republican Party were viable, Devin Fergus demonstrates, because black consciousness had to be repeatedly subjugated to white values. To compound the problems, an economic downturn in the mid-1970s hit blacks hard; black consumers lost their jobs and black-owned businesses failed at a much higher rate than their white counterparts. Historically

35 Dean Kotlowski, “Black Power-Nixon Style: The Nixon Administration and Minority Business Enterprise,” The Business History Review 72, no. 3 (October 1, 1998): 409–45. 36Robert E. Weems Jr. and Lewis A. Randolph, “The Ideological Origins of Richard M. Nixon’s ‘Black Capitalism’ Initiative,” The Review of Black Political Economy 29, no. 1 (Summer 2001), 51- 53.

16

starved of resources, education, expertise, and capital, the black community was forced to compete on an uneven playing field in free-market capitalism.37

Soul City faced more than economic hurdles; the organization was also plagued with accusations of mismanagement and corruption, a condition that also affected Pride, Inc.38 Federal and local investigations into black organizations are part of a long history of white America’s conception of blackness as synonymous with criminality, along with fear of disruption to the established racial order.39 During the

Black Power era, this fear was heightened by the militancy of groups like the Black

Panther Party coupled with urban uprisings in cities across the country. Although the intensification of the War on Crime is often credited to the Nixon administration,

Elizabeth Hinton establishes that the true origin rests squarely during the Great

Society. The Law Enforcement Act passed in 1965 and other measures embedded crime prevention within the anti-poverty programs. After the widespread violence in the wake of the King assassination in 1968, “social programs originally created to combat racial exclusion and inequality…shifted in purpose toward controlling the violent symptoms of socioeconomic problems.”40 The legislation also provided funds directly to local law enforcement agencies, militarizing the police to fight a domestic war against inner city crime. The first and one of the most substantial funding allocations went to Washington, D.C. Pride, Inc. was therefore employing and training street dudes at a time when the Metropolitan Police Department had recently

37 Fergus, 196-202, 227. 230-231. 38 Fergus, 216-219. 39 See for example Heather Ann Thompson, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History,” Journal of American History 97, no. 3 (December 2010): 703-734; Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, revised ed. (New York: The New Press, 2012), 40-47. 40 Elizabeth Hinton, “‘A War within Our Own Boundaries’: Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and the Rise of the Carceral State,” Journal of American History 102, no. 1 (June 2015), 102.

17

been augmented with a fleet of new vehicles, over three hundred new officers and detectives, and a directive to increase the police presence on the streets.41 What began with Johnson intensified with Nixon’s repeated refrain demanding “law and order” so that by the early 1970s there was a “dramatic erosion in the belief among working- class whites that the condition of the poor, or those who fail to prosper, was the result of a faulty economic system that needed to be challenged.”42 Scholars such as

Elizabeth Hinton, Michelle Alexander, and Heather Ann Thompson trace the origins of modern-day mass incarceration and the increasingly punitive response to crime to this time period. It was in this same time period, however, that Pride was putting the young black men that so frightened officials and middle-America to work caring for their neighborhoods, not just as low-level employees but as supervisors and leaders.

Pride was receiving millions of federal dollars—substantially more than the $890,000 given to MPD— to train and deploy a different kind of army and propose a different solution to crime and poverty.

In addition to the national developments that reframed issues of poverty, crime, and racial empowerment, Pride was shaped by the unique character of the city in which it originated. The Nation’s Capital is the only area in the country placed exclusively under the jurisdiction of the United States Congress by the Constitution.

Not only is the city overseen by a federal legislature in which its residents have no representation but, beginning in 1874, lawmakers stripped those living in the federal city of all voting rights, installing a presidentially-appointed Board of Commissioners to govern the District. In 1967, as Pride received its initial funding, Washington, D.C.

41 Hinton, 103-104. 42 Alexander, 47.

18

was in the midst of a radical political transformation. After nearly a century of disfranchisement, District residents had finally been able to vote in the 1964 presidential election. Legislation that would have granted city residents elected local representation failed in Congress in 1966, so Johnson used his executive power to reorganize municipal government and appoint a mayor and city council more representative of the population, which had been majority black since 1957. Despite this key step towards home rule, the Executive and Legislative branches of the federal government still exercised tremendous control in Washington, D.C. There was no real interference in Pride activities by local officials as a result. Although Pride itself has not received much attention in the existing literature, the confrontational style, political maneuverings, and colorful personal life of Pride, Inc. founder Marion

Barry, who was elected mayor of the city in 1978, have garnered much attention from journalists. Harry Jaffe and Tom Sherwood paint a picture of the capital in the waning years of the twentieth century suffering from the national “sickness” brought on by

“the chasm between the races,” a condition particularly acute in Washington, “a small city where fear and racism rule the streets.”43 In Dream City: Race, Power, and the

Decline of Washington, D.C., Jaffe and Sherwood lay the blame for the disintegration squarely at the feet of Barry. In Jaffe and Sherwood’s narrative, Pride is merely the vehicle through which Barry gains admission to the circle of power controlling city politics as authority shifted slowly towards home rule.44 Jonetta Rose Barras, in The

Last of the Black Emperors: The Hollow Comeback of Marion Barry in the New Age of Black Leaders, sees in Barry’s fall from grace the redemption of black leadership

43 Harry S. Jaffe and Tom Sherwood, Dream City: Race, Power, and the Decline of Washington, D.C. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 15. 44 Jaffe and Sherwood, 87, for example.

19

from its descent into “ethnic and patronage politics,” for which Barry is merely one example, towards “an era of competent, professional stewardship of cities long wracked by crime and poverty.”45 Barras portrays the Pride organization as a mass

“of corruption almost from its inception” and accomplishing little more than serving as Barry’s goon squad.46 Jonathan I. Z. Agronsky admits in the preface of Marion

Barry: The Politics of Race that he was motivated to write the biography by anger at

Barry and his associates for what he perceived as “the great and unnecessary harm they were inflicting on the people, reputation and treasury of the nation’s capital,” behavior he blamed for increasing racial divisions in the city.47 Agronsky provides the most detail about Pride operations of any of the Barry biographers but focuses exclusively on purported infighting among leaders and rampant criminal behavior by the “dudes” without any explanation for the ongoing funding and operation of such a dysfunctional enterprise.48 In The Future Once Happened Here, Fred Siegel uses

Agronsky as his main source to hold up Pride as an example of Barry’s corrupt empire in which he used the threat of violence to intimidate the federal government into funding misguided liberal schemes.49 Each author tells a similar story, beginning with Barry’s well-publicized drug use and womanizing, then backtracking to reminisce about the young man who once showed so much potential.

Barry was born into a poor sharecropping family in Mississippi, joined the early civil rights movement in Tennessee, became the first chairman of the Student

45 Jonetta Rose Barras, The Last of the Black Emperors: The Hollow Comeback of Marion Barry in the New Age of Black Leaders (Baltimore: Bancroft Press, 1998), 284, 289. 46 Barras, 125. 47 Jonathan I. Z. Agronsky, Marion Barry: The Politics of Race (Latham, NY: British American Publishing, 1991), xi-xii. 48 Agronsky, 135-148. 49 Fred Siegel, The Future Once Happened Here: New York, D.C., L.A., and the Fate of America’s Big Cities (New York: The Free Press, 1997), 65-73.

20

Non-violent Coordinating Committee, and then adapted SNCC’s tactics to awaken the spirit of resistance in the oppressed community of poor black Washingtonians. In this widely-accepted trope, Barry squandered his credentials as an activist, shifting attention to political ambitions and abandoning his integrity, bringing terrible harm and shame to the adopted city he professed to love. The accomplishments of Pride,

Inc. as an organization and movement are overshadowed by Barry’s dominating personality and get lost in the narrative of his destruction.

In the last several years, scholars have begun to look past the outsized figure of Barry and instead examined the unusual forms that the black freedom struggle took in Washington, D.C., including the work of Pride. Without the right to vote, and with de jure segregation eliminated by presidential decree and court decisions, black

Washingtonians found creative ways to fight against injustice. In his doctoral dissertation “Making D.C. Democracy’s Capital: Local Activism, the ‘Federal State’, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Washington, D.C.,” Gregory Borchardt explores many of the innovative methods used by civil rights activists in the city to address education, housing and employment discrimination. To Borchardt, equality in

Washington, D.C. is crucial because as the Nation's Capital it serves as a symbol for the rest of the country; therefore, he focuses on local movements in the context of the national framework.50 His brief discussion of Pride concentrates on the organization as one of several civil rights efforts in the city; Borchardt does not consider Pride to be a Black Power group because it was “pro-capitalist.”51 Although his emphasis is

50 Gregory M. Borchardt, “Making D.C. Democracy’s Capital: Local Activism, the ‘Federal State’, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Washington, D.C.,” Doctoral dissertation in Philosophy, The Columbia College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University, 2013, 5-14. 51 Borchardt, 154-158.

21

on the freedom struggle in the District as a national model, he does not place Pride or other actions within the historical context of the Great Society or the War on Crime.

He discusses Congressional hostility to the program and investigation into Pride’s finances without addressing why there would have been opposition to an anti-poverty jobs program or explaining the continuation of the federal funding for more than a decade. Like the journalists before him, he finds significance in Pride only as a vehicle for Marion Barry’s political career.52 Lauren Elizabeth Pearlman’s dissertation, “Democracy’s Capital: Local Protest, National Politics, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Washington, D.C., 1933-1978,” contextualizes key events in the

District as emblematic of “the politics of race” in the nation and of the dynamics between the federal government and African Americans.53 Pearlman analyzes “the racialization of crime policies and crime discourse” during the Nixon presidential campaign and administration as a tactic to roll back Johnson’s Great Society initiatives. She argues that Nixon strategists used Washington communities as a representation of the breakdown of “law and order” that resulted from anti-poverty programs.54 The rhetoric used black youth like the young Pride workers not as symbols of empowerment but as fearful examples of delinquents out to destroy decent society. In this shifting discourse, attempts at social uplift undertaken by groups like the Black Panthers and Pride, Inc. were evidence of the impending takeover of the city by criminal elements. Although Pearlman does not discuss Pride directly, her work provides critical new scholarship exploring the relationship between the Nixon

52 Borchardt, 160-162. 53Lauren Elizabeth Pearlman, “Democracy’s Capital: Local Protest, National Politics, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Washington, D.C., 1933-1978” (Doctoral dissertation in Philosophy, Yale University, 2013), 3. 54 Pearlman, 220-226.

22

administration and the District government regarding crime prevention and law enforcement.55 Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s

Capital refocuses the entire long history of Washington, D.C. with the dynamic race relations among multiple groups in the capital city. Chris Myers Asch and George

Derek Musgrove mention Pride only briefly in their extensive history but place it within the larger movement to mobilize the poor in the movement for Black Power, rather than as some cynical exploitation of young men in the cause of Barry’s political ambitions.56

Several scholars have recently examined the previously overlooked history of

Black Power in Washington, D.C. John Preusser in his master’s thesis “The

Washington Chapter of the Black Panther Party: From Revolutionary Militants to

Community Activists,” investigates the reasons that the Black Panther Party did not establish a chapter in the District of Columbia until 1970 and why the BPP failed to thrive there. Preusser concludes that the intense scrutiny that the Panthers faced in their attempt to operate in the federal city contributed to the chapter’s demise. After a failed attempt to host a national convention in the capital, the chapter shifted focus from militant rhetoric to community service and organization.57 Preusser is ambiguous about Pride’s relationship to the Washington chapter of the BPP, citing a

2006 interview with Marion Barry to claim that “many Panthers were also part of

Pride” and so the two groups were friendly.58 However, he also argues that black

55 Pearlman, 220-283. 56 Chris Myers Asch and George Derek Musgrove, Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 350-51, 57 John Preusser, “The Washington Chapter of the Black Panther Party: From Revolutionary Militants to Community Activists,” Master of Arts in History thesis, University of North Carolina Wilmington, 2006, 4-5, 61. 58 Preusser, 20.

23

nationalist efforts were hindered by Pride’s anti-poverty programs and that black activists in the city “believed in revolution, as long as it took place within a capitalistic system.”59 In contrast, Rhonda Y. Williams places Pride’s goals firmly within the “concrete demands” of Black Power. While acknowledging that the receipt of federal, non-profit, or corporate funding for black empowerment programs worried some activists, who feared that their agenda was being “anesthetized,” Williams uses

Pride as an example of “’militant pragmatists,’ garnering resources to advance community empowerment.”60 My work will attempt to explore more deeply the tensions that Preusser and Williams touch on, as well as to develop the additional conversation around the empowerment of young black men at a time when the society increasingly viewed them as disordered and criminal.

This is the first study devoted entirely to Pride and to placing the program within its larger historical context. While Pride’s era of operation coincides with important political changes in Washington and its founder became one of the most significant political figures in the history of the city, my analysis considers Pride as more than a local D.C. story. Pride was a federally funded Black Power program that was initially championed by one of the true believers in the War on Poverty,

Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz. It attempted to overcome the crushing effects of poverty and systemic racism by empowering the most unlikely agents of change, the young men of the ghetto. Like many other Black Power initiatives, Pride promoted the uplift of the black community by working within the existing economic and political systems while maintaining black leadership and cultivating confidence and

59 Preusser, 22. 60Rhonda Y. Williams, Concrete Demands: The Search for Black Power in the 20th Century (New York: Routledge, 2015), 167-168.

24

self-worth among the community it served. While acknowledging the importance of its founders, I seek to move the narrative away from a focus on iconic leaders like

Barry and Wirtz and instead explore the compromises and evolutions that the organization navigated in order to adapt to political and economic conditions over time.

Methodology

The papers of Pride, Inc., alternately called Youth Pride, Inc., are held by the

Moorland-Spingarn Research Center (MSRC) at Howard University. A substantial portion of the primary source research for this study has been conducted using these documents since an analysis of the papers has yet to be undertaken in the current scholarship. The holdings, comprising sixty cubic feet of unprocessed papers, include not only the internal memoranda, correspondence, and publications of Pride, Inc. but also reports and articles from outside agencies and publications which aid in placing the Pride methods and philosophies within their historical framework. In addition, the

Ralph J. Bunche Collection at MSRC includes the transcripts of an October 3, 1967 interview with Marion Barry by Katherine Shannon covering his time at SNCC and the “concept and program of Pride, Inc.”61 The entry for this interview notes that it cannot be read without the permission of the oral author while he is living; however,

Marion Barry passed away November 23, 2014. After his death, permission for citation was granted by MSRC. The interview helps place the initial development of

Pride, Inc. within the context of the changes occurring in the black freedom struggle in 1967 and the shifting focus from legal to economic remedies. I have used the Pride

61 “Ralph J. Bunche Collection,” Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C. http://www.coas.howard.edu/msrc/manuscripts_oralhistory_ralphjbunche.html#b.

25

archives and the interview to develop a clearer picture of the philosophies and efforts of Pride during its years of operation. In the past, Pride’s history has been read backwards through the lens of Barry’s later political career rather than set within its own timeframe, evolving to respond to problems and issues encountered over time.

The documents, memos, and reflections of the Pride workers are employed to develop a truer picture of the Pride programs as they were built.

The sight of young men from poor neighborhoods clad in green overalls and armed with rakes, trash bags, and rat traps inspired many Washingtonians but frightened others, especially law enforcement officials who feared a black uprising.

Through a Freedom of Information Act request, I have obtained copies of FBI case file WFO 157-1580 related to the Bureau’s investigation of Pride, Inc. The documents include reports of surveillance of various Pride, Inc. activities, including street parades, lectures, and demonstrations. The file includes a number of newspaper articles about Pride, Inc. along with reports about associations among members and attempts to infiltrate the organization with informants. Although heavily redacted, the documents still provide important clues about federal attitudes towards the program, its leaders, and its activities. In addition, I have requested and received File WFO

157-7672 for which the main focus is “Marion Barry/Liaison with Groups Sponsoring

Integration” covering the period June 8, 1965 through September 27, 1967. These documents cover the time leading up to the creation of Pride, Inc. and while not as relevant as the Pride, Inc. files, also provide context regarding black activism in the city prior to Pride’s inception and the federal law enforcement response to it.

26

Chapter Organization

Chapter One

Chapter One provides historical context for the creation of Pride, Inc. within an environment in which activists and bureaucrats joined forces to seek innovative solutions to the problem of poverty in the black community. It traces the roots of the idea to empower youth through the Washington office of SNCC as well as other employment programs in the city administered by the United Planning Organization

(UPO). I discuss the initial Pride, Inc. grant in August 1967 within the setting of the growing racial tensions in the city, including the recent police shooting of a black youth, and the development of the Pride concept by Barry and the other founders.

Through this exploration, I seek to place the origins of the program within their proper historical framework as a local post-Selma black empowerment initiative rather than as a vehicle for Barry’s later political ambitions.

Chapter Two

Chapter Two discusses the first year of Pride operations following the renewal and extension of Department of Labor funding. The publicity surrounding the program’s young Chairman of the Board, Rufus “Catfish” Mayfield as an example of what was possible for the “dudes” gained national attention for Pride but also perpetuated the idea that the problems of inner city poverty could be solved by increasing self-respect in the black community rather than by addressing systemic inequalities. After the riots of April 1968, the Pride founders moved away from promoting youth empowerment and shifted towards remaking the city’s economic landscape with black-owned businesses. Although previous accounts of Pride’s first

27

year have recounted the story of Mayfield’s conflicts with the older leaders and his resignation from the program, none has adequately explored his brief period of fame as the face of Pride. My analysis places his notoriety within the framework of the pervasive belief in black pathology and in white society’s promotion of transcendence of poverty through moral uplift. While Mayfield’s departure hastened the shift in the organizational structure of the program, it also was a component of a larger refocusing of Pride as a training and mentorship service for the young men instead of a youth-led initiative. Going forward, Pride leaders concentrated their efforts on developing profitable businesses staffed by the dudes; Barry and the other founders set the rules and controlled the funding.

Chapter Three

Chapter Three follows Pride as it grew into a network of businesses meant to provide economic opportunity for the trainees and to bring black entrepreneurship to inner-city Washington. Pride’s promotion of black capitalism helped the program gain legitimacy during the Nixon Administration since it appeared to mirror the goals, or at least the language, of the President’s agenda for improving racial conditions in the country. This chapter explores the flaws in the black capitalism model along with the struggles of the Pride enterprises to become profitable and self-sustaining. The early ideals of community enrichment gave way to a focus on maintaining and supporting Pride as an organization through major social and political changes of the

1970s. Pride’s ultimate demise in 1981 because of theft and embezzlement has been portrayed as evidence of corrupt intentions of the founders from the program’s inception. Within this more comprehensive analysis, I reveal it as an unfortunate end

28

to an attempt to marry the individualistic goals of the capitalist system with a program meant to benefit the community through government funding.

The history of Pride provides a case study of the fundamental tension experienced by many in the Black Power Movement. Can the legacy of oppressive economic, political, and social systems be overcome through individual and community effort? Will the aspirations of black freedom and wealth be achieved from within the structures of capitalism that have been so instrumental in undermining those goals? The Pride philosophy stressed the importance of self-sufficiency and empowerment through connection to community. The dudes were encouraged to figure out how to make the system work for them, to transform their lives by transforming their city. Over time, Pride adapted in response to challenges from within the organization as well as from the community around them. Ultimately,

Pride was never able to resolve the conflicts that arose from the effort to transform power structures from within the systems that created them.

29

Chapter 1: Locating Pride Within the Evolving Civil Rights Movement, 1965-1967

In October 1967, the Civil Rights Documentation Project conducted an oral history interview with D.C. activist Marion Barry to document his experiences in the

Civil Rights Movement. After chronicling his involvement with lunch counter sit-ins in Nashville, the founding and early days of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating

Committee (SNCC), voter registration actions in Mississippi, and fundraising in New

York City, staff associate Katherine M. Shannon asked Barry about his work in the

Nation’s Capital since his move there in 1965. Of particular interest was Barry’s founding of a new federally-funded organization called Pride, Inc. that had been getting a lot of publicity and consuming a great deal of Barry’s time and effort. Barry answered that he would rather not discuss Pride “because that’s a separate thing,” suggesting that he did not consider the program to be part of the story of the Civil

Rights Movement. “Basically, it’s a work program,” he continued “Pride and dignity and self-help and dealing with guys nobody else wants to deal with, you know. Guys who got records, who drop-out, what some people call the hard-core of the society, the guys who can’t get work in other places, who’ve got no sense of selves and all that stuff.” 62

Barry’s ambivalence about the proper characterization of his new endeavor is emblematic of a larger uncertainty about where to place the Pride story in the history

62 Marion Barry, interviewed by Katherine M. Shannon, “BARRY, Marion”, Ralph J. Bunche Oral History Collection, October 3, 1967, transcript Folder 64, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C, 1-28, 41, 51-54.

30

of black activism in Washington, D.C. and the local Black Power revolution of the late 1960s more specifically. The initial creation of Pride in August 1967 has often been portrayed as a hastily-conceived attempt by federal officials to keep unruly black kids occupied in the last month of the summer which attention-seeking militants exploited for publicity, money, and political advantage.63 An examination of the social and political conditions leading up to the initial grant that funded the one- month experiment, however, reveals a more nuanced evolution as both black activists and War on Poverty bureaucrats searched for the most effective methods to address systemic racial inequality. Each recognized that the strategies of the past were losing value and that bold moves were necessary if increasingly explosive conditions in cities were to be mitigated.

Many past narratives of the Pride, Inc. origin story have situated it within the context of Barry’s at times controversial political career. This has had the effect of coloring Pride’s beginnings with the stain of future scandals which occurred decades later. Although Barry’s experiences as an organizer in Washington are key to understanding the Pride concept of addressing the concerns of the urban poor, the concentration on Barry has recast the other Pride leaders and the young men they employed as mere props in Barry’s as-yet undeveloped political ambitions. Locating the original Pride initiative within the landscape of the post-Selma Civil Rights

Movement and its developing focus on economic issues, as well as the increasing concern about urban unrest by Great Society government officials, provides a more accurate framing for the program’s design and initial funding.

63 See for example Fred Siegel, The Future Once Happened Here: New York, D.C., L.A., and the Fate of America’s Big Cities (New York: The Free Press, 1997), 69; Jonathan Agronsky, Marion Barry: The Politics of Race (Latham, NJ: British American Publishing, 1991), 135.

31

Washington Heats Up

The catalyst for the creation of Pride, Inc. was concern that an expansive

Labor Department employment program in the District had failed to adequately address problems among inner-city youth. In May 1967, Secretary of Labor Willard

Wirtz launched the Washington Concentrated Employment Program, an expansive project designed to provide training and jobs for District residents who were struggling economically, including “[t]he unskilled, the disheartened, the men and women handicapped by police records…people on whom employers formerly were reluctant to take a chance.”64 Wirtz and Vice President Hubert Humphrey, chairman of the Johnson administration’s Council on Youth Opportunity, hoped that the initiative, which included efforts to employ twenty thousand poor youth, would serve as model for other cities looking for solutions to urban unrest and crime.65 Despite impressive accomplishments, the $5.4 million program coordinated by the United

Planning Organization and the Washington Board of Trade ran into numerous stumbling blocks. Funding delays and restrictions that hampered operations caused

“[a]dministrative chaos.”66

The ambitious program meant to serve as an example to the nation instead raised Washingtonians’ hopes only to leave many people, especially young people, frustrated and disappointed. Among the missteps was a six-week delay before hundreds of summer employees—including many teenagers—received their

64 “$5.4 Million Grant to Aid D.C. Jobless,” The Evening Star, 11 May 1967, B1. 65 Betty James, “Preparation for the Summer: 20,000 Jobs in Sight,” The Evening Star (4 June 1967), A1, A11; “H.H.H. Starts Local Summer Jobs at Board of Trade Meeting,” Metropolitan Washington Board of Trade News 22, no. 5 (May 1967), Kiplinger Research Library, Historical Society of Washington, D.C. 66 Carol Honsa, “Youth Program Success Hailed by Humphrey,” Washington Post, 26 Aug 1967, A1.

32

paychecks. Even more discouraging, thousands of applicants were never placed in jobs. Officials had over-promised, and the city’s private business owners had failed to follow up on their commitments to hire area youth. As the Washington Post reported in August, staffers found their offices “besieged by hundreds of angry youngsters who found the jobs were not available.” Despite the opening of additional positions through the Neighborhood Youth Corps, “the glut of applicants—and a disillusioned

‘what’s the use’ attitude—continued through the summer.”67

Chronic unemployment and unfulfilled promises were not the only factors angering black Washingtonians that summer. Two weeks before Wirtz announced the summer job initiative, the death of a young black man at the hands of a white police officer sparked renewed outrage about the treatment of the African American community by the Metropolitan Police Department. On May 1, 1967, Clarence J.

Brooker, known as “Top Cat” or “Bug” to his friends, died after he was shot during an altercation with Officer William Rull. The confrontation began while the officer was questioning a group of young men about their behavior in a nearby grocery store.

Nineteen-year-old Brooker reportedly threw a bag of cookies at Rull’s feet during the exchange. The two became involved in a physical tussle as Rull attempted to arrest

Brooker for littering. Rull, who was only a few years older than those he was interrogating, claimed that his service revolver must have accidentally discharged during the struggle. Brooker’s friends who witnessed the incident told a different story; they claimed the officer shot Bug in the back as he attempted to flee. Brooker informed the arresting officers who responded to Rull’s call for backup that he had been shot. The cops ignored his request for medical attention because they saw no

67 Honsa, “Youth Program Success Hailed by Humphrey.”

33

blood and thought he was feigning injury. Instead, they transported him to the precinct station for booking. By the time Brooker’s complaints were taken seriously and the bullet wound discovered, it was too late; the young man was pronounced dead of internal bleeding at D.C. General Hospital that night. Within a few days, the D.C.

Coroner’s office ruled the black teenager’s death a justifiable homicide.68 It was a response all too familiar to black Washingtonians.

Mistreatment and abuse of black residents by the majority-white Metropolitan

Police Department, which was overseen by the Congress, had been a problem for decades. Most of the officers did not live in the city, commuting instead from the surrounding Maryland and Virginia suburbs. Each year the House District Committee placed a rider in the District Appropriations Act to allow police officers to live outside the city limits, which contributed to a disconnect between the police force and

District residents. Many recruits had moved to the area from southern states such as

Alabama and Georgia, carrying with them segregationist attitudes from back home.

The police force was viewed by the city’s black residents as “colonists or occupying forces.” Police officers regularly ordered African Americans to “move on” if they congregated in public, even if they were simply socializing after church. Beatings and arrests on questionable charges were common. Local community leaders Lonnie King and Rev. David Eaton formed the Citizens Committee for Equal Justice a month before Brooker’s death to campaign against “the disrespect for the rights of persons

68 Walter Gold and Myron Becker, “Police Shot Kills Youth, 19, in NE Fight,” Evening Star, 2 May 1967, A1, B13; Sheridan Fahnestock, “Police Slaying of Youth, 19, Ruled Justifiable at Inquest,” Evening Star, 4 May 1967, B1; Henry S. Jaffe and Tom Sherwood, Dream City: Race, Power, and the Decline of Washington, D.C. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 53-54; ABC7 WJLA, “Rufus Catfish Mayfield, Civil Rights Pioneer,” accessed March 13, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2VheWdSjYM. Although Jaffe and Sherwood claim Brooker was known as “Fat Nasty,” no contemporary accounts list that nickname.

34

continually exhibited by policemen towards Negroes in this community.” The incident that led to the organization of the Citizens Committee was the alleged

“extreme and excessive use of force” against civil rights leader Marion Barry, Jr., former head of the Washington, D.C. office of SNCC, and his companions during an arrest for jaywalking.69 The altercation came at a time when Barry’s experiences in the city were drawing his attention toward urban youth.

Barry in Washington

Barry came to Washington, D.C. in 1965 after many years of involvement in civil rights activism. As a graduate student at Fisk University in early 1960, he spent time in a Nashville jail for his participation in lunch counter sit-ins there. He briefly served as the first chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee

(SNCC) after its formation a few months later, a position he left once he entered a doctoral program in chemistry at the University of Kansas. 70 He remained involved in the movement while pursuing his studies, working alongside Robert Moses in

McComb, Mississippi in 1961.

Four years before Selma, civil rights activists were already having disputes about tactics. Barry focused on direct action initiatives like sit-ins while Moses and

Reginald Robinson coordinated voter registration. Their dual concentrations represented a split among young activists about preferred methods to effect change.

SNCC leadership eventually decided the distinction was unnecessary. “It was just we

69 John W. Hechinger, Sr. and Gavin Taylor, “Black and Blue: The D.C. City Council vs. Police Brutality, 1967-69, Washington History 11, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 1999/2000), 5-7, 10-11. Hechinger served on the City Council from 1967-1969. This article is excerpted from his unpublished 1971 memoir; Lonnie King, quoted in “New Civil Rights Group Charges Police Brutality,” Washington Post, 1 April 1967, B2. 70 Howard Zinn, SNCC: The New Abolitionists (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 19, 34; “A Universal Effort,” TIME 75, no. 18 (May 2, 1960), 18; Barry, Shannon interview, 2-5, 18-19.

35

discovered that both of those things go together,” Barry recalled later. “Eventually, the whole thing about direct action – voter registration direction was resolved. I mean, it was discovered that there was no need to have that separate thing.”71 Barry favored agitation over slower, more deliberate strategies of citizen engagement but acknowledged that both were important for movement building. Despite his inclination toward public, visible events, Barry was not convinced when he visited the

Nation’s Capital in 1963 for the March on Washington that large-scale national demonstrations were effective.72 His ideal approach balanced spectacle with a concentration on local issues.

Before he relocated to the District of Columbia, the problems and struggles of the urban black population were not on Barry’s radar. He left his studies in 1964 to work for the movement full-time, concentrating his efforts on lobbying and fundraising as the head of the New York office of SNCC. While there, he organized a large demonstration in Harlem in support of southern efforts like the Selma march in

1965 but did not initiate any actions to address injustices found in the neighborhoods where the parade was staged. “[W]e weren’t involved in Northern cities, programmatically.” Barry explained in the October 1967 interview, since SNCC leaders wanted to avoid taking on more than they felt equipped to handle. “Our emphasis was in the South… we supported certain local action, but we didn’t initiate any action.”73 Barry cultivated political and business contacts in the North for the purpose of gaining support for southern actions to address southern problems.

71 Barry, Shannon interview, 25-28. 72 Barry, Shannon interview, 46-47. 73 Barry, Shannon interview, 41-42, 49, 51-52.

36

Barry may have had similar intentions when he became director of the SNCC office in the Nation’s Capital. Before he arrived, the D.C. office, like its New York counterpart, had been focused on fundraising and lobbying efforts for southern campaigns rather than addressing issues of concern to local residents.74 In one of his first appearances in the Washington newspapers after beginning his new position, the

SNCC leader spoke out against actions by the U.S. Office of Equal Education

Opportunity, the desegregation enforcement section of the Department of Health,

Education, and Welfare, which penalized school systems in a number of northern states and Washington, D.C. for racial discrimination while failing to take similar action in the South. SNCC had studied southern school desegregation progress extensively but Barry professed ignorance about conditions in the District schools.

His lack of understanding of racial issues in the city suggest he was also unfamiliar in

1965 with local civil rights groups, including the two that had filed complaints about the city’s schools, prompting the federal response. In the article, Barry promised that

SNCC “was going to make its own investigation of local conditions.”75 Whether this intention was genuine in October 1965 is unclear. At least initially, Barry’s mission as director of the Washington office of SNCC did not involve local concerns in the

Nation’s Capital.

In 1965 the District of Columbia was in transition. It became the first

American city with a majority black population in 1957; by the middle of the decade, more than sixty percent of Washingtonians were African Americans. Greater

74 Jaffe and Sherwood, 42-43; Anne M. Valk, Radical Sisters: Second-Wave Feminism and Black Liberation in Washington, D.C. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 18. 75 Larry A. Still, “Rights Leader Hits U.S. on School Bias Issue,” Evening Star, (13 Oct 1965), A39; Donald Pfarrer, “U.S. Moves to Cut Off Aid to 111 School Districts,” Evening Star, 2 Sept 1965, A5.

37

opportunities were opening up for educated black workers in the government, the city’s main employer, as first the Kennedy and then the Johnson administrations actively sought to increase black representation in the federal workforce. Black wealth was still a fraction of white in the area, but black middle-class neighborhoods developed alongside white enclaves. Among the white intellectual elite there was an air of cautious social inclusion that, while not fully welcoming, was at least less hostile to black participation in the cultural life of the city. Amid this growing prosperity was another Washington, however. The public schools, whose problems

Barry had dismissed so easily, were substandard. They were also more racially segregated than they had been a decade earlier when President Eisenhower determined that D.C. school integration would be a model for the rest of the country.

Despite some economic gains, a substantial proportion of the city’s black residents struggled in ghettos plagued by crime, unemployment, and poverty, experiencing similar conditions as those in Harlem, Detroit, and Newark. Southern sympathies pervaded as well. Social services reliant on funding from the segregationist Southern congressmen of the House District Committee, who scored political points with their white constituents back home by starving D.C. programs of support, could not keep up with the needs of the low-income neighborhoods.76

Although Barry professed ignorance of local conditions in 1965, the rights of the citizens of Washington, D.C. were on the radar of the civil rights movement from

76 Constance McLaughlin Green, The Secret City: A History of Race Relations in the Nation’s Capital (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), 3-8; Chris Myers Asch and George Derek Musgrove, Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 318, 330-32; David A. Nichols, “‘The Showpiece of Our Nation’: Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Desegregation of the District of Columbia,” Washington History 16, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2004/2005), 48-49, 52-53; Jaffe and Sherwood, 27-28.

38

the early days of Barry’s activist career. As SNCC chairman, he addressed the platform committees of both the Democratic and Republican conventions in 1960 and urged them to include civil rights in their parties’ agendas; included in the list of issues was voting rights for citizens of the Nation’s Capital.77 In 1965, the year that

Barry moved to Washington, D.C., Martin Luther King, Jr. was considering the

District as the epicenter for a new campaign focusing on the plight of black urban dwellers. King met with politicians and led a march in support of a District of

Columbia Home Rule bill that was languishing in Congress.78 The city also had a long history of local activism against racial discrimination, from the Reconstruction- era demands for equal access to public transportation, to “Don’t Buy Where You

Can’t Work” campaigns against businesses with discriminatory hiring practices in the

1930s, to some of the earliest lunch counter and restaurant protests in the country.79

Nevertheless, SNCC had not attempted to address local issues since establishing a

D.C. office in 1963. After his arrival, Barry struggled to connect with local activists as well as the black working class who bristled at his Southern activist lingo and were suspicious of his intentions.80

Law enforcement agencies in the city initially encountered Barry within the context of his role as a representative of a southern organization. The Federal Bureau

77 Agronsky, 103-104; Zinn, 36-37. 78Derek Musgrove, “A King for Washington and DC,” The Hill Rag (August 2011), 24, http://www.gdmusgrove.com/demo-images/king_washington_hill_rag.pdf; Catherine Maddison, “’In Chains 400 Years…And Still in Chains in DC!’ The 1966 Free DC Movement and the Challenges of Organizing in the City,” Journal of American Studies 41 (2007): I, 169. http://journals.cmabridge.org. 79 See for example Kate Masur, An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle Over Equality in Washington, D.C. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Michele F. Pacifico, “‘Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work’: The New Negro Alliance of Washington.” Washington History 6, No. 1 (Spring/Summer, 1994), 66-88; Joan Quigley, Just Another Southern Town: Mary Church Terrell and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Nation’s Capital (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 3-6, 132. 80 Valk, 18-19; Jaffe and Sherwood, 42.

39

of Investigation identified the SNCC director as a potential source from one of the

“legitimate civil rights organizations” in the capital. The initial FBI memo mentioning

Barry includes in its list of prospective contacts other District activists like Julius

Hobson of Associated Community Teams (ACT) and Sterling Tucker of the

Washington Urban League who were focused on local affairs. However, subsequent memoranda in Barry’s FBI file indicate that he was primarily contacted as a source for information about people working in other areas of the country who might travel to D.C. such as members of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.81 His first arrest in the city (documented in his FBI file) came as part of a large sweep of demonstrators at the Capitol building who were protesting the war in Vietnam. Barry claimed he was not guilty of the disorderly conduct for which he was fined but was merely a bystander at the event. His position at SNCC made his conviction worthy of a mention in the local newspapers although he did not use the publicity to champion any national or local issues.82 His skills as a savvy political strategist who used publicity to his advantage for which he would later become well-known were not yet fully developed.

From Bus Boycott to Free D.C.

The Washington SNCC office and its director began to shift focus to issues of concern to Washington residents when Barry assumed a prominent role in the fight against a proposed bus fare hike. Several local citizens groups spoke out in

81 FBI Memorandum, SA Michael C. Fitzgerald to SAC [Special Agent in Charge], WFO [Washington Field Office] (157-337), 6/8/65, LIAISON WITH GROUPS SPONSORING INTEGRATION, NW 15265, DocID 70001096, page 2, WFO Federal Bureau of Investigation File 157-7672; FBI Memorandum, SA Michael C. Fitzgerald to SAC, WFO (157-614) (P), 8/19/65, MARION BARRY RM [Racial Matters], DocID 70001096, page 35, WFO FBI File 157-7672. 82 “D.C. Rights Group Chief Convicted In Demonstration,” Evening Star 2 Sept 1965, C4, in WFO FBI File 157-7672, page 37.

40

opposition to the increase which they argued would place an undue burden on the city’s poor and elderly residents who relied on the bus for their basic transportation needs. Among the most vocal opponents were several civil rights leaders, including

Julius Hobson of ACT (described by the Washington Star as a “militant” organization,) Roena Rand of the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE), and SNCC national director John Lewis. The lawyer for the privately-owned D.C. Transit, operator of the bus system, vehemently objected to the involvement of civil rights groups in public hearings on the issues, stating that the company’s “record on civil rights is as high as any firm in the nation,” and that it was unfair to imply “that any single group would be discriminated against by this fare increase.”83 The activists countered that the disparate economic impact on lower-income black riders constituted discriminatory treatment. In fact, they claimed, “The real issue behind this is segregation.” As one minister asserted, many opponents of the fare hike believed that the true motivation for the change was to increase white ridership from the suburbs and drive black people from the poorer neighborhoods off the bus.84

Early press reports about the fare controversy mentioned Barry only tangentially; his name appears in the very last sentence of one article which quotes other leaders extensively. As the protest effort progressed towards an organized boycott of the bus system, however, the local SNCC office and its director were featured more prominently. SNCC’s request to be recognized as an interested party in the fare issue was rejected by the Washington Metro Area Transit Commission, the three-person board that oversaw D.C. Transit and would have to approve the increase.

83 Lee Flor, “Bus Fare Hearings Open with a Fight,” Washington Evening Star 8 Nov 1965, C1; “1- Day Bus Boycott Set as Fare Protest,” Washington Evening Star 28 Dec 1965, A1. 84 Rev. William Wendt quoted in Flor.

41

Barry and other SNCC members continued as individual intervenors, and Barry’s role in the planned direct action increased. Where once he was mentioned in passing while reporters focused on the positions of other leaders, by the end of December 1965,

Barry had become the face of the boycott. Organizations like ACT, CORE, and the

NAACP, which earlier had been described as spearheading the effort, now appeared in newspaper articles as supporters or co-sponsors of SNCC’s effort.85 When the one- day boycott on January 24, 1966 was successful both in organizing Washingtonians to stay off the buses and in halting the fare hike, the victory belonged to SNCC and especially to Marion Barry.

In the aftermath of the bus action, the Washington SNCC office became a more prominent player in city politics.86 Barry presented the boycott as an “easy project” for SNCC and its leaders who were used to participation in more dangerous activities.87 It was also indicative of a shift for the organization towards a concentration on economic issues. As Anne Valk notes, “SNCC effectively began to articulate economic concerns as part of its racial liberation agenda, recognizing that racism and economic inequalities could not be separated in Washington, where pronounced disparities in poverty separated black and white residents.”88 As Barry explained, “Negroes make up a majority of the bus riders and anything that affects

Negroes, is, in my opinion, a civil rights issue.”89

85 Flor; “1-Day Boycott;” “Rights Group Plans Boycott on Fare Raise,” Washington Post 29 Dec 1965, B8. 86 Valk, 25. 87 “SNCC Doesn’t Have to Walk in Fare Fight,” Washington Daily News, 4 Nov 1965, 22, in WFO Federal Bureau of Investigation File 157-7672, 41. 88 Valk, 20. 89 Quoted in “SNCC Doesn’t Have to Walk in Fare Fight.”

42

It was an argument that Washington activists like Julius Hobson, a government economist, had been making for years. As the leader of the local CORE chapter from 1962-64, Hobson used disruptive direct action campaigns to highlight the problem of racial discrimination in employment and housing. Although Hobson’s efforts did include negotiations with business owners and landlords, under his leadership, as Valk describes, “CORE perceived that it wielded more power by instigating protests and raising a public outcry rather than hammering out individual agreements;” his agitation was successful in swaying public opinion which opened up jobs and housing options to black residents.90 Hobson left CORE after a dispute with

Roena Rand. Under Rand’s leadership, the CORE office moved from the northwest quadrant of the city, where SNCC’s office was located, across the Anacostia River to the southeast neighborhoods that contained most of the city’s public housing. CORE then concentrated on education and job-training programs and organized fewer direct action demonstrations. By 1966, however, the nationwide shift among civil rights groups towards a Black Power focus led to more leadership conflicts at CORE.91

Hobson continued to bring attention to economic and educational discrimination in the city with his new organization, the Washington Association of Community Teams

(ACT), through attention-grabbing demonstrations.92 In this changing environment, the field was open for new leadership to step into the public square.

The leadership at SNCC recognized the opportunity and prepared to increase their involvement in local issues. In a memo to the organization’s Executive

90 Valk, 21-22. 91 Valk, 21-24. 92Valk, 113-114; Cynthia Gorney, “Julius Hobson Sr. Dies,” Washington Post 24 March 1977, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1977/03/24/julius-hobson-sr-dies/8c1edc81-9586- 487a-a78b-5b6ffedab48a/?utm_term=.00ab26935db1.

43

Committee, Barry detailed the poverty-related problems in the city that disproportionately affected black Washingtonians: poor educational programs and facilities, inadequate housing options for lower-income residents, lack of social and medical services for the poor, police brutality against African Americans, and a penal system that he described as “barbaric.” While he acknowledged that in the past the

Washington SNCC office had primarily been responsible for fundraising and government relations for southern campaigns, Barry proposed that the staff now adopt a third purpose: “To engage in local action programs aimed at erasing local problems particularly discrimination and poverty.” Rather than the typical SNCC strategy of building grass-roots support and then organizing appropriate action campaigns in cooperation with local residents, however, Barry proposed a reverse philosophy. He believed that the way to get Washingtonians with wide-ranging concerns involved in the movement was to inspire the people with direct action drives that would grab people’s attention, similar to Hobson’s strategy. These types of events could

“catalyze the community” in Barry’s vision, uniting neighborhoods and organizations with divergent interests in common cause.93

Within a month after the end of the boycott, Barry’s SNCC office, in partnership with a social justice advocacy group composed of local clergy called the

Coalition of Conscience, began an effort to arouse the public by targeting the political and economic system unique to the Nation’s Capital. In February 1966 Barry announced the “Free D.C.” Movement designed to undermine the influential and elite

93 Memo from Marion Barry, Jr.-Washington Staff to SNCC Executive Committee and SNCC Staff, 14 March 1966, Re: Free D.C, Movement (FDCM), Reel 61, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Papers, 1959-1972, 2-3; Valk, 20.

44

Washington Board of Trade.94 Formed in 1889 by Washington business owners as a means to petition the federally appointed Board of Commissioners and the congressional committees that controlled the District, the Board of Trade soon became the most powerful organization in a city without representative government,

“dominating the circles which exercised power in the city” and “fill[ing] the vacuum in Washington’s civic life” according to Jessica Elfenbein.95 In 1965, the Board of

Trade had campaigned vigorously against a bill in Congress that would have granted

Home Rule in the District, which it had opposed for decades, claiming that the city’s residents did not want to be enfranchised.96 Barry and the Coalition set out to refute the portrayal of a complacent citizenry unconcerned with the vote. The Free D.C. campaign sought to increase awareness and public support for Home Rule by uniting the city’s population against a common adversary, the “moneylord merchants” of the

Board of Trade, on whom they placed the blame for the economic and social injustice faced by black residents.97 Representatives from Free D.C. approached business owners in the city and requested that they display orange stickers in their windows that were emblazoned with a broken chain and the words “Free D.C.” and “Right to

Vote!”98 Those establishments that lacked the sign on their storefronts were subject to boycotts and picketing. Many stores and businesses proudly displayed the sticker without complaint, particularly in poorer neighborhoods with a considerable black

94 Agronsky, 123-124. 95 Jessica I. Elfenbein, Civics, Commerce, and Community: The History of the Greater Washington Board of Trade 1889-1989 (Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt Publishing, 1989), Ix, 14-15. George Washington University Institute of Public Policy, http://www.gwu.edu/~gwipp/cwaspubs.htm. 96 Maddison, 173; Agronsky, 124; Elfenbein, 64-65, 75-76. 97 Maddison, 174; Elfenbein, 77-78; Rhonda Y. Williams, Concrete Demands: The Search for Black Power in the 20th Century (New York: Routledge, 2015), 116; Asch and Musgrove, 345-46. 98 Faye P. Haskins, “The Art of D.C. Politics: Broadsides, Banners, and Bumper Stickers,” Washington History, 12, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2000/2001), 54.

45

customer base.99 The movement made headlines when Barry attempted to drive into the parade of the National Cherry Blossom Festival, sponsored by the Board of

Trade’s Visitors Bureau, in a car emblazoned with “Free D.C.” on the side. Members of the organization, including a young Howard University student who had been crowned “Miss Free D.C.,” were arrested trying to attend the Cherry Blossom Ball.

She stood next to Barry in her sash for the news cameras after her arraignment, while the other activists refused to post bail and remained in jail, increasing publicity for the action.100

Despite the attention that Free D.C. generated, the movement encountered a number of obstacles. John Diggs, a local barber recruited by SNCC to act as the face of the small business owner supporting the campaign, dropped out after he received a barrage of hostile phone calls.101 Tensions developed between the Coalition and

SNCC regarding tactics. Faith leaders questioned the morality of boycotts especially when some canvassers, including Barry, were accused of extortion and intimidation.

Barry’s desire to use the campaign as a vehicle for inspiring the populace to rise up against all injustice clashed with the practical considerations of actual progress on the bill that Free D.C. was initiated to support.102 Although some Board of Trade members spoke out in support of the Home Rule initiative in response to the

99 Maddison, 178-179; Jaffe and Sherwood, 47. 100 Willard Clopton, “’Free D.C.’ Aims at Blossom Fete,” Washington Post, 9 April 1966, B1; “6 Free D.C. Pickets Elect to Stay in Jail: Balked by Police,” Washington Post, 17 April 1966. Portions of this paragraph adapted from Susan Philpott, “Civil Rights in Washington, D.C.: The Radical and the Politician,” unpublished senior research paper, 16 May 2013, 11-13. 101 Barry to SNCC Executive Committee and SNCC Staff, 14 March 1966, 2. 102 Barry to SNCC Executive Committee and Staff, 14 March 1966, 2; Maddison, 178-181.

46

campaign, the economic rhetoric and publicity stunts did not resonate with the

Washingtonians that Barry had hoped to arouse.103

Free D.C. was unsuccessful in advancing the Home Rule legislation in the short term, but the action was responsible for developments that would be important for the subsequent development of Pride, Inc. First, a former Fisk classmate and acquaintance of Barry named Mary Treadwell who had recently moved to the city happened upon a Free D.C. picket and was stirred up when she overheard passers-by slinging racial insults at the protestors. She joined the staff of the SNCC office and became the chair of the fundraising committee, beginning a career of activism that would soon include her role as a founder of Pride.104 Second, while trying to drum up support for the Free D.C. boycott, Barry encountered a group of young activists who used the art of confrontation to pressure government officials to address concerns of poor black residents. The same week that Free D.C. launched, a group of youths from

Anacostia calling themselves Rebels With a Cause stormed the office of the UPO director demanding resources to improve neighborhood recreation services.105 A week later, the SNCC director encountered the Rebels at the Barry Farm public housing project during a meeting between disgruntled tenants and the city’s Housing

Authority director. While Barry and other SNCC workers passed out Free D.C. flyers, the Rebels and a women’s activist group called the Band of Angels sang protest songs and demanded remedies for more immediate problems than their disfranchisement— dilapidated, rat-infested homes stuck in neighborhoods without amenities or job

103 Williams, 117; Maddison, 184-185. 104 Valk, 13-14, 24. 105 “Barry Farm’s ‘Rebels With a Cause’ Organize to Get Help for Project,” Washington Post 23 Feb 1966, B3; Jesse W. Lewis, Jr., “Anacostia Youths Storm UPO Headquarters: ‘Rebels’ Pledged Help for Their Cause,” Washington Post 26 Feb 1966, B1.

47

prospects. The tactics these local groups employed were effective in persuading officials to act.106

The attention-grabbing strategies of grass-roots organizations like the Rebels and the Angels were among many developments that may have shifted Barry’s attention from the city’s business districts to its lower-income neighborhoods. By

March 1966, a dozen Rebels had been hired by UPO to set up a youth program in

Anacostia; several members testified before a national crime commission about their ideas to eliminate delinquency and transform troubled kids into productive citizens.107

The group continued to agitate for municipal attention in their neighborhoods.108

Over the next year, the education and anti-delinquency services they developed in association with a UPO-funded settlement house in Anacostia became the model for the city’s Neighborhood Development Youth Program.109 The message that young

Rebels like Leroy Washington repeated to national leaders whenever they were consulted about problems in the inner-city was that they should seek the counsel of young people if they wanted to design effective programs. “Go back to your neighborhood and talk to kids,” Washington advised. “Find out what they want. We have something to give and something to give you.”110 Although anti-poverty programs aspired to a model based on community involvement, young people in

106 John Carmody, “Band of Angels, Rebels With a Cause, Give Housing Chief Tough Afternoon,” Washington Post, 26 Feb 1966, B2. 107 “Key Skirmish Won by Anacostia Rebels,” Washington Post, 6 Mar 1966, A15; “’Rebels’ Outline Formula to Combat Delinquency,” Washington Post 19 Mar 1966, B3. 108 “City Heads Get Plea for Traffic Light,” Washington Post, 23 Jul 1966, A9. 109 Jean M. White, “Eartha Kitt Joins SE Rebels in Appealing for a Cause,” Washington Post, 23 May 1967, B5. 110 Leroy Washington, quoted in “Welfare Conference Hears from ‘Rebel With A Cause,’” Baltimore Sun, 2 June 1967, A7.

48

Washington like the Rebels pointed out that they had been left out of the process and should be consulted as well.

The Rebels also became an unfortunate example of an issue that was of increasing concern to political leaders and law enforcement in this period, the fear of urban unrest. In April 1966, the Washington Field Office of the FBI conducted extensive interviews with Washington community leaders to assess the status of race relations in the city in an effort to determine the likelihood of an uprising in the city.

The interviewees pointed to several possible areas of tension throughout the city, including agitation by what one president of a D.C. Citizens Association termed “the lunatic fringe” like Hobson and Barry. Several mentioned the ongoing animosity between the police and black residents. Barry, one FBI memo reads, “said the attitude of Negroes in the Negro ghettos is one of fear and hate for police, particularly white police.” He predicted that a confrontation with police officers could easily spark an uprising among frustrated residents.111 Such an altercation came to pass in the early morning hours of August 16, 1966 after a swarm of police officers showed up at a

Congress Heights Neighborhood Development Center, one of the UPO-affiliated youth programs, and arrested a young man attending a meeting called to discuss an incident of violence the day before. “At that point,” one of the UPO workers related,

“the group of boys at the meeting became very upset and decided they would show their protest by picketing.” The demonstration began with teenagers marching in front of the police station with UPO-furnished placards but developed into what the local paper called “a rock-throwing rampage.” UPO leaders placed the blame for the

111 United States Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Possible Racial Violence Major Urban Areas—Washington, D.C., 22 April 1966, 11, 13, in WFO Federal Bureau of Investigation File 157-7672, DocID 70001096, 63, 65.

49

escalation on the Metropolitan Police who donned riot gear in response to the protest and threatened the young men with dogs and speeding police cruisers. One police officer was injured, and twelve people arrested.112 The UPO programs, specifically the Southeast Neighborhood House which supported the Rebels’ youth program, became a target of the resulting investigation.113 Barry used his influence as a member of the investigating committee to steer discussion towards the inherent lack of democratic process involved in any city actions, including the investigation, because residents were ruled by unelected leaders. He was less concerned with identifying the facts of the unrest and more intent on winning the trust of the people.114 The incident likely tainted the reputation of UPO-organized youth programs which were funded in part to prevent the kind of uprising that they were now accused of provoking.

A few weeks after the unrest in Anacostia, Barry composed a long memo detailing the frustrations he had encountered in his attempts to inspire

Washingtonians to follow his lead in the Free D.C. Movement. He alternately blamed his lack of progress on a disengaged populace and a market saturated with activists and anti-poverty programs. He dismissed neighborhood leaders working for the UPO centers as “mostly women with 5, 6, 7 children” who, he insinuated, were only in the work for the generous salaries. While acknowledging the success that the community centers organized by the poverty program had achieved, he characterized their

112 “Teen Gangs Attack Anacostia Police, Stone Cars, Buses,” Washington Evening Star, 16 Aug 1966, A1, A4. 113 “Probe Is Set On Violence in Anacostia: Duncan Blames Southeast House: Police Draw Fire,” Washington Post, 17 Aug 1966, A1. 114 “Role of Southeast House Defended,” Washington Evening Star, 23 Aug 1966, A3; Dan Robinson, “Anacostia Committee Wins Right to Expand Its Membership by 10,” Washington Post, 20 Aug 1966, A1.

50

accomplishments as “a street light here, a garbage can there, and each block club got to be a little empire in itself” without addressing what Barry saw as the underlying cause of the troubles, the city’s disfranchisement. Despite evidence that residents were in fact interested in the type of direct action campaigns he claimed to want to provoke, like a “tent-in” organized to protest urban renewal policies, Barry continually belittled their efforts as not serious since the demonstrators were primarily women and young people whose motivations he questioned.

When the residents he tried to organize came to SNCC with immediate concerns of daily life like housing, jobs, and education, he referred them to UPO.

“You can’t jump from issue to issue, you have to take an issue and work with it.

There will be times when people are not served completely in all ways by your group,” he conceded, but he insisted on the need to maintain a single-minded focus.

“I think this is important,” he reiterated. At the end of the long memo, he admitted that his preferred approach had flaws. “People were coming to us. Our problem was that we did not simultaneously develop a program for the energy that was out there.”115 Over the next year, a program that could harness that energy began to take shape.

Pride Takes Shape

There is evidence of the seeds of the initiative that became Pride, Inc. sprinkled throughout the words and actions of the Free D.C. leaders even as they concentrated their efforts on securing the vote. Early in the campaign to target the

115 Marion Barry, Jr., Memo to SNCC Educational Workshop, “Free D.C. Movement and organizing in Washington, D.C.,” 3 Sept 1966, Reel 61, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Papers, 1959- 1972, 1-13.

51

Board of Trade as the enemy of enfranchisement, Barry noted that the business group had influence because they had money. “How do you accomplish change in a city where you don’t have political power? The answer is, through economic power.”116

SNCC members were concentrating on the mechanisms of power during the summer of 1966 after Stokely Carmichael was elected chairman and began to use the slogan

“Black Power” to describe the priorities of the group. Although critics of the new focus called it “black nationalism,” Barry preferred the term “black consciousness,” a concept that would shape what organizers would later call the Pride philosophy.

Barry recognized, however, that awareness was not enough. “You don’t get a group of people together and say you’re going to talk about black pride and unity. You have to have a program they can fit into so they can see what you’re talking about can do some good.” Simply opposing white people “doesn’t put any money in your pocket. It doesn’t put any food on your table, and it doesn’t put you in a better house.”117 While continuing to work for home rule, Barry revealed in June that he was looking to

“devise other ways of attacking the problem” but was reluctant to say more.118 Free

D.C. also began hosting block parties in July, making contact with young people in the neighborhoods and sometimes deliberately defying city regulations requiring permits to create more publicity.119

Barry’s increasing attention on harnessing the energy he had stoked to systematically address local economic and political issues put him at odds with SNCC

116 Marion Barry, quoted in William Raspberry, “Barry Is New Catalyst for Change Here,” Washington Post, 9 Mar 1966, C1. 117 Marion Barry, quoted in William Raspberry, “Why SNCC Demoted Its Top Whites: It Takes a Negro to Tell a Negro About His Pride,” Washington Post, 25 June 1966, B1. 118 Ibid. 119 “Warrant Is Issued for Barry’s Arrest Over Block Party, Washington Post, 27 July 1966, C7.

52

leadership and with law enforcement. Fed up with the failure of the D.C. staff to adequately raise money, in August the SNCC executive secretary in Atlanta hired a full-time fundraiser for the Washington office, a clear critique of Barry’s leadership.120 In January 1967, Barry resigned from his position as director although he remained a member of SNCC.121 He had several run-ins with the police. He refused to obey arbitrary orders by officers to “move-on” and was issued citations for various unauthorized activities involving block parties.122 The FBI stopped contacting

Barry in October because of his repeated arrests and his rhetoric which was increasingly antagonistic to law enforcement. They dropped him completely as a source in March 1967; by that time, the bureau was regularly gathering information on him as a subject of investigation.123 That same month, he was arrested again, this time for jaywalking. The rough treatment he received at the hands of the MPD officers during that arrest led to an outcry from community leaders and the founding of the Citizens Committee for Equal Justice.124

The death of teenager Clarence Brooker, shot in the back by a police officer during an arrest for littering, bolstered the Citizens Committee claim that black citizens were subject to unreasonable and brutal treatment by the MPD for trivial offenses. Two days after the city coroner deemed Brooker’s killing a justifiable

120 Stuart Auerbach, “SNCC Rebuffs Barry, Hires a Funds Raiser,” Washington Post, 10 Aug 1966, A1; Maddison, 183. 121 Larry A. Still, “Carmichael and Barry to Leave SNCC Posts,” Evening Star, 16 Jan 67, B1. 122WFO Federal Bureau of Investigation File 157-7672; FBI Memorandum, SA L. S. Mohr, to SAC, WFO (157-614), “Marion Barry: Liaison Source,” 30 Oct 1966, DocID 7001096, 157; “Barry Challenges Law That Allows Police to Order Public to ‘Move On,’” in WFO FBI File 157-7672, 155. 123 WFO Federal Bureau of Investigation File 157-7672; FBI Memorandum, SA Hilmer H. Krebs, to SAC, WFO (157-237) (P), “Liaison With Groups Sponsoring Integration Racial Matters,” 12 August 66, DocID 70001096, 145; SA Lawrence S. Mohr, to SAC, WFO, “Marion Barry 157-614 Liaison Source, Willie Hardy 157-949 Liaison Source,” 31 Mar 67, DocID 70001096, 177. 124 Phil Casey, “Police to Probe Barry’s Complaints of Brutality,” Washington Post, 31 Mar 67, B2; “New Civil Rights Group Charges Police Brutality.”

53

homicide, seventy-five teen protestors picketed the police station in outrage.125 The activism of the young people and the adults who supported them spurred the U. S. attorney to call a grand jury to investigate the incident.126 A witness to the shooting,

Brooker friend Rufus “Catfish” Mayfield, emerged as a charismatic spokesman for the black youth who were fed up by conditions in the city’s poorer neighborhoods and relations with authorities. Described by a Washington Star staff writer as a young man “by turns brash, reasonable, arrogant, conciliatory” who “popped up like a cork out of the torpid backwaters of the city,” Mayfield organized a sit-in at the office of

Walter Tobriner, the president of the Board of Commissioners, to demand that D.C.’s governing body convene a citizen’s investigation into his friend’s death.127 Senator

Robert Byrd and Representative Joel Broyhill, who served on the Senate and House

District Committees respectively were livid at the development. The House committee held hearings in which Broyhill disparaged Mayfield for his juvenile criminal record and grilled Tobriner for meeting with citizens of such poor moral character. “I do not propose to be governed by the Rufus Mayfields,” declared

Broyhill, “nor by those who use them as front men of civic distemper.”128 Broyhill assumed that the real organizer of Catfish’s protests was Marion Barry, who began appearing at Mayfield’s side during public events.

Mayfield and Barry both testified before the grand jury investigating the

Brooker shooting and issued a statement together condemning the insufficient

125 “75 Pickets Protest the Death of Brooker,” Evening Star (5 May 1967), E3. 126 William Basham, “Bress Taking Brooker Death to Grand Jury: Opposes Separate Investigation by Citizens Group,” Evening Star (10 May 1967), A1, A6. 127 Woody West, “Dropout Mayfield Acts to ‘Move’ Kids,” Evening Star (2 Aug 1967), A1. 128 Broyhill, quoted in “Brooker Probe Becomes Issue in House, Senate,” Evening Star (11 May 1967), B1.

54

presentation of evidence by prosecutors when the grand jury did not return an indictment.129 Even though the partnership was unsuccessful in getting justice for

Catfish’s friend, the association benefitted each of them in their continued efforts at activism. As Harry Jaffe and Tom Sherwood report, Mayfield introduced Barry to

“the dialect of the street, the walk, the jive, the mannerisms, the culture. In return,

Barry showed Mayfield how to hold a press conference and organize a demonstration.” Mayfield learned how to harness his street smarts and charisma to put them to use in the political arena “and Catfish Mayfield turned Marion Barry into a street dude.” They continued their collaboration, along with Mary Treadwell, with an eye on addressing the problems of poverty. 130 Together they continued to work on a program to bring black economic power to the inner city.

The publicity that Mayfield and Barry generated during the Brooker shooting investigation caught the attention of another street dude who had gotten out of the neighborhood and was working in city planning for the District government. Carroll

Harvey had been concerned about the problems of poverty in his home city since he studied at Howard University under sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, who wrote about class divisions in black society. Witnessing the activism of young men like Mayfield who grew up under similar circumstances to his own, as well as Barry’s acquittal on charges stemming from his jaywalking arrest, gave Harvey hope. He believed that

“Washington is a city where you can get something done” about urban issues.131 He arranged for Barry and his associates to use some space in the Office of Community

129 “Bress Office Hit in Probe of Brooker,” Evening Star (2 June 1967), C10. 130Jaffe and Sherwood, 55-56. 131 Carroll Harvey, quoted in Robert G. Kaiser, “Pride’s Director Sells Hard Work and Pride,” Washington Post (10 Aug 1967), C11.

55

Renewal where Harvey worked. Together they began getting to know the teenagers in lower income neighborhoods and making connections with leaders of gangs, learning the organization of the streets.132

During the summer of 1967, members of Congress and leaders in the Johnson administration were paying attention to those streets as well. Fears about urban unrest and rioting led officials to consider a number of assistance programs to improve conditions in “blighted urban areas.” Several years into the War on Poverty, it appeared that very little progress had been made to improve conditions. During hearings held the year before in August 1966, Senator Abraham Ribicoff disputed the claims of cabinet secretaries like Robert Weaver of the Department of Housing and

Urban Development that the existing programs were effective. Ribicoff argued that funds for housing improvement were flowing into landlords’ pockets rather than creating better living conditions for the poor tenants, who still had to cope with crime and lack of sanitation. As evidence, he pointed to the epidemic of rat infestation in the inner cities. The only federally-funded vermin extermination programs were handled by the Department of Interior and focused on the problem of rats on farms.133 The next year, a proposed $40 million federal program to aid cities in the fight against rodent infestation was met with ridicule in the House of Representatives and voted down, leading Martin Luther King, Jr. to declare that “Congress has revealed that it loves rats more than people.”134

132 Kaiser, “Pride’s Director;” Jaffe and Sherwood, 56-57. 133 Grace Bassett, “Senators to Hear Mayors on Ways to Halt Race Riots,” Sunday Star (21 Aug 1966), A10. 134 Quoted in Nathan Miller, “President, Riot Panel Set Meeting,” Baltimore Sun (29 July 1967), A1; “House Says ‘Rats’ to Rats Bill,” New York Amsterdam News (29 July 1967), 41; Ernest Boynton, “No Humor in Rats Despite the Congressional Guffaws,” Chicago Defender National Edition (21 Oct 1967), 3.

56

Programs for people fared little better as nothing seemed to make a difference among the vast number of young men without work but with criminal records, what officials termed the “hard-core unemployables,” who were most likely to participate in an uprising if tensions boiled over. As the administration rolled out its $5.4 million

Concentrated Employment Program in the summer of 1967, officials begged the

Washington business community to rise to the challenge of providing job training and opportunities for those left behind in previous employment efforts. Vice President

Hubert Humphrey addressed a meeting of the Board of Trade in May and implored them to “stand up to the agitators” (which presumably referred to activists like Barry and Mayfield) by making a real investment in job opportunity for unskilled workers with criminal records. “Do you know how much a riot will cost this city?” Humphrey asked the business leaders. “No matter how much you contemplate paying now it won’t even be a down payment on the damage from the trouble. Every business firm has everything to lose this summer.”135 The entreaties by the Vice President and

Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz only resulted in about 1,400 jobs with private employers. The Concentrated Employment Program was able to place over 21,000 young people in jobs during the summer of 1967, over nine thousand more than in

1966, but there were still at least 14,000 applicants who did not find work. The jobs ended in early August with many young people agitated about the program’s disorganization.136

135 Humphrey quoted in ““H.H.H. Starts Local Summer Jobs at Board of Trade Meeting,” Metropolitan Washington Board of Trade News Vol 22, no. 5 (May 1967), 1, 9; “Labor Sec. Wirtz Explains Jobs Now Program,” Metropolitan Washington Board of Trade News Vol 22, no. 3 (March 1967), 1, 10, Kiplinger Research Library, Historical Society of Washington, D.C. 136 Honsa, “Youth Program Success Hailed by Humphrey.”

57

Amid the frustration, as temperatures and tempers threatened to heat up in the last few weeks of the summer, the Washington Star newspaper ran a front-page article featuring Mayfield and the work he had been doing since the Brooker shooting. Like the Rebels With a Cause the summer before, Mayfield and other young people from the neglected neighborhoods of the city were agitating for improved conditions in the poorer neighborhoods, including recreational and vocational facilities. He and Barry organized and received donations through their new group called the Youth

Committee for Equal Justice, tackling just the kind of smaller-scale issues Barry had dismissed as inconsequential less than a year earlier. Now, however, these projects served a larger purpose, what Mayfield referred to as “the Cause…to better the black man’s chances in society.” While he aspired to achieve the Cause “without any kind of ruckus,” Mayfield refused to take a position on urban unrest, even when questioned about his contacts with SNCC’s H. Rap Brown who had recently been charged with inciting a riot in Cambridge, Maryland. “The riots, I’m not for or against,” he told the interviewer. “It’s whatever is needed to get these people the opportunities they want. A riot is a source of communication—good or bad, it’s a source of communication…I’m not advocating a riot, but you get called an agitator if you tell black men that they’ve got to develop some kind of pride.” Mayfield suggested that white people would be wise to listen to the black youth about their frustrations rather than just condemning violence. “They don’t want the young people following Mr. Brown but they’re not giving the kids any alternatives,” Catfish warned. Through the Youth Committee for Equal Justice, Mayfield and his adult collaborators presented “a list of grievances” to the Board of Commissioners detailing

58

problems in the inner city and sought funding for their proposed program to address some of those issues.137

The day after the Mayfield profile, Secretary Willard Wirtz announced that the Department of Labor had issued a $300,000 grant to a new organization headed by Rufus Mayfield called Pride, Inc. which would employ over one thousand young people for the last month of the summer.138 There are several accounts of the events leading up to the approval of the initial Manpower Development and Training Act funding and the announcement of the program. Both Dream City and The Last of the

Black Emperors describe a confrontation between Barry and Wirtz at an undated community meeting called by Wirtz to talk about plans for a short-term jobs for youth program.139 In Marion Barry, Jonathan Agronsky places the altercation in Wirtz’s office where Barry and other local activists had been invited to discuss possible employment programs.140 In his memoir written more than four decades later, Barry recalled a community meeting but not the tense scene that these accounts describe.141

No contemporaneous reporting about the initial program funding mentions a public showdown, however. Newspaper articles written in the days and weeks after Pride received its first grant describe instead a campaign since early summer by Mayfield and Barry, assisted by Harvey’s planning expertise, to prepare proposals and receive

137 West, “Dropout Mayfield Acts to ‘Move’ Kids.” 138 Paul Delaney, “Jobs for Youths: Mayfield Heading $300,000 Project,” Evening Star 3 Aug 1967, A1. 139 Barras, 122-123; Jaffe and Sherwood, 57-60. Jaffe and Sherwood claim that Wirtz had never heard of Barry, which seems unlikely given that the Secretary was very involved in and concerned about conditions in the city, including rising tensions in the wake of the Brooker shooting. Besides the publicity he received during the protests and investigation, and previously with Free D.C., Barry had recently been the target of Rep. Broyhill’s ire when in mid-July he became a paid consultant with UPO, which received Department of Labor funds, and hired Mayfield as his assistant. See “Broyhill Raps UPO’s Tieup with Barry,” Washington Post 25 July 1967, B2. 140 Agronsky, 135. 141 Marion Barry, Jr. and Omar Tyree, Mayor for Life: The Incredible Story of Marion Barry, Jr. (New York: Strebnor Books, 2014), 72-73.

59

funding to put street dudes to work beautifying their neighborhoods. One article mentions that they had tried unsuccessfully to get the program up and running that summer under UPO’s direction but that the agency declined, according to the

Executive Director, because their “major concern is to have that control of the program under these young people,” the signature feature that made Pride exceptional.142

The speed with which Barry, Mayfield, and Harvey were able to get Pride organized and operational supports the interpretation that they had developed a plan prior to funding approval. On the day Mayfield held his press conference announcing the Department of Labor grant, Pride, Inc. already had a Board of Directors in place with Catfish elected Chairman. (Board membership was composed of ten young people and seven adults, including Mary Treadwell as Secretary.) They were ready with office space in a former convent donated by the Redevelopment Land Agency.

Partnerships had already been established with the UPO and the Washington Urban

League and Carroll Harvey was on loan from the District government as director.

Hiring began immediately and the new recruits received their sharp-looking green uniforms the next day.143 If Wirtz was pressured into providing money for the experimental program by Barry, who then had to scramble to come up with a plan to match his rhetoric, it was not evident. A more plausible explanation is that the team

142 Delaney, “Jobs for Youths;” Hollie I. West, “600 Pride, Inc., Volunteers Prepare for Work: Mayfield Gives Pep Talk,” Washington Post, 6 Aug 1967, C2; Adrienne Manns, “Catfish Hunts for Rats,” Washington Daily News, 4 Aug 1967, 14, in FBI File 157-1580, Pride, Inc., DocID 59169311, 2-3. 143 Delaney, “Jobs for Youth;” Hollie I. West, “1500 Jobs Planned for D.C. Youths: Mayfield to Head Summer Program for Pride, Inc.” Washington Post, 4 Aug 1967, A1; West, “600 Pride, Inc., Volunteers;” Manns, “Catfish Hunts for Rats.”

60

had been strategizing in Harvey’s borrowed office for months to design Pride, Inc. and saw the opportunity to get the program funded.

The press reports about Pride, Inc. in the early days of its operation barely mention Barry; instead, it was Mayfield and his charismatic leadership that received top billing. He was successful at inspiring both the dudes from the neighborhoods and government officials because, as one reporter described it, “he seems to come closest to articulating what a slum kid’s anger is all about.”144 There was an authenticity to the Pride, Inc. founders’ desire to better the lives of the poor—to promote the

“Cause” of improving economic and social conditions for young black men as well as for the communities in which they lived—that has been minimized or dismissed in many accounts of its history. The leadership also demonstrated genuine ability to mobilize an ambitious program effectively, an accomplishment which has been overshadowed by later accusations of mismanagement. They were able, in a matter of days, not only to put over one thousand young people to work in the neighborhood streets, cleaning up garbage and killing the rats that plagued ghetto residents, but also to inspire a sense of hope among young people who too often felt only despair when facing their future in the Nation’s Capital.

In the midst of the early triumph, however, Mayfield was apprehensive about what would happen at the end of the thirty-day experiment. “I don’t want myself or the kids to be cut off and ignored after the summer is over just because the threat of a riot is gone,” he worried. “You don’t just give someone something and then take it

144 Paul Hathway, “With New-Found Pride They Ask: What of the Future?” Sunday Star, 13 Aug 1967, B1.

61

away.”145 A longer- term commitment was required for these bold new tactics to be effective.

145 Hathway, “What of the Future?”

62

Chapter 2: Pride’s First Year: From Rat Patrol through Riot Recovery into a New Philosophy, September 1967-August 1968

During the October 3, 1967 interview with Marion Barry for the Civil Rights

Documentation Project, interviewer Katherine Shannon inquired about recent political developments in Washington, D.C. President Johnson had abolished the

District’s three-person Board of Commissioners and replaced it with a new governing body that included a Mayor/Commissioner, Deputy Mayor, and a nine-member city council. Like the previous governing board, all members were to be presidentially appointed, but Johnson planned to nominate officials who were representative of the racial and economic composition of the city. Although the restructuring became law on August 11, 1967, the president was still in the process of appointing positions in early October.146 Shannon wondered whether Barry would be interested in a seat on the city council. Barry acknowledged that people had approached him about participating, but he was not eligible since he had not been a District resident for three years. He also doubted that serving on the council would be relevant to his work of improving conditions for people in the city. “Why fight for something that doesn’t have any power?” he asked. “You fight to bring about self determination and not to talk about the little bit of power they got.”147 The new officials would not be chosen

146 United States Senate, General Information Relating to the Government of the District of Columbia, United States Senate, Together with the Origin and Form of Government of the District of Columbia, 91st Congress, 1st Session (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1969), 5; Elsie Carper, “Hill Gets Council List: Early Hearings Due,” Washington Post, 13 Oct 1967, B1. 147 Marion Barry, quoted in Shannon interview, 61. All quotes come from the written transcript of an oral history interview, so typographical errors are attributed to the transcriber.

63

by the people and would still be subject to the whims of the District Committees in

Congress.

After dismissing the new city council as more of the same disfranchisement in a new package, Barry then suggested Pride, Inc.’s young Chairman of the Board,

Rufus Mayfield, as a possible councilmember.148 The odd recommendation inadvertently revealed something significant about the power dynamics going on behind the scenes at the fledgling youth employment program. Mayfield and the other young dudes had the appearance of control and representation, but the older leaders intended to exert ultimate decision-making authority to preserve the growing organization. Within two weeks of the interview in which Barry suggested Mayfield for the city council, rumors were circulating that Mayfield’s outspokenness and troublesome behavior could put Pride’s funding at risk. A month later, Mayfield was pushed out of his leadership position and left Pride.

From its inception, a fundamental component of the Pride idea was that it was youth-led. The program’s designers claimed that Pride harnessed the existing leadership skills that the young men had already developed in order to navigate the challenges of life in poverty-stricken neighborhoods. The United Planning

Organization (UPO), the prevailing poverty agency in the District, declined funding for the Pride proposal because UPO leaders were wary of this innovative approach.

Conversely, Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz was willing to take a chance on Pride,

Inc. even though there was already an extensive network of employment programs and youth training opportunities in the city. The Pride leadership publicly declared that their initial success was possible because they had empowered the dudes. Using

148 Shannon interview, 61.

64

the extant hierarchy of the streets, Pride was able to get young people organized and in jobs quickly while the city-run summer youth positions—the same types of jobs for the same pay—went unfilled. Mayfield certainly believed that his position as

Chairman was one of real power and that he was leading the organization based on the principle of bottom-up control. As the older Pride leaders negotiated the daunting tasks of managing both the dudes and government bureaucrats, however, commitment to the initial youth-led model faltered and Barry, Treadwell, and Harvey gradually gained control. After the April 1968 riots following Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination decimated many of the neighborhoods where Pride workers had focused their efforts, the rhetoric of Pride shifted. Barry and the other leaders de-emphasized the empowerment of the “hard-core” and instead promoted black-owned businesses that would employ the dudes after Pride had trained them. The language became less about black liberation through the revitalization of young men’s spirits and more about economic empowerment and black capitalism. Black power would be realized not through the transformation of society by adopting the wisdom of the ghetto; instead, Pride promoted black success within the existing political and economic systems, using the same structural hierarchies.

The Psychology of Pride

The problem of power was the most pressing issue on the minds of many black activists in the late 1960s, including those in the Nation’s Capital who still lacked local self-government in 1967. Walter Washington’s appointment as Mayor of the District of Columbia, one of the first black leaders of a major American city, offered some hope that political power for African Americans was within reach. As

65

Barry noted, however, the city was still controlled by the federal government and operated under the influence of white business owners who could work the system to get what they wanted. Many Black Power activists in the District found the city council members lacking in genuine concern for the needs of black residents, especially those living in poverty.149 Without representative government,

Washingtonians had to find other avenues of influence. A key component of the

Pride, Inc. concept was that the black community had become powerless in part because they had internalized the pervasive racism in which they had been forced to operate for generations, what Pride called “the self-hate and loser complexes” of the ghetto. Before they could claim power, Pride suggested, the dudes had to believe that they were just as worthy of it as were white people. Clean streets and regular paychecks would lead to a renewed sense of dignity among the inner-city residents, the Pride leaders argued. The malaise afflicting the black poor would be replaced by feelings of self-worth and confidence. From this revitalized community new systems of political, economic, and social equality could be built.150

Visibility was a key component of the Pride strategy. The leaders crafted the

Pride uniforms and organized public events to inspire the workers as well as the poor black residents of the streets served by the clean-up patrols. They intended to portray

149Rhonda Y. Williams, Concrete Demands: The Search for Black Power in the 20th Century (New York: Routledge, 2015), 137-143, 166-167; “Our New Government,” Washington Post, 7 Sept 1967, A20; Peter Milius, “Washington Named D.C. ‘Mayor’: HUD Aide is Named as Assistant,” Washington Post, 7 Sept 1967, A1; Leon Dash, “’White Racists, Uncle Toms’ Make Up City Council, Black Power Unit Says,” Washington Post, 4 Oct 1967, B2. 150 Marion Barry, Carroll Harvey, and Mary Treadwell, “Pride - Can You Dig It? Statement of Marion Barry, Jr., Director of Operations, Carroll B. Harvey, Executive Director, Mary Treadwell, Director of Program Development,” 5 Aug 1968, 1-7, Box 5, Folder 51, News Conference 1/23/69 1969,” Youth Pride, Inc., Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C.; Robert G. Kaiser, “Pride’s Director Sells Hard Work and Pride: Runs the Show,” Washington Post, 10 Aug 1967, C11.

66

an image of power and unity.151 The Pride, Inc. founders claimed to offer a remedy for the supposed sense of inferiority pervasive among the black poor by promoting the transformation of its young workers, especially the Chairman of the Board. Rufus

Mayfield’s charisma and enthusiasm made him a perfect example of a young man claiming power and transcending his unfortunate circumstances. Pride promoted the promise that, like Mayfield, these discarded boys could be molded into productive citizens using the skills they had developed while surviving their dysfunctional environments.152 This “Catfish” model was insufficient to achieve the goals that Pride had set, however. Transforming the ghetto from a landscape of despair into a place of prosperity would require more than one eloquent young man could ever accomplish.

The psychological rhetoric of Pride’s solution to inner city problems resonated with War on Poverty bureaucrats like Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz who approved funding grants. In March 1965, prior to Barry’s move to Washington, Wirtz’s

Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan and his staff, concerned that neither civil rights legislation nor Johnson’s anti-poverty programs were sufficiently addressing problems in the black community, prepared an analysis of the immense challenges faced by poor African Americans. The Negro Family: The Case for

National Action was intended as an internal document to propose further policy discussions and did not include any specific actionable items, despite the title.153

Rather than an impetus to action, however, the ideas in The Negro Family became a

151 Hollie I. West, “600 Pride, Inc., Volunteers Prepare for Work,” Washington Post, 6 Aug 1967, C2; Robert G. Kaiser, “Pride Leaders are Looking Ahead, Washington Post, 7 Sept 1967, B1. 152 Kaiser, “Pride Leaders Looking Ahead,” “Pride, Inc.: D.C.’s Cool Answers to Hot Summers,” Ebony 23, Issue 2 (Dec 1967,) 82-89. 153 U. S. Department of Labor, Office of Policy, Planning and Research, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Washington, D.C.: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1965), 47.

67

diagnosis of inherent dysfunction in the black community. The report’s core argument was that racist policies had primarily damaged black men, and in turn destroyed the proper familial hierarchy. “In essence,” the report claimed, “the Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it is so out of line with the rest of American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole, and imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male and, in consequence, on a great many

Negro women as well.”154 The report’s inherent patriarchal bias and misogyny went unchallenged as its analysis entered the public discourse. Particularly as urban uprisings spread through several northern cities, both supporters and opponents of anti-poverty initiatives accepted the report’s diagnosis of the moral failings of ghetto residents. Riots were just the latest manifestation of this cultural disorder, understandable in a community mired in sexual immorality, violence, and corruption.

The Negro Family: The Case for National Action gave white America an excuse to view African Americans as a community that required moral and psychological redemption.155

At first glance, it may seem as if running a jobs program for such damaged people as “the truly hard-core, the drop-outs, the drug addicts, and the jailed,” as

Pride’s promotional material described its target constituency, was an odd choice if the intention was to increase Black Power.156 In voteless Washington, however, it

154 The Negro Family, 29. 155 Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration.” The Atlantic, October 2015. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/the-black-family-in-the-age-of-mass- incarceration/403246/. 156 Youth Pride, Incorporated, Dig Your BLACK Self (Washington, D.C.: Youth Pride, Inc., 1969), Inner Cover, in Youth Pride, Inc. Papers (unprocessed), Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington D.C. Publication was not in one of the boxes when this researcher examined it but was in a separate unlabeled folder provided by MSRC staff. There were, however, four other

68

made sense. More so perhaps than in any other jurisdiction, the War on Poverty programs in the District of Columbia had become a kind of substitute political organization. An advisory council made up of representatives from neighborhoods around the city that voted on the allocation of poverty funding functioned as a stand- in for representative government, “a sort of substitute city council,” as one reporter noted. The council provided residents with a voice in municipal issues, however limited. The community centers run by the UPO provided a resource where community workers listened to residents’ concerns and responded to their needs when they could. The centers hired local people and trained them in administrative and leadership skills. The support provided by the community workers often included assistance with advocacy when other city agencies were unresponsive.157 The

“moneylord merchants” had the Board of Trade as a channel to exercise power; the poor increasingly turned to the War on Poverty centers to wield influence. Across the country, the practical application of “maximum feasible participation” of poor black residents in the War on Poverty programs was regularly undermined by white elected officials.158 In Washington, D.C., the lack of representative government meant that there were fewer local officials with influence over the administration of federal funding. It was in this environment that the founders of Pride, Inc., developed an anti- poverty organization to foster a positive black self-image and gain power.

editions of the publication found in Box 11, “Youth Pride, Inc. 1969” between Folders 3 and 4 at the time of my research. 157 Dan Morgan, “Poverty War Voice is Heard: Gains Semblance of Political Organization Here,” Washington Post, 16 Jun 1966, F1. 158 Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008), 371-374; Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 119-124.

69

The strategy of designing actions that targeted the needs of the people on the margins, rather than concentrating efforts for middle-class African Americans, had been one of the defining characteristics of SNCC since it was originally organized in

1960. Barry’s involvement with fundraising and lobbying, first in New York and then in his early days of organizing in Washington, D.C., was an aberration from the work of most SNCC activists. In the group’s southern campaigns, SNCC workers tended to spend much more time with those living in poverty than with the celebrities, wealthy donors, and policy makers with whom Barry associated in his northern activities.159

As Hasan Kwame Jeffries has argued, SNCC’s campaigns in places like Lowndes

County embraced the tactic of developing leadership among the people most ignored by other reformers. They worked primarily with “those who are illiterate, those who have poor educations, [and] those of low income,” as SNCC organizer Courtland Cox described.160 Jeffries calls this method of organizing “freedom politics” which

“challenged traditional hierarchies” and cultivated reform through radical engagement of the forgotten members of the black community. “Freedom politics was a substitute for the undemocratic traditions that defined American politics, which ranged from disenfranchising poor people to choosing candidates exclusively from the propertied and the privileged,” Jeffries explains.161 In Washington, D.C., perhaps the most undemocratic of all American cities, the Pride experiment initially laid claim to its own version of this participatory democratic ideal.

159 Barry, Shannon interview, 41, 50-51. HHasan Kwame Jeffries, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 150. 161 Jeffries, 5, 150.

70

In its early days of operation, Pride promoted Rufus Mayfield as the embodiment of its challenge to traditional social structures: the empowered and influential street dude, an example of the promise of Pride. His narrative of transformation from convicted felon to capable leader was just the type of redemption story that those who accepted the black male pathology thesis were looking for.

Reporters and politicians, in the District and around the country, noted Catfish’s charm, his ability to recruit and organize inner-city teenagers, and wondered if he represented the supposed “psychological miracle” required to transform economic conditions for poor urban African Americans. As a CBS Evening News report speculated, “It may be that this young man knows the real secret, holds the real key to spiritual equality, and is far ahead of most of the national Negro leadership."162

As news outlets heralded Mayfield and the Pride, Inc. experiment, that

“national Negro leadership” was continuing the push for true equality in ways that increasingly made white decision-makers nervous. In the wake of riots in Newark and

Detroit in the summer of 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr. of the Southern Christian

Leadership Conference (SCLC) announced a plan for “mass civil disobedience” which would “use rage as a constructive and creative force” in cities across the country to bring attention to the causes of poverty and frustration in the black community. “The slums are the handiwork of a vicious system of the white society,”

King declared, and if the country wanted to avoid more violence it would have to start dismantling that system.163 Meanwhile, Stokely Carmichael of SNCC had traveled to

162 Eric Severeid, CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, 8/30/67,” Transcript, 13, Box 5, Folder 51 “News Conference 1/23/69 1969,” Youth Pride, Inc. Collection, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C. 163 Quoted in “King Calls for Massive Protests,” Washington Post, 16 Aug 1967, A1.

71

Havana, Cuba where he melodramatically declared, “We are preparing groups of urban guerrillas for our defense in the cities. This struggle is not going to be a mere street meeting. It is going to be a struggle to the death.”164 In a time of such heightened tensions and militant-sounding rhetoric, it was comforting for white society to hold up the smiling young man from the D.C. streets leading a clean-up effort in the hope that urban poverty and racism could be solved without disrupting the systems that perpetuated those conditions.

The public perception of Pride during its early days also appeared to support the assumptions that poverty would be solved through the spiritual transformation of the black community which was depicted as psychologically if not morally deficient, albeit because of discrimination and unemployment. "This is part of the core problem of Negro progress,” the CBS commentator Eric Severeid claimed, echoing the sentiment of The Negro Family, “human spirits ruined by generations of slavery and the whole spiritual cargo of its legacy which has poisoned both the races, and the question bothering many who try to think closely about the problem is how Negro pride can be created by other means than defiant acts of violence." He discounted any assertion that adequate employment, housing, and education would be sufficient to alleviate what he termed the “inferiority complex” characteristic of the black community, “but they could rebuild a slum, with their own hands, skills and leadership."165 This was the potential that Mayfield represented in early press reports: that a former criminal and high school drop-out who had been reborn as a productive citizen could lead other boys out of their life of darkness by cleaning up the squalor of

164 Quoted in Michael Arkus, “Carmichael Turns Up in Havana, Calls for U.S. Guerrilla Warfare,” Washington Post, 26 Jul 1967, A8. 165 Severeid, 12.

72

city streets. In the words of Lyndon Johnson, the Pride youth would be transformed from “tax-eaters” into “taxpayers” through hard work and skills training. “Teach them some discipline and when to get up, and how to work all day,” the president declared during a 1964 conversation with a member of Congress about the War on Poverty,

“and in two years, I’ll have them trained where they can at least drive a truck instead of sit around a pool room.”166 A program like Pride, in which the young men themselves purportedly led their fellow slum dwellers out of their environment of despair and inaction, offered a solution to black poverty without the kind of frightening upheavals to the status quo that King and Carmichael were proposing.

Not all the attention was positive. For those deeply invested in maintaining white supremacy in Washington, D.C., even innocuous accomplishments by young black men were threatening. Representatives Joel Broyhill (R-VA) and John

McMillan (D-VA), the ranking Republican and Chair of the House District

Committee respectively, were livid that Rufus Mayfield, whom they considered to be a common criminal, was leading a federally funded program. Broyhill demanded that

Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz “immediately rescind the Mayfield appointment and call to account the officials in his agency responsible for this deliberate insult to members of Congress, as well as the decent youths of the District who will be placed in subservience to an admitted agitator who has continuously displayed reckless disrespect for law and human dignity.” He also questioned the pay for the Pride workers, suggesting that the minimum wage of $1.40 an hour was an exorbitant rate for the poor boys in the program “which will undoubtedly be more than their fathers

166 Lyndon Johnson, quoted in Guian A. McKee, “’This Government Is with Us’: Lyndon Johnson and the Grassroots War on Poverty,” in The War on Poverty: A New Grassroots History, 1964-1980, ed. Annelise Orleck and Lisa Gayle Hazirjian (Atlanta: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 39.

73

earn in many instances.”167 Mayfield countered that it was just this kind of attitude from officials that fed urban unrest, calling Broyhill a “great contributor to the riots” because of his hostility to programs like Pride. “Broyhill should be tried and convicted for what he’s doing to the black youths of America,” he railed.168

Mayfield’s nemesis Broyhill was not the only one raising concerns. Secretary

Wirtz responded to several angry letters from both members of Congress and citizens outside of the District who questioned the program and its leadership. Wirtz took these objections seriously and worked hard to convert the letter writers. Wirtz’s responses were not standardized; each was worded to address individual concerns.

The language of the responses suggests that those objecting to the initial Pride grant assumed that allowing the young black men themselves to run the program was tantamount to using tax dollars to fund criminal activity. Wirtz countered that one of the important features of the program was that it was “organized and administered primarily by disadvantaged youths who chose Mr. Rufus Mayfield to be Chairman of the Board” and that “he and other releasees from such [youth correctional] institutions must be given a fair chance to become productive members of society” since the goal of the Department of Labor job programs was “to encourage employment opportunities for all who want to work” including those who had criminal records.169

He pointed out that the whole concept of the program was experimental, “to determine whether large numbers of unemployed youth can effectively be given at

167 “Broyhill Hits Labor Department for Naming Mayfield,” Evening Star, 4 Aug 1967, A1. 168 Rufus Mayfield, quoted in “Youth Group Gets $300,000,” Washington Afro-American, 5 Aug 1967, 1-2. 169 W. Willard Wirtz, Secretary of Labor, letter to Mr. Robert W. Friday, Nutley, New Jersey, 23 Aug 1967, Reading Files, “Departmental” July-Sept 1967, Records of the Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz 1962-1969, Box 541, General Records of the Department of Labor, Record Group 174, National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. The responses in this file do not include the initial correspondence to which the Secretary is responding.

74

least brief work experience and be motivated positively by taking a role in operating responsibility for a major community work program.”170 The program was not just

“an encouraging self-help effort,” Wirtz noted, but had the potential to benefit the community as well by “mak[ing] urban slums a less dismal place to live.”171

The goal of community uplift was suspect for some avowed white supremacists. Alabama Congressman Armistead Selden, Jr. was particularly concerned that federal funds were used to teach the workers “Negro history.” Wirtz countered that a critical component of Pride was to “instill in [the workers] a feeling of self-worth and good citizenship” to promote “positive social values and work habits.” The four half-day sessions set aside for cultural enrichment, he explained, were “intended to help give the youth a sense of pride and heritage by focusing, not only on problems, but on constructive contributions Negroes have made and are making to American society.” Perhaps to lend legitimacy to the effort and dispute any suspicion that the dudes would be stirred up to militancy by the history lessons,

Wirtz assured the southern Congressman that “expert advice and cooperation has been sought” for the enrichment sessions. He specifically mentioned General Robert

Mathe, a white World War II veteran and current member of the D.C. Board of

Commissioners, as one of the speakers brought in to encourage respect for “public service and the duties of citizenship.”172 Pride, Inc. was designed specifically to calm

170 W. Willard Wirtz, Secretary of Labor, letter to Honorable Albert H. Quia, Washington, D.C., 21 Aug 1967, Reading Files “Departmental” Box 541, Record Group 174, National Archives at College Park, MD. 171 W. Willard Wirtz, Secretary of Labor, letter to Mrs. Dorothy Collins, Winchester, VA, 23 Aug 1967, Reading Files “Departmental” Box 541, Record Group 174, National Archives at College Park, MD. 172 W. Willard Wirtz, Secretary of Labor, letter to Honorable Armistead I. Selden, Jr., Washington, D.C. 24 Aug 1967, Reading Files “Departmental” Box 541, Record Group 174, National Archives at College Park, MD.

75

racial tensions by giving the workers hope and a sense of self-esteem. For segregationists like Selden, this may have been the most concerning aspect of

Pride.173 Teaching black history to the dudes could have the effect of providing justification for the simmering resentments that had boiled over in other cities.

Wirtz’s support for Pride appeared radical to those who opposed the idea of empowering street hustlers to control their own employment program. Within his advocacy for a program conceived “to see if youths may be better motivated toward positive work habits and goals when they are given a degree of responsibility” there lay echoes of the black pathology thesis posited by his former Assistant Secretary.174

Poor black neighborhoods were dismal and dirty because the people living there lacked “positive work habits and goals,” not because the city leadership and

Congressional overseers had deliberately ignored them. Through federal funding, the deficiencies in the black community may be remedied. No mention was made of the systemic policies of neglect that contributed to the filthy environment, or the understandable reluctance of the dudes to conform to the expectations of a society that rejected them.

The elevation of Catfish to a kind of hero status in the early days of Pride,

Inc., was problematic not only because no young person could possibly reverse the effects of poverty and discrimination with a good attitude, a winning smile, and a broom. By promoting Mayfield’s personal success as an example of a young man transcending his circumstances, the hypothesis of black pathology was subtly

173 Selden was a signer of the 1956 “Southern Manifesto” decrying the Brown v. Board of Education decision and affirming the belief in the “separate but equal” doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson. See “Southern Manifesto,” Strom Thurman Institute at Clemson University. http://sti.clemson.edu/component/content/article/192-general-info/790-1956-qsouthern-manifestoq 174 Wirtz, letter to Robert Friday.

76

perpetuated. The early Pride model of community uplift did nothing to address the structural inequalities that had resulted in the internalized sense of inadequacy that

Pride sought to disrupt. As Carol Gibbons, an accomplished young woman from

Harlem who testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee alongside Mayfield, noted, “The problem with our society is that it makes room for one person—a token.

It has to be a system in which everyone can make it.”175 Cleaning up the poverty- stricken neighborhoods had the short-term result of brightening the environment for the black community, and the rhetoric of empowering the hard-core appeared radical, but the program was conservative in its approach to the social and political conditions which had created the mess in the first place.

The Organization and Structure of Pride

Despite its limitations, the program did have some impressive accomplishments. In the first two weeks of August, Pride successfully organized around one thousand fourteen- to eighteen-year-old boys in the “hard and dirty work” of clearing over 700 lots and cleaning about 1,400 city streets, mostly in their own neighborhoods.176 They collected so much trash that the city had trouble providing enough trucks to haul it away. Impatient with the slow response of the city’s sanitation department, Pride workers broke into the lab where the municipal supply of rat poison was stored and mixed their own, following the protocols which Health

Department officials had taught them the week before. Rather than chastise the boys, officials praised their enthusiasm. Their accomplishment of killing thousands of

175 Carol Gibbons, quoted in Elsie Carper, “Mayfield Discounts Effect of Agitators.” Washington Post, 24 Aug 1967, C1. 176 Kaiser, “Pride’s Director Sells Hard Work and Pride,” “City Heads Laud ‘Pride,’ Request Its Extension,” Evening Star, 31 Aug 1967, C1.

77

rodents throughout the city inspired the department to hire more workers for positions in pest control.177

Meanwhile, District officials were unable to fill a third of the 434 city- managed youth positions funded at the same time as the Pride program, even though the jobs involved doing similar work for the same pay rate of $1.40 an hour, or $56 for a forty-hour week. As the city struggled to find workers, Pride was forced to turn away young job seekers. Carroll Harvey noted that the failure to recruit enough workers could be attributed to the Sanitation Department’s unwillingness to meet the boys in their own neighborhoods, instead expecting applicants to travel to the U.S.

Employment Services office downtown. To gain credibility with the dudes, Harvey explained, officials would have to be willing to do things differently.178 While not calling for the complete remaking of the existing power structure, some disruption of current expectations was necessary if new results among this population were to be realized. The Pride leaders believed that their perspective as members of the community and as activists gave them the advantage in designing successful programs for poor youth.

Despite the grumbling from Capitol Hill and from a few disgruntled citizens of other states, the response to Pride’s work from around the city was overwhelmingly positive. The public noticed the effect of Pride’s innovative approach. Residents of the neighborhoods where Pride workers deployed were pleased that their long-neglected streets were getting attention. They were also

177 Robert G. Kaiser, “Rat Patrol Opens Guns As City Widens Drive,” Washington Post 18 Aug 1967, A1, “City Heads Laud ‘Pride,’” Paul Hodge, “Boys ‘Stand Tall’ in Banks,” Washington Post, 19 Aug 1967, A1. 178 Robert G. Kaiser, “Red Tape Snarls Youth Jobs,” Washington Post, 16 Aug 1967, A1.

78

impressed to see the youths working so hard in the summer heat; men and women came out of their homes to shake the dudes’ hands and bring them cool drinks. The press wrote stories about the young men, profiling especially the older boys serving as foremen and area supervisors (earning $80 and $100 per week, respectively) who exhibited impressive leadership skills. Some were college students, countering the stereotype that all dudes were drop-outs with police records. Adults from the city

Highway Department who drove the trucks for the Pride workers encouraged the boys to get an education and avoid a life of limited options. Reporters followed the dudes to the bank as they cashed their first paychecks and opened savings accounts at

Mayfield’s urging. When they were interviewed, the young men only mentioned one complaint: the program was too short. Just as they were making progress, the funding was scheduled to end on the first of September.179

As the program neared the end of its initial four-week funding, the District

Commissioners urged the Labor Department to continue the initiative into the school year, although perhaps scaled back to provide part-time employment. The reduced hours would not only save money but would also encourage the workers to remain enrolled in school. City officials lauded the effectiveness of the Pride leaders in organizing so many young, inexperienced employees in such an ambitious sanitation effort. Management officer Robert Rogers, who was hired by the city to evaluate the program, praised the “tremendous impact” that Pride had in the neighborhoods where they worked. He also commended the effort to address the emotional well-being of the young people, noting that “these dudes, as they call themselves…have taken

179 Paul Hathaway, “With New-Found Pride They Ask: What of the Future?” Sunday Star, 13 Aug 1967, B1; Hodge, “Boys ‘Stand Tall.’”

79

personal pride in Pride.” The city officials’ commendations came with a caveat, however. Even though the Pride workers were providing public services that were arguably the responsibility of existing municipal departments, the District government declared that it would not be able to continue providing support for Pride, which had cost the city about $37,000 over the month of operations. If Pride were to continue, it would have to be a federally-funded operation.180 Fear of riots was not a sufficient motivator to convince the city officials that they had a responsibility to provide adequate sanitation to all neighborhoods. Residents of the city spoke up in support of the program as well; a petition circulated to call for the continuation of

Pride and received over 30,000 signatures. Even Vice President Hubert Humphrey called for the initiative’s extension.181

After intense negotiations between the Pride leadership and Secretary Wirtz over the Labor Day weekend, the Department of Labor announced that the youth employment project had been extended for another year. The new $2 million grant

(about $14 million in twenty-first century dollars) would provide funding for about

600 full-time positions for workers not currently enrolled in school and about 800 part-time jobs for those who were attending school. The distinction was important, as the Star pointed out, because if working for Pride resulted in dudes dropping out of school, the program would be unsuccessful in improving conditions for the boys or for the community. “If both earning and learning can be achieved during the school

180 Robert G. Kaiser, “Project Given High Praise: City Seeks U. S. Funds to Keep Pride, Inc. Alive,” Washington Post, 1 Sept 1967, B1; “City Heads Laud ‘Pride,’ Request its Extension,” Evening Star, 31 Aug 1967, C1. 181 “Pride, Inc.: D.C.’s Cool Answer to Hot Summers,” Ebony 23, no. 2 (December 1967), 82.

80

year, however, a double purpose is served.”182 The Board of Commissioners also suggested that as Pride expanded, the youth leadership might benefit from more supervision than they had received during the summer experiment.183 The premise of a multi-million-dollar government program run primarily by young men from the streets was beginning to concern those in power.

The dudes themselves, and the older leadership supporting them, displayed no such reticence. They were confident that the renewed funding was confirmation that their current structure of empowered youth was working. In defiance of officials hoping to reign in the young men’s exuberance and bring them under stricter control, the jubilant Pride staff held a “victory march” through the streets of Washington on the morning of the continued funding announcement. Starting at their headquarters at

941 North Capitol Street, NE, about 200 young people paraded along a twenty-five- block route to the intersection of 14th and U Streets, NW, the area where the SNCC office then was located. They banged on trash can lids with rakes and sang “Pride is

Here” to the tune of “Amen.” Some carried signs that read “Pride Is Here. Keep It.”184

In response, the Metropolitan Police Department issued summonses for Rufus

Mayfield, Marion Barry, and Carroll Harvey for parading without a permit. The charges were quickly dropped after the city’s Assistant Corporation Counsel Robert

182 “New Life for Pride,” Evening Star, 10 Sept 1967, G1; “Labor Dept. Weighing Extension of Pride, Inc.,” Evening Star, 2 Sept 1967, 20. In Dream City, Jaffe and Sherwood mistakenly report that the initial grant was for $1.5 million, although Barry and Mayfield had requested $2 million (64). The source of this error appears to be a 6 Sept 1967 Washington Post article titled “Project Pride Gets U.S. Funds for Full Year,” B1, which quotes “Sources at Pride” for the lower figure. This article was published on the same day that the Department of Labor announced the new grant, suggesting that it was written before complete information was available. 183 Kaiser, “Project Given High Praise.” 184 “Youth Stage a Gay March to Celebrate ‘Pride’ Grant,” Evening Star, 6 Sept 1967, A4; Federal Bureau of Investigation, March By Members of Pride, Inc on September 6, 1967 in Washington, D.C.,” 6 Sept 1967. Copy obtained from National Archives, Washington, D.C. RD 42583 by MKS on 4 March 2014.

81

Campbell dismissed the event as “a group of very happy young people expressing jubilation and joy.”185

As they filled the city streets, the young men were putting everyone in

Washington on notice that they were claiming their place of influence in the Capital.

With new-found pride and confidence, they were no longer willing to accept second- class status. “The message was—this is an army,” remembered author George

Pellicanos. “And it’s a black army, and that’s scary to a lot of people.” White

Washingtonians were confronted with the formidable presence of Pride dudes refusing to remain invisible. “We wanted to scare white folks,” recalled Gerald Lee, one of the young men in green, “and let them know that we were about having power.”186 It got the attention of law enforcement. In addition to the MPD citations, the Federal Bureau of Investigation also took notice and sent observers to monitor the demonstration.187 The FBI agents reported that at the end of the march, “Mayfield commented to reporters that the black man should not have to suffer to achieve equality. He said that in his opinion black power means equality.” Although Mayfield predicted that there would be no riots in the capital city, he also did not subscribe to the philosophy of nonviolence, the agents noted, and would defend himself if

185 “Illegal Parade Charges Dropped: Police Falleth Before Pride,” Washington Daily News, 9 Sept 1967, 5 in FBI WFO file 157-1580 “Pride, Inc.” NW: 12814 DocID 59169311, Page 28, Stuart Auerback, “Pride’s Happy March Puts 3 in Toils of Law,” Washington Post, 8 Sept 1967, A3. 186 Quoted in The Nine Lies of Marion Barry, directed by Dana Flor and Toby Oppenheimer (New York: IndiePix, 2009), DVD. 187 FBI, March By Members of Pride, Inc. According to the memo accompanying the report, “SAs Forrest F. Burgess and John R. Palmer observed the activity on 9/6/67.” A copy of the report was included in the FBI files for Marion Barry and Rufus Mayfield. A notation on the memo also indicates that a new file had been created for Pride, Inc. Memorandum from SAC, WFO (157-NEW), To: Director, FBI, “March By Members of Pride, Inc. on September 6, 1967, in Washington D.C.” 6 Sept 1967. Copy obtained from National Archives, Washington, D.C. RD 42583 by MKS on 4 March 2014.

82

attacked.188 For those who were expecting Catfish to act as a shining example to the country of the promise of black youth, his failure to promote only peaceful responses to injustice was troubling to white officials. The willingness of Pride participants to adopt a confrontational public identity had put the clean-up effort on the FBI’s radar.

Although Mayfield did not quote Stokely Carmichael or espouse the slogans of Black Power, the promotion of Pride’s image as assertive and confident was in line with Carmichael’s call to end the politics of “respectability” in northern cities. The organizer of freedom politics in Lowndes County, Alabama warned against aligning black-controlled organizations too closely with existing white institutions or politicians to protect against their tendency to revert to the way things have always been, with white interests prioritized and the needs of the black inner city ignored.

“The rewards of independence can be considerable,” Carmichael and his co-author

Charles Hamilton proclaimed in their book Black Power: The Politics of Liberation.

“It is wasteful and inefficient, not to mention unjust, to continue imposing old forms and ways of doing things on a people who no longer view those forms and ways as functional.” The only way to transform “the brutalizing, destructive, violence- breeding life of the ghettos,” they advised, was through the model of innovative thinking and bottom-up leadership.189

The promotion of Pride as a program run by the dudes had successfully won the organization another grant, but it would take more than a charming spokesman and publicity stunts to effectively run a forty-week, $2 million jobs program with the

188 FBI, March By Members of Pride, Inc.; Carl Bernstein, “District Decides Not to Prosecute: Pride Chiefs Freed of Parade Counts,” Washington Post, 9 Sept 1967, B2. 189 Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (New York: Random House, 1967), Vintage ed., Nov 1992, 166, 175-177.

83

goal of addressing the most challenging issues facing the urban poor. One month into the Pride experiment, the ideal of democratic leadership and equality was already in conflict with the practical concerns of maintaining control and securing political power through the management of the program. Even as the press continued to focus on Mayfield, Deputy Director Marion Barry became the spokesperson for the older members of the Pride leadership. During the September 6 announcement of the funding extension, it was Barry who laid out detailed goals for Pride over the coming year which included training and educational opportunities, job creation in underserved areas of the city, and “[l]eadership and business management development among hard-core youth.” While Mayfield repeatedly asserted that the new grant proved “that black, young kids can organize and operate a program by themselves,” the plan Barry described included partnerships with established anti- poverty organizations.190 There was consensus among both the public and officials that the young Pride leaders had done an excellent job on a short-term basis of recruiting workers, addressing real needs in the community, providing much-needed income to young people with few prospects, and providing “a sense of contributing something valuable” in neighborhoods with few such opportunities.191 As the program continued, however, officials believed that the dudes could benefit from collaboration with older organizers with some level of expertise. Barry, Harvey, and

Treadwell agreed.

The new grant included funds to coordinate training opportunities between

Pride, Inc. and the Washington office of the Opportunities Industrialization Center

190 Woody West, “’Pride’ Project Extended with $2 Million Grant,” Evening Star, 6 Sept 1967, A1. 191 James Kidney, “Pride Inc.: ‘Get a Good Feelin’,” George Washington (University) Hatchet, Special Edition (Nov 1967), in WFO FBI File 157-1580, Pride, Inc., NW: 12814, DocID 59169311, 37-40.

84

(OIC).192 Founded by Baptist minister Leon Sullivan in Philadelphia three years earlier, the OIC provided training in various skilled professions along with job placement assistance. The initiative was originally funded through private donations from corporations and nonprofits when the Labor Department refused Sullivan’s initial application for a grant. By 1967, however, the OIC had become one of the flagship initiatives of the Office of Economic Opportunities (OEO), a public/private partnership receiving millions of dollars in federal funding to run more than twenty centers around the country. President Johnson touted the OIC as “an example of how successful the whole war on poverty can be.” 193 Although Sullivan’s philosophy included tailoring training programs to the needs and abilities of his clients, he also believed that the key to success was preparing a black workforce that could easily integrate into the white business culture. “The OIC trainee gives a good day’s work for a good day’s pay. He is punctual and dependable,” Sullivan argued. “He recognizes that he represents an investment to an employer and that he is to return that investment in performance.”194

The OIC vision was at odds with Mayfield’s plan to create a work environment in which the dudes felt comfortable and valued as they were, “not just any old jive gig or one that makes a person feel like a fixture,” he described,” but one that makes you feel like part of an operation.”195 Barry, in contrast, praised the partnership as the logical next step for Pride to move beyond a “street-sweeping

192 Paul Hathaway, “Pride Gets Link with Job Center,” Sunday Star, 17 Sept 1967, A1. 193 Matthew J. Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 112-115. 194 Leon Sullivan, quoted in Countryman, 114. 195 Rufus Mayfield, quoted in Robert G. Kaiser, “$2 Million in New Ideas: Pride Leaders are Looking Ahead,” Washington Post, 7 Sept 1967, B1.

85

effort” and into “something that will give status and dignity” to the workers. The executive director of the D.C. OIC center, Rev. David H. Eaton, described the collaboration as mutually beneficial, since the OIC could offer the dudes an opportunity for “upward mobility” while the Pride leaders would assist the

Washington OIC with recruitment, an area in which the office had struggled over the first year of its operation. For those trainees that had successfully completed the OIC program, ninety percent had been placed in positions and were earning above minimum wage on average.196 But Eaton acknowledged that only a fraction of those who contacted the center made it to graduation and employment. “If he wants to goof off, we don’t want him,” Eaton declared.197 Pride was designed specifically for the young men who had trouble conforming to the expectations of such a program, the so-called “hard-core unemployed.” The Pride concept that Barry and Mayfield presented to Secretary Wirtz to win the initial trial grant was designed as an alternative to the hierarchal job training programs that already existed in abundance in

Washington. The partnership with OIC suggested that there were already doubts that the model was workable.

In addition, Rufus Mayfield’s position as the public face of Pride was becoming difficult to manage, as his colorful style and personality brought unwanted negative publicity to the group. Concerns about the behavior of the young Chairman of the Board began to appear in news articles. Reporters mentioned his wardrobe choices— “a blue blazer with white pearl buttons” or “pastel slacks and Italian cut

196 Hathaway, “Pride Gets Link with Job Center.” 197 David Eaton, quoted in “Training Center Hails Year on Job,” Washington Post, 13 Dec 1967, B7.

86

shoes”—in a way that suggested he was spending his Pride earnings frivolously.198

For an organization that was conscientious about its public appearance, Mayfield’s fancy clothes ran counter to the Pride image of green-uniformed young men united in their mission of hard work and community improvement.199 Columnist Clarence

Mitchell, Jr. of the Baltimore Afro-American defended Mayfield’s appearance, noting that his clothing demonstrated “what many have known and contended all along…[that] the poor of our country do not want to be pictured as bums” and would wear nicer clothes if they could. Mitchell worried, though, that there was danger ahead for Catfish. He expressed hope that “some of those who now deserve credit for helping to push him into the limelight do not try to get him off the track and poison his mind with propaganda about people who are genuinely trying to be helpful.”

Mitchell was concerned that Mayfield was beginning to believe that only authentic street dudes like himself understood anything about urban poverty.200

There were other indications beyond his clothing choices that Mayfield was not conforming to the Pride image promoted by the Barry faction. When the Pride leaders attended a meeting in the district offices about the parade charges, Mayfield sat in the big leather chair at the Assistant Corporate Counsel’s desk until one of

Pride’s lawyers chided, “Rufus, this isn’t a board meeting.” Mayfield moved, but then

198 Elsie Carper, “Mayfield Discounts Effect of Agitators,” Washington Post, 24 Aug 1967, C1; Bernstein, “District Decides Not to Prosecute.” Mayfield received no compensation from the initial August 1967 Department of Labor grant directly although he did receive $750 through a donation from the Washington Urban League. W. Willard Wirtz, letter to Mr. J. R. Bailey, Bridgeton, NJ, 29 Aug 1967, Reading Files “Departmental” Box 541, Record Group 174, National Archives at College Park, MD. 199 David R. Boldt, “Pride Enters Fifth Year: Self-Help Group Still Wrestles Problems,” Washington Post, 10 Sep 1972, D1. During an interview for the five-year anniversary of Pride, Treadwell contrasted Mayfield’s fancy clothes with the Pride strategy to represent the dignity of the working class through their appearance in public in their work uniforms. 200 Clarence Mitchell, Jr., “From the Work Bench: Rufus Mayfield’s Case Proves Two Pictures Worth More Than a Thousand Words,” Baltimore Afro-American, 2 Sept 1967, 4.

87

kept the others waiting because he needed “to cancel a very important appointment.”201 He wore sunglasses indoors and carried a walking stick while testifying before Congress, put a Pride bumper sticker on the Vice President’s car when Humphrey came to visit the workers, and boasted that he and the other young board members were doing a better job of recruiting workers than the U.S.

Employment Service without “any help from anybody.” Letters were pouring in from around the country asking for his help and advice, he bragged.202

As Clarence Mitchell had predicted, Mayfield’s interactions with white leaders suggested that he viewed the intentions of those outside of the Pride orbit as suspect. While leading Michigan Governor George Romney on a walking tour of

Washington neighborhoods, Mayfield— “silk-suited and paisley-tied”— “lectured” the possible presidential candidate for “playing politics” because Romney shook the hands of workers from another community center run by the Urban League.203 He berated Father James Groppi during the Milwaukee activist’s visit to Pride, embarrassing and discouraging him. Mayfield accused the white leader of exploiting the black men with whom he had led marches against housing discrimination. “It’s the old case of whites using Negroes,” Catfish criticized. “After they’re through, they throw you back.” The Wisconsin group was so rattled by the encounter that they canceled press events scheduled later that day.204 The press had held Mayfield up as

201 Bernstein, “Pride Chiefs Freed of Parade Counts.” 202 UPI Photo, “Senate Committee Told of Riots,” New Journal and Guide (Norfolk), 2 Sept 1967, 2; David R. Boldt, “Pride Enters Fifth Year: Self-Help Group Still Wrestles Problems,” Washington Post, 10 Sep 1972, D1; “Pride, Inc.” Ebony; WJLA-TV, “Rufus Catfish Mayfield, civil rights pioneer,” video, 2:51, 18 Feb 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2VheWdSjYM; James Kidney, “D.C. Teenagers Beam With Pride at ‘Their’ Pride, Inc.,” Chicago Defender, 7 Sept 1967, 16. 203 Robert L. Asher, “Romney Romps Through D.C. Ghetto,” Washington Post, 13 Sept 1967, A1; “Romney Lectured on Mayfield Tour,” Baltimore Afro-American, 23 Sept 1967, 17. 204 Ethel Payne, “Milwaukee March Leader Called ‘Just a Whitey,’,” Chicago Defender, 3 Oct 1967, 9.

88

the example of ghetto redemption, but he failed to follow the script that had been laid out for him. He believed that he had something unique to contribute to the discussion of poverty and racism and he was increasingly impatient with anyone who wanted to be seen with him but did not appreciate his message. In October 1967, there were indications that even Pride’s champions were losing patience. Mary Stratford reported in her “Washington News” column in the Afro-American that her Labor Department sources had revealed a plan for leadership restructuring at Pride. Federal officials intended to impose a “restraining influence” on Mayfield and the other Pride leaders to reign in the problematic rhetoric. “The Department is reportedly perturbed because, in plans for Pride to be a model experiment for the nation, it was not foreseen that

Mayfield would adopt a role as race relations expert,” Stratford explained.205

The scrutiny that Mayfield’s behavior was drawing to the organization put him at odds with the older Pride leaders, who were concerned with maintaining control over the program. On November 23, 1967, just short of three months into the expanded Pride experiment, the Chairman of the Board announced that he was quitting.206 Publicly, Barry and members of the Pride board expressed surprise at the suddenness of Mayfield’s departure while admitting that it was probably for the best.

There were indications that trouble had been brewing for some time. Vice Chairman

Winston Staton suggested that Catfish had lost interest in the day-to-day work of running an organization and was only interested in the public attention he had

205 Mary Stratford, “Some Heads May Roll if LBJ Hears About This,” Baltimore Afro-American, 21 Oct 1967, 5. 206 William Raspberry, “Pride Turns to Job Skills for Youths,” Washington Post, 24 Nov 1967, B1; Jaffe and Sherwood, 64-65. In Dream City, Harry Jaffe and Tom Sherwood describe a public altercation between Mayfield and Barry that preceded the departure but press accounts at the time portray an unexpected but uneventful resignation. The authors appear to be conflating two separate events, one in November 1967 and the other on February 28, 1968.

89

received as the face of Pride. An area supervisor echoed Staton’s assessment, noting that, “The time has come for us to roll up our sleeves. The glory part is gone. That’s why Mayfield is going.” Mayfield attributed his decision to tension with Barry and

Treadwell.207 Mayfield’s departure apparently forestalled the rumored takeover by the

Department of Labor, which would have undercut the mission of Pride as a vehicle for Black Power.

In the face of possible loss of control and funding, the remaining leaders abandoned the most radical rhetoric of the program’s initial proposal. Pride was no longer promoted as a program run completely by the poor kids themselves. Catfish criticized the shift in an interview with journalist Wilbur Pinder, Jr. of Washington

News at the beginning of 1968, musings that were recorded in the Pride FBI file. “On the inside I sort of hurt because I can see Pride’s control going to the bureaucrats and the phonies,” he lamented, denying that he was concerned about his loss of prominence. “What hurts me most is that I wasn’t able to solve the problems within

Pride.”208 In February, he scheduled a press conference to urge Harvey, Barry, and

Treadwell to resign, claiming that Pride had “lost its grass-roots purpose” under their leadership and that the Pride dudes had been “brain-washed” by the trio. Mayfield backed down and canceled the event, however, when he discovered that about two hundred Pride workers were among the crowd gathered to hear his statement.

Reporters observed that many of the young Pride men were armed with guns and knives. “There ain’t going to be any press conference,” the men reportedly

207 Orville Green, “’Catfish Didn’t Carry Weight in Pride’,” Baltimore Afro-American, 9 Dec 1967, 14. In this article, the Vice Chairman’s last name is spelled “Staten” in error. 208 Rufus Mayfield, as told to Wilbur Pinder, Jr. “’Don’t Know Where I’m Going but I Know Where I’ve Been,’” Washington News, 4 Jan 1968, 1, 14, in FBI File “Pride, Inc.,” WFO 157-1580, NW 12814, DocID 59169311, 48.

90

threatened. Barry had accompanied the caravan of Pride work trucks to the bar where

Mayfield had called the conference but disavowed any responsibility for the confrontation. He and Harvey downplayed the threatening behavior that could easily have led to violence as “an emotional response” that is perhaps to be expected from street kids who were “used to dealing in hard terms.”209 The event demonstrated that the adult leaders were not using their positions as mentors to guide the dudes away from the kind of aggression they had learned in the street. They may even have been cultivating it.210 They were willing to use the threat of violence to maintain the authority of the Pride leadership.

The February showdown made public a power struggle that had been growing in the weeks since Mayfield’s November departure. Catfish was not alone in his concerns; he had been consulting with a group of “dissidents” composed of former and current Pride members, including some with positions on the board of directors.

The group had met with federal and District officials at least twice to complain that the older leaders had usurped the authority that was supposed to be in the hands of the young participants. “One of the primary grievances of the dissidents,” the Star reported, “is that Barry, Harvey and Miss Treadwell have taken over the planning and dominated the operation of the program, creating, in effect, the same employer-

209 Carl Bernstein, “Pride Blocks Mayfield’s Conference,” Washington Post, 29 Feb 1968, B1. Jaffe and Sherwood appear to place this confrontation during a press conference on the day of Mayfield’s resignation announcement at Pride headquarters but press reports about the leadership change in November 1967 mention no conflict. Dream City, 64-65. 210 The WFO FBI file for Pride, Inc. includes a report about a disturbance at the Washington Coliseum during a Temptations concert on October 29, 1967 that involved Pride members. The report suggested that Marion Barry may have orchestrated the trouble because he had been denied entry to an event at the Coliseum the night before. Several factors were listed as contributing to the disorder but the agent composing the report asserted that “Pride Incorporated was deeply involved in the disturbance.” Letter and LHM to Director, From: SAC, WFO, “Disturbance Following Rock and Roll Show, Washington Coliseum, 3rd and M Streets, N.W., October 29, 1967,” 28 Dec 1967, in FBI WFO file “Pride, Inc.,” 157-1580, NW 12814, DocID 59169311, 46.

91

employee relationship that the designers of Pride wanted to avoid.” Although the directors were unhappy with the “faction” speaking against them, they did not disagree with that assessment, acknowledging that they were the final decision- makers. They asserted that “true participation is the acceptance of responsibility” which the Pride workers could only learn from “structured discipline” if they wanted to develop an economically viable organization. Mary Treadwell went a step further, saying that the leadership had to be tough because “[t]here are only two institutions that have worked with these dudes before—the Army and the jails.” Offering similar organizational structure and correction was the only way, they claimed, to harness the raw leadership skills many of the dudes learned on the street. To survive as a black power organization, Treadwell claimed, “we can’t book losers.”211 In later years,

Treadwell would dismiss the idea that the Mayfield departure represented any type of failure of the Pride model by claiming that Catfish was not authentically representative of the type of young man the program served. “[H]e didn’t even like dudes,” she claimed. “I even think he thought they smelled bad.”212 The realities of managing a multi-million-dollar federal program, the leaders argued, required a traditional, top-down organizational structure. The Pride mission of self- empowerment could be accomplished by teaching the dudes to operate within that structure.213

211 Woody West and Barry Kalb, “Crucial Evaluation Under Way: Pride Awaits Decision—Has Ghetto Jobs Project Made It?” Sunday Star, 17 Mar 1968, A1, 17. 212 Quoted in Boldt, “Pride Enters Fifth Year.” 213 West and Kalb, “Pride Awaits Decision.”

92

Uprising: Pride Emerges from the Ashes

The government officials who supported Pride were less concerned than the young dissidents with the question of whether the leaders of the program remained faithful to their original proposal of youth empowerment. Their priority in funding

Pride was the hope that it would calm tensions in black neighborhoods and avert the kind of civil unrest that had erupted in other cities around the country. After the April

4, 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whatever success the anti-poverty programs had managed in easing unrest quickly dissolved. For several days, waves of property destruction and looting spread through the city, concentrated mostly within the business districts with a predominantly black customer base.214 Barry and

Treadwell patrolled the areas of unrest periodically to make sure there were no Pride workers engaged in violent or illegal activities.215 How successful they were in keeping Pride-affiliated youth out of trouble is unclear; they reported that eight percent of the 1,200 Pride workers were detained by police during the disturbance, although the Pride attorney claimed that the arrests were primarily for curfew violations.216 The bands of roving young men setting fires and ransacking stores certainly included at least some employees of the city’s youth centers.217 Pride

214 Chris Myers Asch and George Derek Musgrove, Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 355-359. 215 “New Violence Erupts in D.C.; Johnson Calls Joint Session,” Evening Star, 5 April 1968, A1, A17: Jaffe and Sherwood, 71. Marion Barry was provided with a letter from “Carroll B. Harvey, Deputy Director, Mayor’s Office” authorizing him to “pass unimpeded through the disturbance areas of the city” because “Mr. Barry is Director of Operations at Pride Inc, and his purpose for movement is concern for Pride’s 1208 employees of whom 1200 are inner city males between the ages of 14-35.” Carroll B. Harvey, Letter 7 April 1968, Youth Pride, Inc., Box 5, Folder 1 “Memos-Carroll Harvey,” Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C. 216 John Fialka, “Stores May Burn Again, Barry Tells Bar Group,” Evening Star, 16 Apr 1968, B4. 217 The Historical Society of Washington, D.C. houses an oral history collection which includes interviews with Washingtonians who experienced the 1968 uprising. One account is provided by an anonymous rioter who was the director of a youth employment center at 9th and Q Street, NW. He recounted not only participating in the violence with his gang, the Zulus (“We did everything to help

93

workers managed to avoid any association with violent activities, instead making themselves visible in service roles such as protecting businesses. Giant Food, the grocery store chain whose owner had been supportive of Pride, emerged from the looting and property destruction unscathed thanks to Pride assistance; its rival

Safeway suffered substantial damage. Once the violence had abated, Pride partnered with Giant to organize food delivery to ravaged neighborhoods. As a result, Pride emerged from the widespread destruction with its reputation intact despite the failure of the city’s youth empowerment programs to mitigate the rage that fueled the riot.

As Jaffe and Sherwood note, “Compared to a crazed teenager with a Molotov cocktail, Barry was a moderate,” and the Pride leadership’s ability to continue functioning during the unrest provided positive publicity to the organization.218 Barry,

Treadwell, and Harvey transformed what could have been the death-knell for their federally funded riot-prevention program into a triumph.

As peace returned to the streets and officials began planning for the city’s recovery, the Pride leadership team became prophetic voices of impending doom if

Washington attempted to return to “business as usual.” Barry accused city leaders of

“missing the whole damn point” of the property destruction, which revealed what he called the “serious crisis” of economic inequality in Washington.219 Wearing a Pride- green jacket and reciting poetry by Langston Hughes, Barry warned a gathering of the

D.C. Bar Association that “if these stores are built back the same way, they will be the flames,”) but using a pass he carried as a youth leader for the government to avoid searches and pass through checkpoints. He refers to “some blacks” protecting Giant grocery stores which suggests that the unnamed poverty group for which he worked was not Pride. “John Smith* Interview,” 16 Oct 2002, Folder 3, MS0769, 1968 Riots Oral History Collection, 2002-2003, Historical Society of Washington, D.C., 21-25. 218 Jaffe and Sherwood, 78-79. 219 Quoted in Robert L. Asher, “City Curfew Eased; Soldiers Remain, But Cut Patrols,” Washington Post, 11 Apr 1968, A1.

94

burned down again.” He advised that the only way to avoid more unrest was to support black-owned businesses that became a part of the communities in which they operated. Treadwell echoed Barry’s sentiments, reflecting that “Everybody and his mother used to be able to come in to black communities and operate, and whether they boycott or burn, people in black communities just aren’t going to stand for that anymore.” For businesses to be successful in black neighborhoods in the future, “they must include development of their self-awareness.” She touted Pride, Inc.’s programs and its control by black leaders as a model for black capitalism and entrepreneurship.220

Moving forward, this would become the mission of Pride, Inc. More than a small-scale neighborhood cleaning effort to keep potentially volatile young men from the poorest neighborhoods occupied and out of mischief, the leaders of Pride had a new vision. The purpose of Pride was not merely to lift a few kids out of poverty into gainful employment and to make their neighborhoods a little more livable in the process. As it expanded, Pride would focus on creating a completely new dynamic in the economic and social structure of Washington, D.C. They would facilitate the development of a workforce that used the talents and skills of the street to compete in the marketplace against white-owned businesses that historically had exploited their black customers and damaged the black community. “It is time for us in the black community to become economically sound,” Barry declared. They must reverse the cycle in which African Americans “consume everything and produce nothing.”221

Barry, Treadwell, and Harvey believed they could combat the structural racism that

220 Bernadette Carey, “Barry Would Bar White Control of Business in Rebuilt Ghettos,” Washington Post, 16 Apr 1968, B3. 221 “Mayor Hails Project for Services by Pride,” Evening Star, 20 Apr 1968, A10.

95

had doomed black Washingtonians to lives of financial hardship and lost opportunities through black control of businesses and community institutions.

As Pride embarked on its second year of operation, the promotional language for the program reflected this goal. An August 1968 Pride press release issued from their headquarters at 1536 U Street, N.W., likened the group’s evolution to the progression from birth through adolescence into adulthood, “and finally the settling down to raise a family of healthy economic offspring.” The initial “hypothesis” of the program, the document declared, “was that there was order in what is classically described as the social disorganization of the street corner; that, in fact, there were leaders and followers on the street and a whole informal structural hierarchy in between.” The design of Pride was predicated on the assumption that the “economy of the streets” could be harnessed into a functioning business with just a little support and the opportunity to earn money legally. However, the Pride leadership discovered that the dudes had been too damaged from the pathology that plagued the poor black community—absent fathers, inadequate education, “lack of parental love and discipline”—to “change their authoritarian way of living” which included intimidation and violence, analysis that could have come straight from The Negro

Family. “There was in fact, we learned, no real belief in the democratic processes” among the young men, they argued. As a result, a successful youth-led organization had been impossible.222

222 Marion Barry, Jr., Carroll Harvey, and Mary Treadwell, Pride-Can You Dig It? Statement of Marion Barry, Jr., Director of Operations, Carroll B. Harvey, Executive Director, Mary Treadwell, Director of Program Development, Press Release, 5 Aug 1968, Box 5, Folder 51, News Conference 1/23/69 1969,” Youth Pride, Inc., Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C.; Peter Braestrup, “Pride’s Job Program Goal: ‘Piece of Action’ for Ghetto,” Washington Post, 22 Mar 1969, D1.

96

Control remained in the hands of the Pride leadership and the office management team who were referred to as the “professionals” and who were expected to work long hours without paid overtime. The department heads included a mix of college-educated young men and street dudes who had the aptitude and desire to move into administrative positions.223 The dudes would have the opportunity to apprentice with the organization’s leaders to learn the strategies of success. Once a trainee had developed skills in a certain area, he could pass the knowledge and experience to his peers. “The mystery of, and the distrust for, expertise vanishes when the dude starts to acquire it,” the announcement predicted.224 The new hierarchical structure would soon be termed “dudes and brass.” There was still a Board of

Directors, now headed by Winston Staton who had been vice-chairman under

Mayfield. Carroll Harvey continued to serve as the unsalaried Executive Director while also working for D.C.’s Office of Community Renewal. Marion Barry was

Director of Operations and Mary Treadwell was Director of Program Planning.225

Pride brass—Harvey, Treadwell, and Barry—were determined to develop economically sustainable businesses that they believed would ultimately benefit the dudes and the black community.

It was an ambitious goal. As Pride continued to operate through a new presidential administration as well as the eventual return of representative

223 Braestrup, “Piece of Action.” 224 Marion Barry, Jr., Carroll Harvey, and Mary Treadwell, Pride-Can You Dig It? Statement of Marion Barry, Jr., Director of Operations, Carroll B. Harvey, Executive Director, Mary Treadwell, Director of Program Development, Press Release, 5 Aug 1968, Box 5, Folder 51, News Conference 1/23/69 1969,” Youth Pride, Inc., Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C.; Peter Braestrup, “Pride’s Job Program Goal: ‘Piece of Action’ for Ghetto,” Washington Post, 22 Mar 1969, D1. 225 “Pride Looks for Economic Successes in Next Decade,” Washington Afro-American, Annual Negro History Supplement, 14 Feb 1970, 9, in WFO FBI File 157-1580, 74-78; Paul Delaney, “Jobs for Youths: Mayfield Heading $300,000 Project,” Evening Star, 3 Aug 1967, A1.

97

government to the Nation’s Capital, they would face many obstacles. While they expected to struggle against outside opposition, it was the challenges that came from within the organization as well as stubborn economic realities that proved the most difficult to overcome.

98

Chapter 3: The Rise and Fall of Pride, 1969-1981

From its inception, the Pride method of community uplift through neighborhood clean-up efforts was suspect to many in the Black Power Movement.

Organizing a Rat Patrol army opened the founders up to ridicule from black leaders who considered the sanitation effort less than revolutionary, perhaps even accommodationist. Putting black boys to work picking up garbage played into the racist narrative that relegated black bodies to menial, dirty work. Washington activist

Julius Hobson once dismissed the effort as “training black boys to be poor.”226 During his interview for the Civil Rights Documentation Project in October 1967, Marion

Barry disregarded such criticism, saying that the plan for Pride was always more ambitious than trash collection. “We’re interested in upward mobility, that guys can move up in certain areas, you know. We knew that from the very beginning. So we just let those people talk until we got ready to move.”227 As Pride expanded from a temporary experiment in youth empowerment into a fully funded anti-poverty organization, Barry and the “brass” made the move to transform the program into a much larger network of training, education, and economic endeavors.228

“Business is essentially a social activity,” wrote business director John

Anderson in a memo to the executive directors of Pride entitled “Operating

Philosophy,” and it must be conducted within the economic, social, legal, and technological framework currently in existence. The Pride version of black capitalism

226 Quoted in Tony Lang, “A Pride of Razor-Clawed Lions Eyes Pride’s Leaders,” Washington Post, 11. 227 Marion Barry, Shannon interview, 55; William Raspberry, “Militants Scoff at Success,” Washington Post, 24 Sept 1967, B1. 228 Willard Clopton, Jr., “Pride, Inc. Looks to a New Landscape,” Washington Post, 9 Mar 1968, A11.

99

did not attempt to subvert the existing “monetary and capitalistic society” in which it operated, although Anderson noted that the community Pride served was “long on demand and short on supplies.” 229 The Pride leaders were genuinely committed to collective self-determination through the development of a skilled black workforce and successful Pride-owned businesses. Several department managers wrote their own “Personal Operating Philosophy” statements, affirming their desire to serve the workers and the community with their “allegiance, loyalty, dedication, and faith in

Youth Pride Inc., every dude and every Black Person.”230 Part of that philosophy included the understanding that personal ambitions should be subverted to the greater mission of serving the community, even discouraging trainees from stepping out beyond the Pride umbrella. As the organization grew and adapted to changing social and political conditions, the commitment to the uplift of the black community became intertwined with the perpetuation of the Pride network of businesses. What was good for Pride, and ultimately what was good for the leaders in power, became the priority over what would benefit the individual worker or the neighborhoods in which Pride operated.

Within Pride, the focus became creation of business enterprises into which trained and mentored dudes could transition. According to this new plan, the businesses would provide opportunities for the trainees to become successful within their communities and generate revenue so that Pride could become self-sustaining.

229 John Anderson, “Operating Philosophy,” Memorandum to Executive Directors, 19 June 1969, Box 5, Folder 6, “Memos-Business Analysis (J. Anderson) 1969,” Youth Pride, Inc., Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C. 230 Landen McCall, Community Services Officer, undated, Box 5, Folder 4, “Memos-Field Services (D. Russell), 1969,” Youth Pride, Inc., Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C. See also similar statements by Bernard Fowler, Community Services Officer; George A. Cottman, Administrator In-School F.T.D.; James Harvey, Administrator, Out-of-School Operations, Dept of Operations and Field Training; Dan Russell, Director of Field Training.

100

The development of Pride as an engine of black capitalism echoed the campaign rhetoric of the incoming Nixon administration; despite significant problems over the years with financial mismanagement, Pride continued to receive funding from the

Labor Department even as other Great Society programs were eliminated. Pride gained legitimacy as a fixture in Washington’s evolving political environment but was never able to achieve the goal of financial self-sufficiency. Barry’s focus shifted to his political career and he left the organization. After his departure, economic realities coupled with the criminal behavior of Pride professionals led to the program’s eventual collapse. The question of whether the economic model of black capitalism was viable as a mechanism towards a more equitable society remained unresolved.

The Pride Business Model

The Pride leadership, like many activists in Washington, saw within the devastation of the April 1968 riots the opportunity to reshape the economic and political landscape of the city. In a sense, it had provided the catalytic event that

Barry had attempted to create two years earlier with his Free DC campaign.231 Rather than advocating for immediate political change, however, Barry and the other Pride leaders were now promoting an economic restructuring of the ghetto which would usher in black ownership of businesses in black neighborhoods. Barry called for strict control of how the devastated districts would be rebuilt as well as substantial federal

231 Chris Myers Asch and George Derek Musgrove, Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 359-60.

101

investment in revitalizing the affected communities.232 At the same time, the

Republican candidate for President was describing a similar plan, promising “a piece of the action” for black entrepreneurs in poor neighborhoods, although Nixon’s proposal included small business loans, job training, and tax incentives but not the large-scale cash investment that Barry suggested. Success would come through support of free enterprise in the black community, Nixon declared, not through the creation of “dependency” that would come with direct financial aid.233 The policy experts in the incoming Nixon administration still accepted the hypothesis of black pathology of The Negro Family but believed it could be cured by, in the blunt assessment of one of Nixon’s staff members, “getting more Black people to behave like whites,” adopting the allegedly white middle-class values of thrift, education, and hard work.234 The Pride leaders, by contrast, asserted that their programs would be successful because they celebrated blackness without “self-hate” and understood the black community.235 Both were political calculations. Nixon was courting black votes while also avoiding talk of integration which could alienate conservative whites.236

Barry was interested in increasing black influence through the avenues available in the District: economic power and access to federal funding.

232 William Clopton Jr. and Carl W. Sims, “Washington Turns to Relief Effort,” Washington Post, 9 Apr 1968, A1; Bernadette Carey, “Barry Would Bar White Control of Businesses in Rebuilt Ghettos,” Washington Post, 16 Apr 1968, B3. 233 Richard Nixon, “Bridges to Human Dignity II: An Address by Richard M. Nixon,” quoted in Dean Kotlowski, “Black Power—Nixon Style: The Nixon Administration and Minority Business Enterprise,” Business History Review 72 (Autumn 1998), 415. 234 Sallyanne Payton, quoted in Kotlowski, 417. 235 Barry Kalb, “Marion Barry: An Individualist Leading Street Dudes,” Evening Star, 21 Jul 1969, A14; Youth Pride, Incorporated, Dig Your BLACK Self (Washington, D.C.: Youth Pride, Inc., 1969), Inner Cover, in Youth Pride, Inc. Papers (unprocessed), Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington D.C. Publication was not in one of the boxes when this researcher examined it but was in a separate unlabeled folder provided by MSRC staff. There were, however, four other editions of the publication found in Box 11, “Youth Pride, Inc. 1969” between Folders 3 and 4 at the time of my research. 236 Kozlowski, 411, 414.

102

Advocates for Black Power questioned how such change could possibly be achieved from within the system that caused the very disempowerment they sought to address. It was the willful neglect of the inner-city neighborhoods by the very officials praising Pride’s accomplishments that created the conditions that made the

Rat Patrol necessary. As Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture) and Charles V.

Hamilton noted in Black Power: The Politics of Liberation, the black community was acutely aware of the effects of the “white power structure” in their lives. A young person who joined a group like Pride “sees the streets in the ghetto lined with uncollected garbage, and he knows that the powers which could send trucks in to collect that garbage are white. When they don’t, he knows the reason: the low political esteem in which the black community is held.”237 Fear of urban unrest had made concern for the poor politically expedient; money and attention flowed into the neglected neighborhoods and to the Pride organizers. A sustained effort to root out economic stagnation, however, could not be dependent on such fickle political winds.

Although he expressed mistrust of “white institutions,” Barry became increasingly savvy at working with both white and black leaders across the ideological spectrum.

The Pride vision of economically-viable businesses run by drop-outs with criminal records may have been radical, but Barry was a pragmatist who was willing to work within existing power structures even as he criticized and challenged them.238

To Barry and the other directors of Pride, the priority for achieving Black

Power and economic equality was control. Black leadership and black ownership were crucial if there were to be any hope of overcoming the crushing effects of white

237 Kwame Ture and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (New York: Random House, 1967), 9. 238 Kalb, “Marion Barry.”

103

supremacy. It was a principle influenced by Barry’s early experience working with white SNCC activists in Mississippi and witnessing what he termed the “latent superiority that exists among white people.” He became frustrated that white civil rights workers “weren’t just patient enough to let local leadership develop.” This tendency of white people to discount or ignore black input led to rifts in the SNCC organization; it altered Barry’s perspective as well. “So what happened really, a lot of white people had alienated us,” he recalled, “certainly some of them alienated me…not from a blcak [sic] and white point of view but from an ideological point of view because I didn’t think they were in touch with what was going on…”239 Years later, as a director of Pride, he could concede that “there are whites who have the expertise and the experience that we need” to make Pride work but ultimately “blacks can understand blacks better than anybody else.” Maintaining black control— “that is, the right kind of black,” as Barry qualified—was a crucial component of Pride’s expanding operation. 240

The ultimate control of the War on Poverty programs remained to a certain extent in the hands of the government agencies funding the initiatives and, as Rhonda

Y. Williams points out in Concrete Demands: The Search for Black Power in the 20th

Century, “relying on federal funds to show the white power structure that black people could stand up on their own was complicated.” Black activists who relied on money from the government operated under the real threat that the funds would be withdrawn if their methods or message deviated from the acceptable political boundaries of the administration holding the purse strings. They also endured

239 Barry, Shannon interview, 30, 32. Typographical error in transcript. 240 Barry, quoted in Barry Kalb, “Marion Barry.”

104

criticism from other Black Power advocates that they were selling out their mission in pursuit of white money.241 Marion Barry, and later Mary Treadwell, became known for their lack of concern for either perspective. Evening Star reporter Barry Kalb characterized Barry as a leader infamous for “dwelling on money” which Kalb attributed to “his deep conviction that white America owes black America for the deprivations blacks have suffered.”242 Although some Black Power leaders like Floyd

McKissick were considered sell-outs for their embrace of the Nixon Administration’s program of black capitalism, the Pride leadership dismissed such criticisms as representing a double standard. White people and the corporations they led received financial assistance from the government without being labeled dependent on federal largesse. Black organizations were even more worthy of support considering the legacy of discriminatory practices that had hindered black advancement and self- sufficiency.243

During their ambitious demonstration on the National Mall in the spring of

1968, organizers of the Poor People’s Campaign from SCLC were also seeking federal funding to mitigate economic inequality. Protesters from around the country who lived in the plywood dwellings of Resurrection City along the Reflecting Pool headed out to lobby various federal agencies during the days of their encampment.

They demanded that the government take concrete action to address the problems of poverty throughout the country. Representatives of various interest groups argued that existing economic policy willingly distributed subsidies to the rich and powerful

241 Rhonda Y. Williams, Concrete Demands: The Search for Black Power in the 20th Century (New York: Routledge, 2015), 167-8. 242 Kalb, “Marion Barry.” 243 Williams, 167-8.

105

but balked at providing funds to those living in poverty for necessities like food, a system they equated to “political graft.”244 To combat such entrenched power structures, the Poor People’s Campaign called for coalition across racial lines. The fundamental purpose of bringing poor Americans from diverse backgrounds to live together in the Nation’s Capital was to unite “all of America’s poor: the Indians, the

Puerto Ricans, the Mexican-Americans, the poor whites, the poor blacks—each of whom had been taught that the others were enemies” so that they could recognize areas of shared interests.245 Once their eyes were opened to their common class struggle, they would be able to fight for solutions to poverty that also undid existing racial hierarchies.

Pride’s leadership did not share the beliefs or the transracial strategies of the

Poor People’s Campaign. Pride, Inc. was unapologetically designed to support the black community. “I think, philosophically, it’s almost impossible to talk about poor whites and Negroes working together,” Barry explained in 1967. “In a society everyone strives for certain level of attainment, material attainment: jobs, homes, social status, etc. Now a white person can come to Washington who’s poor, and he can move into that market and get a job. They cease to be poor anymore. They leave that hole. It’s like Negroes can’t escape out of that hole and no matter how high you get, how much money you make, you’ve still got that pressure to keep you in a certain place, whereas white people don’t have that problem.” If Pride was to successfully address the problems of black poverty, it had to remain black-focused. “I

244 Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, “Resurrection City: The Dream…The Accomplishments,” Ebony 23, no. 12 (Oct 1968), 66. 245 Jackson, 66; Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (Boston: Boston University Press, 1968), 174.

106

don’t think it’s possible to have a poor white and black movement of any substantial nature for any long period of time in America,” Barry continued. “I think racism is too deep.”246Although Pride, Inc. could not legally exclude enrollees in the program based on race, the public promotion of the Pride image tended to discourage non- black applicants. Administrators of other anti-poverty programs discovered that

“Spanish-speaking brothers,” for instance, were reluctant to apply for jobs or training at Pride because they believed they would not be welcomed.247

The struggle between the ideals of democratic participation and the practicality of running an effective organization was a long running issue in the black freedom movement. Barry recalled that the split between black and white SNCC workers in Mississippi in 1964 included disagreements about how much structure and lines of authority should be implemented. In Barry’s memory, white idealists pushed for less structure while black activists, who had suffered violence on the ground, tended to see the lack of discipline inherent in the idealism of their white colleagues as unworkable, even dangerous for the black community they were trying to serve.248

During the Poor People’s Campaign, SCLC leaders were frustrated that the press focused on logistical problems for which they had not adequately planned rather than on the messages that the demonstration was designed to convey. “The care of the mule train, the mire and the inherent confusion in a massive task of building a city of many ethnic groups were amplified or printed out of proportion by the news media,”

246 Barry, Shannon interview, 57. 247 Marshall Brown, Memo from Special Assistant to the Community Coordinator, to Marion Barry, untitled, 24 Mar 1971, in Box 2 “1968-71,” Folder 4, “Change, Inc.,” Youth Pride, Inc. papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C; “Pride, Inc.: D.C.’s Cool Answers to Hot Summers,” Ebony 23, Issue 2, (Dec 1967), 84. Mayfield is quoted as assuring a reporter that Pride could conceivable hire young men of other races but “I couldn’t ask him if he’s proud to be black.” 248 Barry, Shannon interview, 30-31.

107

complained Jesse Jackson. “Thus a nation largely misinformed were challenged to judge the personal behavior of poor people rather than the collective behavior of the

Congress.”249 If the organization was undisciplined, the public would focus on mistakes and the larger message of justice would be lost. The practical considerations of functioning within existing political and economic structures also put pressure on protest groups to conform. In Alabama, activists who were instrumental in the creation of the Lowndes County Freedom Party (LCFP) abandoned it and joined the

Democratic Party after several electoral losses, deciding that political success was more important than maintaining commitment to earlier principles of freedom and transparency.250

Among the Pride, Inc. leadership, the goal of moving beyond street clean-up into economically viable businesses was incorporated into the philosophy of empowering the hard-core unemployed. Pride Economic Enterprises, Inc. (sometimes abbreviated PEE or PEEI) began operations in March 1968 with the purchase of a small landscaping company.251 Using a combination of Small Business

Administration loans, private financing, federal funding, and donations, the for-profit arm of Pride expanded over the next several years to include varied and ambitious business ventures. Pride Landscaping and Gardening Co. trained and employed fifty dudes and secured several contracts including the landscaping of five Giant Food stores.252 A painting and maintenance division had less success developing clients; its fifteen employees worked primarily at Pride-owned properties. In September 1968,

249 Jackson, 68. 250 Jeffries, 218-220. 251 “Pride Looks for Economic Success,” 77. 252 Braestrup, “Piece of Action”; “Mayor Hails Project for Services by Pride,” Evening Star,20 Apr 1968, A10.

108

PEEI entered into an agreement with American Oil Company to purchase and operate a gas and service station located at 14th and Euclid Streets, NW, right in the heart of one of the riot-ravaged neighborhoods.253 Within two years, Pride had opened two more American Oil stations and three British Petroleum (BP) stations, one of which was located outside the city in the Maryland suburb of Seat Pleasant. One of the BP stations in the Southeast quadrant of the city was converted into a training facility when it was determined that it would not be profitable.254 Pride Economic Enterprises also purchased a warehouse at 1355 New York Avenue, NE in May 1969 and a 55- unit housing complex, the Buena Vista Apartments, in August 1970. Each was financed with some combination of commercial and private financing, although the

Pride leaders were sometimes evasive about the source of funds.255

The purpose of all these endeavors, Barry explained, was to provide career options for enrollees in the non-profit Youth Pride training program. He described the sanitation work of Pride as “a way-station” in which the “hard-core” dudes would have the opportunity to “learn good work habits… coming to work on time and above all, coming to work every day.” While picking up trash, cleaning streets, and killing rodents, the dudes would develop the skills needed to operate in the working world, understanding what behavior was acceptable and what was not. No fighting, stealing, or gambling was allowed while under the “Pride banner,” although there were no restrictions on behavior while off the clock. Once a man had demonstrated

253 Braestrup, “Piece of Action.” 254 Ivan Brandon, “Pride Becomes ‘The Man’ as Apartment Landlord,” Washington Post, 25 Aug 1970, C1. The addresses of the additional American Oil stations were 3728 Georgia Ave, NW and 1244 South Capitol Street. The BP stations were located at 4027 16th St, NW and 6900 F St Seat Pleasant. The training center was at 3710 Minnesota Ave, SE. 255 Barnes, “Pride Warehouse”; Brandon, “Pride Becomes ‘The Man.’”

109

responsibility and had acquired marketable skills, he would move into a position with

PEEI where he would continue to be mentored and trained.256

The Problems of Pride: Black Capitalism’s Flaws

The model of transitioning the young trainees through a government funded program and into skilled employment with a company that both benefited the community and made a profit may have matched the model for black capitalism that the incoming Nixon administration was touting, but there were some inherent problems with the concept. As Washington Post columnist William Raspberry pointed out in October 1968, depending on the poor black community for the workforce, the capital investment, and the customer base for these businesses was a laudable dream that was likely to fall short of its goal. Pride’s vision included “a large number of community-owned cooperatives, [meeting] community needs, hiring community residents, and returning profits to the community.” The neighborhoods that Pride planned to serve, however, were low-income and woefully short of the kind of capital necessary to provide adequate investment without government assistance.

There was another problem with the numbers, Raspberry noted. “Barry sees a system in which the lowliest grease monkey can work [his] way up to better and better jobs.

This is a beautiful concept, but it requires both an endless supply of grease monkeyes[sic] to feed in at the bottom and an ever-expanding chain of Pride businesses to place the thoroughly trained employees as they are pushed out at the top. Otherwise, there must certainly come a day when there is a good man at every

256 Braestrup, “Piece of the Action.”

110

position and no room for a grease monkey to move up.”257 The logistics of the Pride feeder system could only work if the Pride business empire kept expanding and the poor communities in which it operated somehow became much more prosperous than they had been historically.

Barry was clear that Pride’s mission did not include preparing most of the workers for employment outside the Pride umbrella and beyond the inner-city community. In this way, Pride rejected the individualism that was a component of the standard capitalist ideal. The purpose of Pride was not to fit the dudes into the existing economic structure. “We don’t just want a slice of the pie,” Barry explained.

“We want a whole new recipe.” Developing an initiative for the sole purpose of turning a profit ran the risk of exploiting the black community rather than supporting it. “If a man [from Pride] wants to go into business for himself, we won’t encourage it, we won’t help him,” Barry declared.258 The purpose of Pride training was to enrich the community (and the Pride businesses) rather than just the individual. Few Pride workers sought employment opportunities outside of the Pride network, however. The mission of Pride was to serve a constituency that was least likely to have other employment prospects. Not only did they face the obstacle of racial discrimination, many were functionally illiterate, reading on a fourth-grade level on average, and a larger percentage had criminal records. Even if they were able to find employment, there were no jobs available that offered Pride’s security. “On the outside, you’re the last hired, first fired, laid off after two, three, four months,” observed one of the Pride

257 William Raspberry, “Pride, Inc. Has a Dream,” Washington Post, 7 Oct 1968, C1. 258 Quoted in Kalb, “Marion Barry.”

111

workers. The only other viable prospects for many of the Pride dudes was the criminal activities of the streets, which came with their own risks and challenges.259

In addition to negotiating a possibly unworkable economic model, the program continued to face attack by critics who were convinced that Pride was nothing more than a criminal enterprise giving away taxpayer dollars to the city’s least deserving citizens. Rep. Joel Broyhill kept a file chronicling all the accusations of misconduct he received from the public, including, his office staff claimed, from former Chairman Rufus Mayfield. Sen. Robert Byrd was also vocal in his criticism of

Pride. Broyhill called for a Government Accounting Office audit of Pride’s financials in June 1968, an extensive process that took seven months.260 The GAO auditors found evidence of forgery and payroll padding in the early days of Pride as well as insufficiently rigorous accounting practices. The Department of Labor assured congressional oversight committees that the problems had been rectified and that there was no reason to revoke the most recent $3.7 million Pride contract, especially since the total amount of allegedly stolen payroll funds was only $900.261 As a result of the audit, a grand jury was convened in March 1969 to investigate the fraud allegations. In February 1970, the grand jury issued indictments against seventeen current and former Pride employees on various fraud charges totaling about

$10,000.262 One of those indicted was Chairman Winston Staton, although by the time the charges were filed, Barry reported that Pride no longer operated with a Board

259 Braestrup, “Piece of the Action.” 260 Lang, “A Pride of Razor-Clawed Lions.” 261 Elsie Carper, “Pride Padded Payroll, GAO Probers Charge,” Washington Post, 7 Sep 1968, A1. 262 “17 Workers Indicted: ‘We at Pride Will Not Be Demoralized,’” Washington Afro-American,14 Feb 1970, 1, in FBI WFO File 157-1580, Pride, Inc., 78-81.

112

of Directors and Staton was employed in another capacity.263 Staton pled guilty to forgery. Three other Pride workers eventually were convicted of charges or pled guilty, but the rest were either acquitted or had charges dropped.264 A second GAO audit, undertaken in 1970 after Rep. Broyhill charged that Pride had used federal funds to purchase the Buena Vista Apartment complex, found the accusation unsubstantiated. The August 1968 contract appropriated up to $1.1 million for

“investment in corporate enterprises to enable the Corporation [Pride] to employ permanently 275 disadvantaged persons” but there was no evidence that any of that money was used for the real estate transaction. The audit noted continued sloppy accounting practices two years after the first investigation. This time, the GAO found no criminal activity, but it did question $145,000 worth of expenditures and required

Pride to reimburse the Department of Labor.265

The investigations and the exposure of forgery could have resulted in the loss of public confidence in Pride. The negative publicity threatened both the federal funding on which the operation relied and the fledgling for-profit endeavors, potentially scaring away prospective customers. Rather than adopting an attitude of repentance, however, the Pride leaders defiantly struck back against their critics. The

263 “Pride Official Pleads Innocent to Charges,” Washington Post, 19 Feb 1970, E7. There is conflicting information present in the Pride FBI file about Winston Staton. The file contains the transcript of an article from the Washington Afro-American titled “Pride Looks for Economic Successes in Next Decade,” dated February 14, 1970 which includes the sentence, “The current chairman, Winston Staton, age 41, is one of the older dudes.” From page 76 of FBI WFO 157-1580. Another article from the Afro-American dated the same day, 2/14/1970, on page 81 refers to the indictment of Winston Staton and lists his age as 26. A photograph on page 88 in the Ebony article about Pride from December 1967 showing Winston Staton appears to be a man in his early twenties. The Post article and subsequent references to Staton’s conviction list his age as 26. 264 Peter Osnos, “Ex-Official of Pride, Inc., Guilty in Payroll Fix,” Washington Post, 27 May 1970, B2; Peter Osnos, “Pride Worker Acquitted in Forgery Case,” Washington Post, 13 May 1970, B1; Boldt, “Pride Enters Fifth Year.” 265 Comptroller General of the United States, U.S. General Accounting Office, letter to Representative Joel T. Broyhill, Washington, D.C., 28 Oct 1970.

113

thefts were not a sign that the Pride model had failed, they argued. In fact, the situation was indicative of the program’s success. “Criminals didn’t slip into Pride,” explained William Minor, a Pride staffer. “Working with the dudes was part of our original contract proposal. You dig? Some trouble was bound to happen.”266 The real problem, Pride argued, was the waste of taxpayer money on these frivolous investigations initiated because a few members of Congress were out to discredit a successful program for the black community. The relatively measly amount of money involved in any small-time criminal activity by the dudes was just the price of running a program for “the hustler, the drop-out and the ex-junkie.” They printed cartoons in the Pride newsletter depicting a pig with “Byrd” and “Broyhill” across its two back legs feeding at the trough of tax dollars labeled “Probe.”267 Pride hired

Moss Kendrix, famous as the creator of the first advertisements which were designed to engage African American consumers, to handle a public relations campaign which countered the suspicions of corruption and mismanagement. Kendrix also trained

Pride personnel to staff a Public Relations Department and introduced them to the black news media.268 The PR effort resulted in positive news coverage at both the local and national level.269 The strategy was effective at reframing the audits and indictments not as evidence of ethical lapses but as proof that the Pride method of self-help for the least likely to succeed was working. Pride continued to receive

266 Quoted in Lang, “A Pride of Razor-Clawed Lions.” 267 Youth Pride Incorporated, “Bring Who Together?” Harambee, vol. 2, (Feb 1969), 1, in FBI WFO File 157-1580, 93. 268 Marion Barry, Letter to Moss Kendrix, 25 Apr 1969, in Box 5, Folder 12, “Kendrix, Moss- Consultant,” Youth Pride, Inc., Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C.; “Moss H. Kendrix, A Retrospective,” The Museum of Public Relations, http://prvisionaries.com/kendrix/life.html. 269 Pride, Incorporated, Pride, Inc. “Doin’ It! “pamphlet, (February 1969), in FBI WFO File 157-1580, 109.

114

substantial federal funding even as more conservative and less expensive programs like the OIC were refused additional funds to expand.270

The challenges of running the ever-expanding network of Pride businesses and services, while not necessarily insurmountable, did take their toll. Pride reported that the suspicion surrounding the audit caused the landscaping business to lose

$35,000 in potential contracts. Another business venture called ARTCO, which was set up to market and sell commemorative plaques honoring Martin Luther King, failed. A candy factory planned for the New York Avenue warehouse Pride acquired in 1969 never materialized after the equipment they planned to purchase was deemed non-compliant with District of Columbia standards; a consultant hired to broker the purchase cheated Pride out of $5,000 in the transaction. The property eventually went to foreclosure in 1972 when Pride was unable to find any commercial tenants for the building.271 Managing the Buena Vista apartment complex proved much more challenging than originally anticipated as the Pride dudes and brass became responsible for collecting rent and maintaining the amenities for low-income tenants.

“When you own something you become the man and you know how black folks feel about the man,” Pride planner John Anderson explained. “We fixed the roof and the plumbing and set up a playground but we had to raise the rent to do it. Man, you should have heard some of the names they called us.” Even with millions of dollars coming in from government grants as well as revenues from the for-profit business ventures, Pride regularly had to scramble to make payroll every month. As a result,

Pride had trouble keeping its income streams separate and ended up mingling funds.

270 Carol Honsa, “OIC Is Refused Extra Funds,” Washington Post, 7 Jun 1968, B5. 271 Barnes, “Pride Warehouse is Sold;” Braestrup, “Piece of the Action;” Lang, “Pride of Razor- Clawed Lions.”

115

“We’re constantly robbing Peter (Pride itself) to pay Paul,” Barry admitted.272 By the end of 1970, Pride was holding large fundraisers to avoid bankruptcy.273

The financial struggles and accounting mishaps were compounded by another fundamental hurdle in the work to establish black capitalism: lack of expertise. “None of us grew up on briefcases and we can’t get competent, dedicated blacks to come here without getting fabulous salaries,” Barry complained.274 His condemnation of the black educated class for their unwillingness to help the dudes could be harsh. In a speech at Howard University, he ridiculed the students in the audience as “shirt and tie niggers” and accused them of being ashamed of their blackness. They should spend time at Pride tutoring their poorer brothers, he chided.275 He was specific about what type of professional assistance Pride would accept. “If you work for IBM, help us set up data processing systems. If you’re a banker, help us on financing. We don’t need sociologists and housewives or volunteers who want to do something good” for the less fortunate.276 Barry was clear that while he welcomed legitimate professional assistance, the organization was not set up to be anyone’s feel-good charity project.277

Finding and maintaining competent leadership was an ongoing issue even among the “brass.” Despite his impressive education, Barry lacked the skills to be an effective administrator. As Carroll Harvey noted, “His areas of concentration are basically knowing the politics of the street, knowing the moods and demands of the people. He realizes he doesn’t have capabilities across the board. Marion is not

272 Brandon, “Pride Becomes ‘The Man.’” 273 Ivan C. Brandon, “Radiothon Raises $30,000 for Pride,” Washington Post, 7 Dec 1970, 25. 274 Quoted in Brandon, “Pride Becomes ‘The Man.’” 275 Kalb, “Marion Barry.” 276 Quoted in Braestrup, “Piece of Action.’” 277 Braestrup, “Piece of Action.”

116

attentive to details, so he needs a detail man around him.”278 Harvey had experience working in government administration, but in September 1969 he left Washington,

D.C. and Pride for an urban planning position in Indiana, leaving Mary Treadwell and other professionals in the office to oversee the details of Pride’s complex operations.279 Treadwell was considered experienced in business operations because she had once worked as a buyer for a department store.280 Developments over the next decade would call Treadwell’s administrative skills and ethics into question, but she was relentless in her demands for professionalism from her department supervisors. “I fail to see how you could label your board meeting ‘productive and beneficial,’” she wrote in a memo to the Health Coordinator about his work trying to develop a drug treatment program. “May I take this opportunity to strongly advise that you become intelligently oriented to those duties which you are held responsible to execute.”281 In another, Treadwell castigated a supervisor for arranging a trip to

Baltimore for the dudes without following proper protocol. “Your action was a flagrant violation of procedure and showed an intolerable disrespect for authority.

Unfortunately, this incident was not an exception in the ever occurring example[sic] of how your Department, under your leadership, fails to properly serve Pride’s constituents.” She placed the offender on probation.282 Barry was known for his laid- back style and indulgence of the dudes; Treadwell by contrast was the harsh

278 Quoted in Kalb, “Marion Barry.” 279 Richard E. Prince, “D.C. Planner to Direct Gary Urban Unit,” Washington Post, 22 Aug 1969, C2. 280 Boldt, “Pride Enters Fifth Year.” 281 Mary Treadwell, “Board Meeting,” Memorandum to Thomas Oliphant, 2 Aug 1968, in Folder 14, Untitled, Box 11, “Youth Pride, Inc. 1968,” Youth Pride, Inc., Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C. 282 Mary Treadwell, “Violation of Procedure,” Memorandum to Dan Russel, 26 Feb 1970, in Folder 17, “Current Projects,” Box 11, “Youth Pride, Inc., 1968,) Youth Pride, Inc., Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C.

117

taskmaster.283 As Barry became increasingly involved in community projects away from Pride, Treadwell’s management style and demeanor dominated the Pride office.

The office management staff took special pride in their willingness to commit their time and talent in innovative ways to serve the dudes. “Nobody’s here just to get a salary,” explained one staff member, emphasizing that any professional that was unable to “relate to the dudes” would not last long at Pride.284 When it was determined that the standard method of cataloging and organizing books was a hindrance to struggling readers trying to access available material, Judy Howell, the

Orientation Coordinator, and her library assistant spent months designing a Pride

Library System which used categories that were more relevant to the workers’ life experiences and did away with extensive numbering and decimal places “which act as barriers to library use for our dudes, who are extremely uncomfortable with figures.”285 The education staff devised innovative tutoring methods to treat those who struggled with reading respectfully and to avoid “remind[ing] those who are already frustrated with school and education of those 'past failures.'" Instructors were advised to allow the learners to tell stories in their own words and to use their narratives as the basis for lessons. The idea was to engage them in the idea of reading and its usefulness. The dudes would recognize that “[w]hat I experience, I can talk

283 Kalb, “Marion Barry;” Lang, “A Pride of Razor-Clawed Lions;” Braestrup, “Piece of Action.” 284 Raymond Evans, quoted in Lang, “A Pride of Razor-Clawed Lions.” 285 Judy Howell, “The Pride Library System,” Memorandum to Mary Treadwell, Executive Director of Programs, through Dave Newton, Group Development Administrator, 15 Jan 1971, in Box 11, Folder 2, “Training Education Memos 1970-1971,” Youth Pride, Inc., Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C.; “Pride Library System,” undated, Box 11, Folder 39, “Pride Library System,” Youth Pride, Inc., Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C.

118

about-what I talk about can be written - what can be written can be read."286 The

Coordinator of the Continuing Education Learning Laboratory (CELL) developed a curriculum to teach reading, math, science and social studies to trainees within the context of automotive management training.287 To reach the goal of developing businesses and workers that operated within the existing political and economic system, Pride professionals were willing to try pioneering methods to meet the dudes where they were and build upon experiences and skills that were relevant to them.

For the most part, Pride management tried to offer most services in-house to avoid relegating any control to outside entities. Although small-scale partnerships with other anti-poverty organizations continued, Pride management was intent on maintaining control of the projects. They ran a credit union, operated a health clinic, provided recreational activities, and even attempted to create a drug treatment program called Project Reach without professional consultation.288 One of the most ambitious projects, however, involved a partnership with American University.

Through specially designed curricula, the plan offered participants the opportunity to earn a certificate through a two-year work-study program that would not only enrich the students personally but would also empower graduates to further the Pride mission. The purpose of the collaboration with the predominantly-white university was to foster what the planners called “the black-white community” on their own terms. Sending Pride students into a white-majority institution “at once informs aware

286“Guideline for Instructors in the Summer RELL (Reinforced Education Learning Lab) Program,” undated, Box 14, Folder 1, “July 1-11 Chronological File 1969,” Youth Pride, Inc., Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C. 287 William Brockenberry, “Course Outline, CELL,” 25 Apr 1969, Memorandum from Assistant Business Operations Officer, To David Newton, Education Coordinator, Box 11, Folder 8, “Cell,” Youth Pride, Inc., Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C. 288 Lang, “A Pride of Razor-Clawed Lions;” Pride, Inc., “Doin’ It,” 3.

119

and motivated blacks through direct inter-action procedures with the white middle- class culture without deeply risking their co-option. At the same time their presence and their experience can help educate white students to the needs, talents, and insights of conscious and dedicated blacks.”289 Even though the organization tended to be insular, the leadership recognized that Pride workers would have to negotiate the white world to become successful black capitalists.

It was an important part of the students’ experience to interact with affluent white students, but Pride leadership did not want the students to become too comfortable in their world. The proposal noted that a black student who spent too much time immersed in white middle-class settings might “become acculturated to a social climate which alienates him from his roots, so much that he is reluctant to return and serve his own people in the Inner City.” The experience of “direct daily contact with whites” in school might “lessen the sharper polarization of races” and would also help the students “[t]o understand and know whites on an equal basis” which would “enable the ‘dudes’ to learn how to work more freely in community business terms as the Pride economic projects develop.” The more comfortable the students were in a white environment; the more business opportunities would be available to them. For this reason, the required classes included not only Business and

Economics but also Culture classes that explored “the sociology of the black-white community with specific references to social movements, social problems, social institutions, police and law enforcement, and community development.” The

289 ABSTRACT. Project Title: Project PRIDE/American University. A Project to Prepare Members of Pride, Inc. So That They Can Aid in the Support of Present and Future Programs of Pride, Inc., 12 Apr 1969. Box 11, Untitled Folder 14, Untitled, Youth Pride, Inc., Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C., 2.

120

integrated classes studied “the development of principles of psychology, racism, and black-white communication problems” to learn how to relate to one another. The phrase “black-white community” is also used in the description of a class called

“Black Awareness,” which included analysis of music, art, and literature. Although black art was the focus, it would be presented within the context of the interaction between the races.290 Many of the Pride students earned glowing praise from the AU instructors for their leadership abilities. English professor Will Inman even noted that

James Sanders, supervisor of the alley-cleaning operation, was “more sold on the economic system in the United States” than Inman, but with a “genial nature [that] disarms those who might not like his frank talk, and this is good for helping people to look at the other side.”291

The economic system in which Sanders and others at Pride had such confidence was historically very tough on small businesses, particularly the kind of service industry endeavors that tended to be minority-owned. As Dean Kotlowski notes in “Black Power—Nixon Style: The Nixon Administration and Minority

Business Enterprise,” the Nixon administration had trouble putting its rhetoric about supporting black-owned businesses into practice. The Office of Minority Business

Enterprise (OMBE), created through Executive Order early in Nixon’s first term under the Commerce Department, had as its mission the support of minority entrepreneurship through public-private partnerships and specially-designed Small

Business Administration loans. In line with the administration’s commitment to free

290 Project Pride/American University, 3-5. 291 Will Inman, “Report by Will Inman, Instructor, English 23.100 MA, Composition and Reading I, Mr. James Earl Sanders,” 27 Jun 1969, Box 11, Folder 12, "Teacher Eval. of Pride/AU Students,” Youth Pride, Inc., Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C.

121

enterprise, Commerce Secretary Maurice Stans promoted the OMBE role as one of

“stimulation and coordination” within the public sector and existing government programs like SBA, rather than providing new funding or on-the-ground assistance to fledgling businesses. The program had few successes in the first year. Administration officials were able to show some progress once the administration began encouraging agencies to pro-actively seek procurement from minority-owned firms. Government contracting has consistently been an important industry in the Nation’s Capital, although not one that Pride pursued. Resistance among some procurement officials, particularly at the Defense Department, to participate in anything that could be construed as a quota system or as affirmative action hampered the expansion of this phase of the initiative. Increasing educational opportunities in the 1970s (and,

Kotlowski suggests, representation of black entrepreneurship in popular culture such as The Jeffersons television show) helped as well. The chronic issues of lack of capital, expertise, and experience in minority communities that plagued the Pride endeavors continued to limit the administration’s ability to move the concept of black capitalism beyond a mere talking-point.292 The existence of a program in Washington that appeared to be “doin’ it,” in Pride parlance, kept Labor Department grants coming even in the changing political environment.

Pride and Legitimacy

Pride celebrated its five-year anniversary in September 1972 with an open house at the freshly painted and decorated headquarters at 16th and U Street. Even with all the controversies and struggles the group had faced over the years, Pride was

292 Kotlowski, 415-445.

122

still the place where public figures wanted to be seen. Mayor Washington attended, declaring September 10 Youth Pride Day to correspond with his own anniversary of taking office. Washington’s non-voting delegate to the U.S House of Representatives,

Walter Fauntroy, remembered Pride’s beginning after the death of Clarence Brooker, declaring, “Where he fell, black pride rose.” Sargent Shriver, Democratic nominee for

Vice President in that year’s upcoming election and head of the Office of Economic

Opportunity when Pride received its first grant, praised Pride’s accomplishments at turning the vision of “radicals” into a reality. Barry discouraged the Democrat from using the event as a campaign rally, noting that President Nixon and Vice President

Agnew had also been invited. Pride had continued to receive federal funding from the

Department of Labor under the Republican administration; the contract that ran until

December 1972 was for $1.9 million, a reduction in funds that suggested waning support from the Nixon administration. Barry claimed Pride had requested the smaller amount as a step towards financial independence. As the Pride “In-School Band” entertained the crowds gathered in the street outside for the celebration, the head of the District’s Committee on Youth Opportunity declared the experiment of Pride a success, stating that “Pride is no longer a project, but an institution in this community.”293

What the invited guests touted as a pillar of the Washington community was a leaner and less innovative organization than it had been in the early days. The non- profit institution, Youth Pride, Inc., was still the largest component of the Pride entities. The training program which once employed about nine hundred young men

293Alice Bonner, “Political Figures Help Pride Celebrate Fifth Anniversary,” Washington Post,11 Sept 1972, C1; Joseph D. Whitaker, “U.S. Grants Pride $1.9 Million for ’71,” Washington Post,15 Jan 1971, C3.

123

and had moved several thousand through its program now had 350 enrollees. The

American University partnership continued successfully, enrolling thirty students in its fourth year of classes. Another thirty had recently completed Pride’s automobile mechanic course. Pride Economic Enterprises had transferred two gas stations to the non-profit arm and closed all but one of the other stations, located at the corner of

Georgia and New Hampshire Avenues. The paid staff of PEE had shrunk from a high of eighty positions to only thirty on the payroll staffing the gas station, working in landscaping and painting, and managing the Buena Vista apartment complex.

Although the for-profit businesses had avoided bankruptcy and were turning a modest profit, they were still about $80,000 in debt. A new business venture called Pride

Environmental Services, Inc. had secured a contract to provide trash cans around the city and sell advertising space on the receptacles, an undertaking that had the potential to generate revenue but was unlikely to provide many more positions for

Pride’s trainees.294

Five years in, the atmosphere in the office had evolved as well. Marion Barry was elected to the school board (the first representative body in the city in nearly a century) in November 1971 and was chosen to serve as its president in January 1972.

He and Mary Treadwell married in May of that year.295 In his 2014 memoir, Barry explained his move into political office as the natural evolution of the desire to effect change, despite his earlier dismissal of accepting positions of limited power. “Some

294 David R. Boldt, “Pride Enters Fifth Year: Self-Help Group Still Wrestles Problems,” Washington Post, 10 Sep 1972, D1; Bart Barnes, “Pride Warehouse is Sold at Auction After Default,” Washington Post, 17 Feb 1972, D2. 295 Irna Moore, “School Board Elects Barry as President,” Washington Post, 25 Jan 1972, C5; Asch and Musgrove, 377-378; Jaffe and Sherwood, 98-99; Sally Quinn, “Marion Barry Marries,” Washington Post, 27 May 1972, B3.

124

people felt I shouldn’t run for public office at all,” he recalled. “But it didn’t make any sense for me to keep organizing on the outside if I saw a way to get in and lead the people from the inside. That’s just another part of responding and stepping up in the times.”296 With Barry’s increasing political responsibilities, Treadwell became the executive director, although she technically shared the title with her husband. Under

Treadwell’s exacting management style, expectations of employees became tougher.

Enrollees in the job training program were suspended if they had poor attendance records and were dropped if they did not shape up. Employees of Pride Economic

Enterprises were fired for poor performance, action rarely taken in earlier years. Drug use was no longer tolerated; the drug treatment program was discontinued. John

Anderson, a former Army captain, took over as head of the job training program and tightened up management practices. A former juvenile court case worker, Paul

Roberson, became the new supervisor of the enrollees who still attended high school.

In perhaps the most significant indicator that times had changed at Pride, the affectionate term “dude” was dropped from the Pride lexicon. “I don’t call them dudes,” Roberson declared. “I call them men.”297 The days of indulgence and understanding had passed; as one supervisor wrote to his staff, this was “a new ballgame” at Pride, and the brass were no longer willing to accept excuses.298

In perhaps the most telling indicator of Pride’s legitimacy in the public square, even the Federal Bureau of Investigation gave the organization its stamp of approval.

296 Marion Barry, Jr. and Omar Tyree, Mayor For Life: The Incredible Story of Marion Barry, Jr. (New York: Strebor Books, 2014), 85. 297Boldt, “Pride Enters Fifth Year.” In news reports, Mary Treadwell is sometimes referred to by her married last name, or as Mary Treadwell Barry. However, she is most often known as Mary Treadwell, which is how she is identified throughout this paper. 298 Carl Logan, “Meeting,” Memorandum to ALL STAFF, Education, 8 Mar 1971, Box 11, Folder 2, “Weights & Measures Reference Tables,” (contents do not match label), Youth Pride, Inc., MRSC.

125

The Bureau had kept an eye on the developments at Pride, particularly concerned that the gas stations provided the young men and their cohorts with access to fuel that could be used to start fires. They noted that during several days of unrest in

September 1970, a number of unidentified “Negro males” were observed buying gasoline from the station and 14th and Euclid which a source suggested was used for

“Molotov cocktails” during the incident, even though no fires were actually set.299

The FBI began an investigation in 1971 into reports it received from several sources including the Columbia, South Carolina field office, as well as an employee in the office of Barry’s opponent in the school board race, that Pride was affiliated with black separatist groups and was “working to destroy the power structure and the system.” Specifically, it was alleged that “the overall purpose of Pride was to get the black people interested in political education and to become involved in politics so they can tear down and destroy the government from within.” The community uplift propaganda of Pride’s public outreach was just a ruse, these sources charged, so that

“the government would be led to believe they were a legitimate organization and would not have to worry about them.”300 The Washington Field Office of the FBI determined in early 1972 that there was no evidence “that Pride has any intentions as to try and tear the government down from within” or that they were inciting other groups to do so. “There is nothing whatsoever to indicate that Pride has either the potential or aspirations of destroying the government,” the FBI concluded. Pride was

299 Federal Bureau of Investigation, untitled document, 25 September 1970, in FBI WFO File 157- 1580, 151-152. 300 SA Paul E. Morrison, “Pride, Inc. aka, Youth Pride, Inc.,” Memorandum, 24 Feb 1972, in FBI WFO File 157-1580, 51; SA Paul E. Morrison, “Pride, Inc.,” Memorandum, 29 Nov 1971, FBI WFO File 157-1580, 68; SA Paul E Morrison, “Marion Barry,” 1 Nov 1971, FBI WFO 157-1580, 71; Supv. Gerald T. Grimaldi, “Marion S. Barry,” 21 Oct 1971, FBI WFO 157-1580, 72-73.

126

“a legitimate organization trying to help the hard-core unemployed and underprivileged.” With that, it closed the investigation into Pride as a subversive organization.301

With its acceptance by politicians and law enforcement as a non-threatening fixture in the Washington community, and the de-radicalization of the management’s outlook about what was possible in the struggle against urban poverty, Pride had left behind a key component of the program’s original identity. The Pride workers even seemed to have lost compassion for the black community they served. During a painting and clean-up project a few blocks from Pride headquarters undertaken as part of the five-year anniversary celebration, the young men expressed disgust that the neighbors stood idly by rather than taking up a paint brush to help. “They’re lazy,” declared one worker.302 The Pride men now labeled older members of the community with the same epithet that had been attached to inner city youth by opponents of the anti-poverty programs. Even the elevation of Mary Treadwell to a position of nearly exclusive control of the organization was a betrayal of one of the Pride values, albeit a chauvinistic one. Barry had declared in his Howard University speech that he was only interested in assistance from male student volunteers, since “we’re pushing for black male supremacy.”303 Like the authors of The Negro Family, the Pride founders subscribed to the theory of the black matriarchy’s damage to the African American

301 Federal Bureau of Investigation, untitled document in WFO File 157-1580, page 47; Paul Morrison, “Pride, Inc. aka Youth Pride, Inc.,” FBI WFO 157-1580, 51, 53. 302 Lynn Dunson, “Youth Pride Project: They Toil as Neighbors Watch,” Evening Star, 10 Sept 1972, D5. 303 Kalb, “Marion Barry.”

127

male. Other than in the secretarial pool and a few office staff, the Pride workers were all male.304

Suspicion had swirled around Treadwell’s leadership for years, and not only because of her harsh management style. There were misgivings about her apparent lavish lifestyle, with autos and homes that seemed to be too expensive for her to afford on her Pride salary. Treadwell claimed that she had “a second income,” although she did not reveal its source. She justified her expensive tastes as a reward for the difficult and dangerous work she did at Pride, referencing an incident when a disgruntled worker pulled a gun on his supervisor. She claimed that any criticism of her spending was part of an ongoing campaign of harassment and intimidation by the enemies of Pride.305 Pride continued to receive federal funds and operate its training programs as well as the many offshoot businesses, and the rumblings about

Treadwell’s expenditures did not derail the Pride organization or her husband’s growing political career.

In Pride’s seventh year of operation, the political landscape of Washington,

D.C. underwent a major transformation. The U.S. Congress finally passed limited home rule legislation for the capital city. After a century without representative government, residents of the District of Columbia went to the polls in 1974 to elect a mayor and city council. Mayor Walter Washington was elected to the office which he had held since 1967 as a presidential appointee. Even though the power of the new

District government would be limited, since Congress retained the ability to reject any legislation it passed, Marion Barry ran for and won an at-large seat on the city

304 Williams, 166. 305 Lang, “A Pride of Razor-Clawed Lions.”

128

council.306 Among the factors that contributed to his political success was the reputation Barry had developed as a founder and director of Pride. The experiment born in the tense summer of 1967 to find work for the young men who were the most difficult to employ had weathered criticism, scandal, and near bankruptcy to become a fixture in the city’s political and social structure.

The Fall of Pride

As elected representation was at last returning to Washington, Mary

Treadwell made the fateful decision that would lead to Pride’s downfall. In 1974,

Treadwell opened another subsidiary business, P. I. Properties, Inc. Unlike Youth

Pride’s other spin-offs, this company would be a non-profit enterprise. The new venture was formed for the sole purpose of purchasing a 285-unit apartment complex located in the Columbia Heights neighborhood, a half-mile away from the Youth

Pride headquarters and one block from one of the Pride gas stations. Clifton Terrace had been a prestigious address in the early twentieth century, but by the time the 1968 riots devastated the area, the former luxury project had become, like the neighborhood around it, dilapidated and dangerous.307 The complex had already undergone one major rehabilitation effort, including small contracts with Pride businesses for clean-up and landscaping. After four years of delays and setbacks, the

$2.25 million renovation was completed by the antipoverty non-profit Housing

306 Asch and Musgrove, 379-380; Jaffe and Sherwood, 103-106. 307Burt Barnes, “Success Crowns Long Struggle to Rehabilitate Clifton Terrace,” Washington Post, 15 May 1972, A1; Lewis M. Simons and Ron Shaffer, “How HUD Gave Project to Pride,” Washington Post, 23 Oct 1979, A1; Asch and Musgrove, 391.

129

Development Corp. in May 1972.308 Two years later, the project went bankrupt and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) foreclosed on the property, which was again falling into disrepair. After negotiating a trial management contract under a questionable non-competitive arrangement with HUD assistant secretary H. R. Crawford, Treadwell attempted to purchase Clifton Terrace under a for-profit Pride real estate venture called Pride International. HUD’s general counsel determined that the agreement was improper since the contract must go to a non- profit entity; Treadwell immediately formed P. I. Properties to execute the management contract with the intent to purchase.309 The decision was an odd one, given the stated Pride mission of self-empowerment. As a non-profit enterprise, P. I.

Properties did not fit the Pride model of black capitalism since it could not generate any revenue for the Pride endeavors. It also did not offer many skilled positions into which trained Youth Pride workers could advance. The HUD legal department declared that a non-profit organization with no track record was not eligible for such a contract. Nevertheless, HUD and P. I. Properties signed the contract to proceed.310

Despite its dubious legality, the agreement was viewed positively throughout the city. Donald Humphrey, the president of the Housing Development Corp., praised the move. “The poor have reaped the benefits” of the work his organization began,

Humphrey proclaimed in a letter to the editor of the Post, “and are now living in fully modernized units. With the transfer to Pride, the responsibility for success…lie[s] in

308 Matthew Lewis, “Clifton Terrace Cleanup Begins,” Washington Post, 9 Jan 1968, B2; Barnes, “Success Crowns Long Struggle.” 309 Simons and Shafer, “How HUD Gave Project to Pride;” Thomas W. Lippman, “Pride, Inc., to Manage Clifton Terrace Project,” Washington Post, 1 Apr 1974, A1; Megan Rosenfeld, “Pride Unit to Buy Clifton Terrace,” Washington Post, 17 May 1974, B8. 310 Simon and Shaffer, “How HUD Gave Project to Pride.”

130

the hands of a corporation born of the poor, which closes the circle.”311 Indeed, it was because of Pride’s reputation as an enterprise run by and for those living in the community that Crawford had bent the rules. He hoped that Clifton Terrace would serve as a model for other low-income projects and intended “to work with minority groups to see if they help us to stabilize some of these communities.”312 Mayor

Walter Washington along with other notable District politicians, including Marion

Barry, attended a ceremony marking the transfer of Clifton Terrace to P. I. Properties.

Washington commended the complex as a model of black “entrepreneurship” and example for the rest of the country of the restoration and proper management of low- income housing.313

The publicity glossed over signs of real trouble at Clifton Terrace that had been evident since HUD skirted proper protocols to secure the contract with

Treadwell. In the first full month of management, P. I. Properties had over $13,000 worth of expenses that were not properly documented. Each month thereafter, there were questionable expenditures. HUD also flagged the practice of contracting with

Pride companies, controlled by Treadwell, for landscaping, maintenance, and security. Bills were in arrears, escrow accounts were short of required reserves, and the veracity of the accounting was in question. “Project disbursements almost always equal or exceed project collections,” noted the auditors, which meant that there was no money left to pay HUD what it was owed. Because P. I. Properties consistently failed to meet the terms of its trial management period, final transfer and sale of the property was repeatedly postponed. When the Mayor lauded Clifton Terrace as a

311 Donald F. Humphrey, “Pride and Housing,” Letter to the Editor, Washington Post, 6 Jun 1974, A23. 312 Lippman, “Pride, Inc. to Manage Clifton Terrace.” 313 J. Y. Smith, “Clifton Terrace Hailed As a Model,” Washington Post, 13 Nov 1975, A21.

131

model of renewal, he did not note that the complex had been sold to Treadwell’s company for only $800,000, even though the original negotiated contract was $1.2 million. The sale required no cash downpayment and was financed fully through a

HUD-insured mortgage. The November 1975 press event celebrated the first mortgage payment to HUD, four months after the sale was closed. It would be one of only four payments that P. I. Properties ever remitted.314

If the sale appeared bad for the taxpayers, it turned out to be even worse for the Clifton Terrace tenants. When P. I. Properties first took over management of the project in April 1974, Treadwell sent a letter to the residents assuring them that the company would make the interests of the community a priority. “We have long used the word ‘Harambee,’” at Pride, she explained, “which means people working together for the common good, as our mandate.”315 Within a few months, however, a group of residents had organized in opposition to the sale of the complex to P.I.

Properties, charging that the buildings were dirty and unsafe.316 Public opinion remained with the management, however. Reporters covering the rift accepted

Treadwell’s explanation that the tenants were really upset that P. I. had been tough about collecting rent that was in arrears to pay for needed repairs. As columnist

William Raspberry noted, running low-income housing was a daunting financial undertaking, since the costs could be the same or greater than higher-end properties, but the rental income was substantially less. Treadwell used the same hard-nosed

314 Smith, “Clifton Terrace Hailed as a Model;” Simons and Shaffer, “How HUD Gave Project to Pride;” 315 Quoted in Lippman, “Pride, Inc. to Manage Clifton Terrace.” 316 Jane Rippeteau, “Pride-Tenant Rift Clouds Future of Clifton Terrace,” Washington Post, 30 Oct 1974, B2; Laura A. Kiernan, “Clifton Terrace Control Given to HUD by Court,” Washington Post, 22 Aug 1978, C1.

132

approach with the tenants as she had with the Pride workers because it was necessary,

Raspberry noted. He pointed out the harsh economic realities, just as he had with the

Pride model years before. “You can’t solve everybody’s problem,” he declared. “You can provide decent housing and a reasonable level of services (with government subsidies) at a reasonable cost.”317 Unaware of the financial mismanagement that

HUD noted from the beginning, the public assumed that P. I. Properties was doing the best it could under difficult circumstances.

By 1977, the Pride subsidiary was failing to meet even those minimum standards of service. Clifton Terrace made headlines as tenants faced one of the coldest Washington winters on record without heat or hot water. Treadwell, her sister

Joan Booth, who worked as the project manager, and general manager Robert Lee blamed their inability to pay utility bills on chronically delinquent rent payments. The difficult financial circumstances facing residents were exacerbated, the trio insinuated, by deficient moral character. Booth charged that those behind on rent payments weaseled out of consequences or eviction by being dishonest to authorities.

“They tell me they don’t have the money for rent,” she told a reporter, “so we go to court, and they drive away in a brand new car. The judges just let them go right on through.” In retaliation, Booth posted the names of all the delinquent tenants on her office window, blaming them for the lack of heat.318 Eighteen months later, the list of housing code violations had grown so egregious, the District criminally charged

Treadwell and P. I. Properties with three hundred counts of housing, zoning, fire, and

317 William Raspberry, “Lessons Learned From Clifton Terrace,” Washington Post, 26 Nov 1975, A11; Rosenfeld, “Pride Unit to Buy Clifton Terrace.” 318 Courtland Milloy, “Clifton Terrace Tenants Cold, Manager Blames Late Rents,” Washington Post, 24 Jan 1977, A1.

133

licensing offenses.319 Among the violations: Clifton Terrace was rat-infested and full of uncollected garbage.320 HUD swiftly moved to foreclose on the property and remove P. I. Properties from management.321

Soon after P.I. Properties lost the complex, another explanation of the fiasco came to light. After a year-long investigation that included extensive on-the-record interviews with a P.I. Properties’ bookkeeper, the Washington Post ran an exposé of an alleged criminal enterprise run by Treadwell, Booth, and Lee at Clifton Terrace. In four days of full-page articles, reporters Lewis Simons and Ron Shaffer listed a dizzying array of charges against the three managers. At every turn, the reporters detailed, the P. I. Properties staff siphoned money from the complex, stealing between

$600,000 and $1 million in total. The bookkeeper claimed that Treadwell justified her actions as taking what was owed to her, since she had been forced to operate as a non- profit to win the contract. “We felt that what was going on at Clifton Terrace was going on everywhere, that we were taking what we were entitled to,” the bookkeeper said. “Mary would say, ‘What’s the point of being in command if you can’t get something out of it? Whites do it all the time.”322 At Clifton Terrace, the needs of the community had not been the priority for Treadwell. She and her co-conspirators witnessed the suffering of the residents caused by their mismanagement and blamed the lack of moral character of the poor for the terrible conditions. Black Power and black capitalism had become the freedom to engage in corruption in the same way

319 Patricia Camp, “Clifton Terrace Accused by D.C. On 300 Counts,” Washington Post, 9 Aug 1978. 320 Lewis M. Simons and Ron Shaffer, “Pride Firm Tied to $600,000 Theft,” Washington Post, 21 Oct 1979, A1. 321 Laura A. Kiernan, “Clifton Terrace Control Given to HUD by Court.” 322 Zellene Laney, quoted in Simons and Shaffer, “Pride Firm Tied to $600,000 Theft.” See also, Ron Shaffer and Lewis M. Simons, “How Pride Firm Stole From Tenants, U.S.,” Washington Post, 22 Oct 1979, A1; Simons and Shaffer, “How HUD Gave Project to Pride;” Ron Shaffer and Lewis M. Simons, “How HUD Watched the Thefts at Clifton Terrace,” Washington Post, 24 Oct 1979, A1.

134

that they had observed the white power structure exploit the system. To have control was to take the opportunity to enrich yourself. After a grand jury investigation, Booth and Lee pled guilty to conspiracy to defraud HUD and to “misappropriate, misapply, divert, and steal monies and assets” from Clifton Terrace. Treadwell was convicted of twenty-one counts of conspiracy and fraud in July 1983 and sentenced to three years in jail.323

As a result of the Clifton Terrace scandal, the entire Pride enterprise fell apart.

Articles about P. I. Properties, Inc. repeatedly conflated it with Pride, Inc., tainting all the businesses with the bad publicity. In December 1979, the U.S. grand jury investigation expanded to include Youth Pride. The FBI issued subpoenas to the federal and city departments which had provided funding or other support; since

1975, the funding for Pride’s nonprofit training program had been managed through the D.C. Department of Manpower.324 The District government ordered an audit of

Pride’s financial records in 1980 and uncovered over 250 bank accounts through which funds moved for the different Pride entities, making it difficult to keep track of revenue and expenditures. In addition, the financial documents were so poorly managed that the auditors found it impossible to prepare a proper audit. More than a decade after the Department of Labor first required more stringent accounting practices for Pride, the D.C. auditors found “a seeming lack of familiarity with all necessary federal regulation” for maintaining adequate records. Looking back over

323 Laura A. Kiernan, “Treadwell, 4 Others Indicted: 30 Counts Allege Pride Spinoff Funds Were Used Illegally,” Washington Post, 23 Feb 1982, A1; Kenneth Bredemeier, “Treadwell Guilty of Conspiracy: Convicted in Plan To Defraud U.S. Of Housing Funds,” Washington Post, 30 Jul 1983, A1; Kenneth Bredemeier, “Ex-Pride Chief Gets 3 Years In Clifton Terrace Scandal,” Washington Post, 20 Jun 1984, A1. 324 Ron Shaffer and Lewis M. Simons, “U. S. Grand Jury Probe Extends to Youth Pride, Inc.,” Washington Post, 12 Dec 1979, A1; Joseph Novitski, “Open House, Celebration Mark Pride’s Birthday,” Washington Post, 25 Aug 1975, B1.

135

the organization’s papers, the auditors found that Youth Pride had been cited year after year for this failure, without any effect on continued government funding. The auditors’ report listed over $40,000 in questionable expenses. Treadwell declared the results “excellent” given that the funds in question represented only about three percent of Pride’s most recent contract.325 Her optimistic perspective notwithstanding, funding was cut off as of September 30, 1980. Using what remained of previous contracts, Pride operated in a limited capacity for another ten months. By August

1981, the headquarters at 16th and U Streets was empty, and the doors closed.326

The Clifton Terrace fiasco did not end up delegitimizing the Pride endeavor long-term or permanently tainting the reputation of its co-founder, Marion Barry.

Barry ended his involvement with Youth Pride in 1975; he and Treadwell divorced in

1977.327 Although the two were married during a portion of the time that Treadwell was accused of stealing money, each of the Post articles which exposed the fraud clarified that Barry was not implicated in the embezzlement in any way.328 Barry was elected Mayor of Washington, D.C. in 1978. This put him in the uncomfortable situation, once accusations of wrongdoing appeared, of heading the city government which was auditing the organization he helped found and which was run by his former wife. On the day in October 1979 that the first Post article appeared, the

Mayor ordered a city review of all existing Pride contracts to ensure they were in

325 Ron Shaffer and Lewis M Simons, “Audit Questions Youth Pride’s Expenditures,” Washington Post, 6 Jun 1980, C1. 326 Eugene Robinson and Laura A. Kiernan, “Youth Pride Shuts Down, Cites U.S. Funds Cutoff,” Washington Post, 12 Aug 1981, A1. 327 Shaffer and Simons, “U.S. Grand Jury Probe.” In some accounts, Barry says he left Pride in 1977 or 1978. See Kiernan, “Treadwell, 4 Others Indicted.” 328 Shaffer and Simons, “How Pride Firm Stole From Tenants, U.S.”

136

order.329 By then, the city was running its own youth employment program funded through the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA), the Carter

Administration’s employment program. Just as the grand jury probe was expanding to include Pride entities, Mayor Barry was facing Congressional scrutiny that the city- run summer jobs initiative had not met its ambitious goals to employ thirty thousand young people. In contrast, funding for Youth Pride’s four hundred positions in the last year of its operation was relatively insignificant.330

After Pride’s closure was announced, the Washington Post ran an editorial cautioning that the program’s ultimate failure should not be viewed as a referendum on the futility of its mission. It placed the blame squarely on the shoulders of the few bad actors who exploited Pride for their own personal enrichment, not on the ideals of the Great Society or on the belief that capitalism could work even for the most marginalized. “The downfall of Pride should not be generalized into anything more than a sad ending to an enterprise that was created to help unemployed young people learn skills and get work,” the paper cautioned. It was worthy effort that should not be discounted despite its ignoble end.331 Back in its 1969 profile, the Evening Star had caught Pride founder Marion Barry in a moment of doubt and reflection about the endeavor he so effectively promoted. “What Pride is doing is not a panacea,” Barry admitted. “I’m not so sure that what we’re doing in the final analysis—if the country

329 Milton Coleman and Timothy S. Robinson, “Barry Orders a Review of City’s Pride Contracts,” Washington Post, 23 Oct 1979, A1; Asch and Musgrove, 385-388. 330 Donald P Baker, “Barry: Youth Jobs Plan Fine: Senate Told Program Exceeded Goal,” Washington Post, 7 Dec 1979, B1; Robins and Kiernan, “Youth Pride Shuts Down;” Ray Marshall, “The Labor Department in the Carter Administration: A Summary Report—January 14, 1981,” U.S. Department of Labor, https://www.dol.gov/oasam/programs/history/carter-eta.htm. 331 “Pride’s Fall,” Washington Post, 14 Aug 1981, A28.

137

continues the way it’s going—is going to make that much difference.”332 The same could be said about many of the Great Society and Black Power initiatives which faded or collapsed under political, economic, and social pressure. The problems of poverty and racial discrimination which activists and policy officials alike tried to solve during the era of Pride’s experiment have proven intractable. “Nobody’s got a monopoly on the right approach,” Barry observed in 1970. The attempt to provide the forgotten young men of the inner-city with “a new value system—pride and blackness,” made a difference in the lives of many young Washingtonians even if it was ultimately unsuccessful in remaking the economic landscape of the city.333

332 Quoted in Kalb, “Marion Barry.” 333Quoted in Lang, “A Pride of Razor-Clawed Lions.”

138

Conclusion

The unprocessed collection of Youth Pride, Inc. papers at the Moorland-

Spingarn Research Center at Howard University includes a number of reports, articles, and other reference documents from outside sources, some stuck between folders in boxes or mixed in with other, unrelated papers. It is difficult to know who collected these resources and what purpose any one individual document served.334

Within Box 5 is a 1969 journal article from the Harvard Business Review titled

“Making Capitalism Work in the Ghettos” written by Louis L. Allen, President of

Chase Manhattan Capital Corporation. Allen argued that the term “black capitalism” was a misnomer. “Capitalism does not vary according to the color of its practitioners,” he wrote. While he conceded that supporting entrepreneurship in underserved communities required creative solutions, Allen believed that it was impossible to solve racial and economic problems of the inner-city with capitalist models. "Helping small businesses in these areas to get started and to prosper is no cure-all,” he predicted. “It will not directly improve health standards, schooling, or housing. What it can and will do, if practiced broadly, will be to provide a significant number of deserving and aspiring individuals with the opportunity to try their hands at the capitalist game." A few exceptional businessmen might make it out of the ghetto, Allen predicted, especially if they cultivated a customer base outside of their

334 See for example, Box 11, Folder 3, “Training Education,” contains only an undated typed page titled “Printing Costs” which lists expenses for Dig Your BLACK Self, a legal booklet, bumper stickers, calendars, and an American Oil ad. Between Folders 3 and 4 are SRA Tests and Management Tools booklets from 1970 and four copies of Dig Your BLACK Self. Folder 4, “Project Reach,” contains a United Planning Organization proposal for “The Manpower Addiction Rehabilitation Center (M.A.R.C. 1).”

139

community, but the problems of poverty could not be solved through economic ventures alone.335 Inherent in Allen’s argument is the belief that the structural dynamics of the ghetto were intractable. The black poor would always struggle and suffer; the best that could be accomplished would be to support a few promising young people and help them escape their community.

The Pride model was shaped by the intention to defy such a narrative. Rather than teaching the dudes to conform to the expectations of the white business world, the designers believed that capitalism could be modified to work within existing social structures of the inner-city, using street wisdom rather than traditional economic expertise. With federal funding as venture capital, Pride intended to build a network of businesses that would employ the “hard-core” who lacked prospects outside of their community and bring needed services and prosperity to the poverty- stricken neighborhoods. Initially, they hoped that the young men themselves could organize and lead the effort, with Rufus Mayfield as their role model. After a few months of operation, however, the Pride philosophy adapted to the difficulties of overcoming the deeply rooted effects that the environment of crime and poverty had on the young men. Over time, the Pride organization evolved and adopted a traditional structure of discipline and top-down decision-making, moving away from its earlier idealism. Despite many impressive accomplishments, Pride never made a substantial difference in the economic conditions of Washington, D.C. and was unable to sustain profitable businesses without financial support from the government.

335 Louis L. Allen, “Making Capitalism Work in the Ghettos,” Harvard Business Review 47, Issue 3 (May/June 1969), 83-92.

140

As Allen predicted, Pride was able to have an impact on the individual lives of some of its participants. Rufus Mayfield had an extensive career in public service and community activism, including many years working for the Washington, D.C.

Department of Human Services.336 The most consistently touted success story was that of Gerald Lee, who appeared regularly in newspaper articles about the Pride programs. Lee started working at Pride as a high school sophomore with failing grades and habit of petty theft. He rose through the Pride ranks, participated in the

Pride-American University certificate program, attended AU for his undergraduate degree, and went back for law school. He had a distinguished legal career, was involved in politics and social justice activism, and served two decades as a federal judge. One of his former law clerks, Justin Fairfax, was elected Lieutenant Governor of Virginia in 2017, only the second African American to hold statewide office in that state.337 Both Lee and Mayfield took to heart the Pride ideal of continued service to the community, although neither did so through entrepreneurship or the establishment of businesses. They both joined the existing systems of government and worked within them.

Many authors like Jonathan Agronsky and Fred Siegel, writing in the decade or two after Pride’s demise, insinuated that there was never any intention among the

336 “Rufus Mayfield,” Destiny-Pride, Inc., http://destiny-pride.org/boardteam/rufus-mayfield; ABC 7- WJLA, “Rufus Catfish Mayfield, Civil Rights Pioneer,” 18 Feb 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2VheWdSjYM. 337 David R. Boldt, “Pride Enters Fifth Year,” Washington Post, 10 Sep 1972, D1; Joseph Novitski, “Open House, Celebration Mark Pride’s Birthday,” Washington Post, 25 Aug 1975, B1; Rachel Weiner, “Federal Judge Who Worked to Increase Diversity in Legal Profession Set to Retire,” Washington Post, 4 May 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/federal-judge- who-worked-to-increase-diversity-in-legal-profession-set-to-retire/2017/05/03/6b2e3554-2538-11e7- a1b3-faff0034e2de_story.html?utm_term=.d455806be6af; Gregory S. Schneider, “Poised to Make History, Justin Fairfax Got a Powerful Reminder of His Own Heritage,” Washington Post, 27 Jan 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/poised-to-make-history-justin-fairfax- got-a-powerful-reminder-of-his-own-heritage/2018/01/27/825fe454-0217-11e8-8acf- ad2991367d9d_story.html?utm_term=.b8bd73c30d62.

141

Pride leadership to remake the economic conditions in Washington’s poor neighborhoods. In their narratives, Pride was always a criminal enterprise, with Barry and Treadwell using a combination of threats and false promises to keep federal dollars flowing and to illegally line their own pockets.338 The conspiracy to defraud the government at Clifton Terrace was certainly a betrayal of the Pride mission; in addition to stealing federal money, the P.I. Properties scam victimized the poor community that Pride was created to serve, and the perpetrators placed the blame for the deteriorating conditions at the complex not on their own greed but on the moral failings of the residents. It is an unfair leap, however, to discredit the entire Pride enterprise because of those crimes. Ten months after their exposé of financial improprieties at Clifton Terrace, Post reporters Lewis Simons and Ron Shaffer published another article detailing allegations by former Pride Security Chief Roscoe

Brockenberry that Treadwell regularly stole money from Youth Pride beginning in

1968. The amount of money in question—about $3,000 a month, or more than

$20,000 in twenty-first century dollars—was substantial, but Treadwell was never criminally charged with stealing from the original non-profit.339 The organization was subject to several investigations and audits throughout its tenure which never implicated Treadwell in any wrongdoing. Treadwell went to prison again in January

1998 for embezzling money from the Columbia Heights Advisory Neighborhood

Commission, so her first conviction clearly did not resolve her problems with money management. As her 2012 obituary pointed out, however, she also had a long history

338 Jonathan I. Z. Agronsky, Marion Barry: The Politics of Race (Latham, NY: British American Publishing, 1991), 137-148; Fred Siegel, The Future Once Happened Here: New York, D.C., L.A., and The Fate of America’s Big Cities (New York: The Free Press, 1997), 71-73. 339 Lewis M. Simons and Ron Shaffer, “Ex-Aide: Treadwell Bled Youth Pride: Systematic Thefts, Falsified Records Alleged,” Washington Post, 3 Aug 1980, A1.

142

of activism and community organization. She successfully helped design and manage the Pride organization, which was an influential social program in the Washington community for over a decade.340 The theft is a key component of the story of Pride, but it is not the whole story.

The problems of corruption and possible abandonment of social justice ideals were not unique to the Pride organization or to Washington, D.C., despite what critics of Marion Barry often imply. Scandals plagued Nixon’s Office of Minority Business

Enterprise as Small Business Administration loans intended to support minority entrepreneurship were awarded to white-owned businesses.341 In North Carolina,

Floyd McKissick’s Soul City project of Republican-supported black capitalism faced an investigative newspaper series leveling similar charges of questionable expenses and political misdeeds as were alleged against Pride’s Clifton Terrace project. A

GAO audit and subsequent Justice Department investigation uncovered the same kinds of improper bookkeeping practices that plagued Pride, although no individuals associated with Soul City were indicted.342 Black politicians in Lowndes County,

Alabama, engaged in the same kinds of voter suppression tactics and fraud to win elections that had been used against them in the past, turning their back on the freedom politics that had gotten them into office initially.343 Across the country, anti-

340 Bart Barnes, “Mary M. Treadwell, 71, Dies; Ex-Wife of Marion Barry Served Prison Time for Defrauding the Federal Government,” Washington Post, 25 Jul 2012, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/mary-m-treadwell-71-dies-ex-wife-of-marion-barry- served-prison-time-for-defrauding-the-federal- government/2012/07/25/gJQAz5Qz9W_story.html?utm_term=.971ca9a2e127. 341 Dean Kotlowski, “Black Power-Nixon Style: The Nixon Administration and Minority Business Enterprise,” Business History Review 72 (Autumn 1998), 440-41. 342 Devin Fergus, Liberalism, Black Power, and the Making of American Politics, 1965-1980 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 216-218. 343 Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 239-241.

143

poverty programs faced accusations of fraud and mismanagement, often leveled falsely by segregationist politicians who wanted to shut the programs down. When the charges were substantiated, lack of expertise and the inherent financial problems associated with poverty were usually contributing factors.344 Existing political and economic systems were unable to eliminate poverty. Likewise, the poor communities could not reform the problems of capitalism by attempting to adopt its tenets.

In Pride’s case, these issues were compounded by a sense of injustice and discrimination against African Americans inherent within the political and economic systems in which Pride was expected to operate. Pride’s leaders often railed against what they saw as a double standard; white businesses could operate solely to increase the wealth of their owners and stakeholders, but black businesses were held to different expectations. “When we talked about killing rats and cleaning alleys nobody said anything,” observed Barry in 1970. “When we start talking about economic power and producing something on a large scale, all the racists and semiracists show their true colors” and question Pride’s legitimacy.345 “When blacks control a multi- million-dollar corporation, you’re talking about real power,” he observed in another interview that year. “People can see that; they don’t like it.”346 He charged that the

344Annelise Orleck, “Introduction: The War on Poverty from the Grass Roots Up,” 16; Kent B. Germany, “Poverty Wars in the Louisiana Delta: White Resistance, Black Power, and the Poorest Place in America,” 244; Annelise Orleck, “Conclusion: The War on the War on Poverty and American Politics since the 1960s,” 455; in The War on Poverty: A New Grassroots History, 1964-1980, Annelise Orleck and Lisa Gayle Hazirjian, ed. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011.); For a discussion about election tampering and the gradual erosion of “freedom politics” in Alabama, see George Derek Musgrove and Hasan Kwame Jeffries, “’The Community Don’t Know What’s Good for Them’: Local Politics in the Alabama Black Belt during the Post-Civil Rights Era,” in Danielle L. McGuire and John Dittmer, Eds., Freedom Rights: New Perspectives on the Civil Rights Movement (Louisville: University of Kentucky Press, 2011), 305-27. 345 Marion Barry, quoted in Ivan Brandon, “Pride Becomes ‘The Man’ as Apartment Landlord,” Washington Post, 25 Aug 1970, C1. 346 Marion Barry, quoted in Tony Lang, “A Pride of Razor-Clawed Lions Eyes Pride’s Leaders,” Washington Post, 25 Oct 1970, 11.

144

government was perfectly willing to support for-profit enterprises for white business- owners but expected the antipoverty organizations to form nonprofits, as if the black community did not deserve the same chance at prosperity.347 This perceived disparity allowed Treadwell to reportedly feel justified in bending the rules to compensate herself in a way that she believed she deserved. After all, capitalism was just another

“shell game” like the dudes ran on the streets; they all needed to learn “how to hustle on a legitimate level” to succeed in the white man’s game.348

By the early eighties, as Pride feel apart, the game had changed. The hoped- for transformation of poor Washington neighborhoods in the aftermath of the 1968 uprising and destruction never materialized. The young men in the ghetto were increasingly dismissed as criminals rather than encouraged as possible entrepreneurs.

The War on Crime, begun under Johnson and intensified during the Nixon

Administration, became the War on Drugs in the Reagan era. Crack cocaine infiltrated the neighborhoods of the District, giving officials a reason to incarcerate the street hustlers who had once been called “dudes.”349 There was no longer any political will to employ the “hard-core,” although before his political career was derailed by drugs, Mayor Barry incorporated some of the principles of Pride into the

347 Peter Braestrup, “Pride’s Job Program Goal: ‘Piece of Action’ for Ghetto,” Washington Post, 22 Mar 1969, 53. 348 Lang, “A Pride of Razor-Clawed Lions;” Lewis M. Simons and Ron Shaffer, “Pride Firm Tied to $600,000 Theft,” Washington Post, 21 Oct 1979, A1. 349 Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010, 2012), 5-7, 45-55; Chris Myers Asch and George Derek Musgrove, Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 391, 401-407.

145

city’s Summer Youth Employment Program and the city’s aggressive minority contracting program.350

In his 2009 survey of the existing Black Power scholarship, Peniel Joseph calls on historians to “take seriously unacknowledged and obscure strains of black activism,” particularly those stories that are difficult to pigeonhole into one specific area of study but instead reveal the connections between social, economic, and political movements.351 This study moves Pride out from under the shadow of Barry’s political career and places it within the context of the intersections of Great Society liberalism, Black Power self-determination, and black capitalism’s attempt to remake economic power dynamics. It transports the work of Pride’s dudes, brass, and professionals beyond the program’s failures, acknowledging the creative and adaptive methods they used in their attempt to address entrenched problems of poverty and racism in the urban communities of Washington, D.C. Resituating the effort to create employment opportunities for the most marginalized members of society and remake the economy of the ghetto using their talents within its proper historical context contributes to a fuller picture of the breadth of Black Power activism. Pride was neither a criminal enterprise nor a goon squad to intimidate officials into providing its founders with money and power. It was an ambitious program that sought to convey the dignity of work and prosperity to the forgotten and ignored, in the city where they were doubly disfranchised, without economic or political power. Though it could not

350 Asch and Musgrove, 395, 409-11; Mike DeBonis, “Marion Barry’s Legacy was Built on Thousands of Summer Jobs,” Washington Post, 23 Nov 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/mike- debonis/wp/2014/11/23/marion-barrys-legacy-was-built-on-thousands-of-summer- jobs/?utm_term=.be3e0b29a9b5; D.C. Department of Employment Services, “Mayor Marion S. Barry Summer Youth Employment Program,” https://does.dc.gov/service/mayor-marion-s-barry-summer- youth-employment-program. 351 Peniel E. Joseph, “The Black Power Movement: A State of the Field,” The Journal of American History 3 (December 2009), 773.

146

ultimately transform the structural inequality of the systems in which it operated,

Pride made a difference in many young people’s lives and in the cultural life of

Washington, accomplishments that should be recognized.

147

Bibliography

Periodicals

Baltimore Afro-American Baltimore Sun Chicago Defender Ebony Magazine New Journal and Guide (Norfolk, VA) New York Amsterdam News Washington Daily News Washington Post Washington Evening Star

Primary Source Collections

Federal Bureau of Investigation, Washington Field Office, File Number 157-7672, “Marion Barry,” Screened by Carrie Tallichet Smith, 30 April 2015, RD 42583, DocID: 70001096, National Archives, Washington, D.C. ---, Washington Field Office, File Number 157-1590, “Pride, Inc.,” Screened by Heather Macrea, 24 Mar 2014, DocID: 59169311, National Archives, Washington, D.C. General Records of the Department of Labor, Record Group 174, National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. Metropolitan Washington Board of Trade News, Kiplinger Research Library, Historical Society of Washington, D.C. Ralph J. Bunche Oral History Collection, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C. Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Papers, 1959-1972, ProQuest Digital, Ann Arbor, MI. Youth Pride, Inc. Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C. Secondary Sources Agronsky, Jonathan I. Z. Marion Barry: The Politics of Race. Latham, NY: British American Publishing, 1991. Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Revised Edition. New York: The New Press, 2012. Allen, Louis L. “Making Capitalism Work in the Ghettos.” Harvard Business Review 47, Issue 3 (May/June 1969): 83-92.

148

Asch, Chris Myers and George Derek Musgrove. Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Ashmore, Susan Youngblood. Carry It On: The War on Poverty and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama, 1964-1972. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008. Barras, Jonetta Rose. The Last of the Black Emperors: The Hollow Comeback of Marion Barry in the New Age of Black Leaders. Baltimore: Bancroft Press, 1998. Barry, Marion Jr. and Omar Tyree. Mayor For Life: The Incredible Story of Marion Barry, Jr. New York: Strebor Books, 2014. Borchardt, Gregory M. “Making D.C. Democracy’s Capital: Local Activism, the ‘Federal State’, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Washington, D.C.” Doctoral Dissertation in Philosophy, The Columbia College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University, 2013. Coates, Ta-Nehisi. “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration.” The Atlantic. October 2015. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/the-black-family-in- the-age-of-mass-incarceration/403246/ Countryman, Matthew J. Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Diner, Steven J. “The City Under the Hill.” Washington History 8, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 1996): 55–61. Elfenbein, Jessica I., Howard Gillette Jr., and William H. Becker. Civics, Commerce, and Community: The History of the Greater Washington Board of Trade, 1889-1989. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Co., 1989. Fergus, Devin. Liberalism, Black Power, and the Making of American Politics, 1965- 1980. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2009. Germany, Kent B. “Poverty Wars in the Louisiana Delta: White Resistance, Black Power, and the Poorest Place in America,” in Annelise Orleck and Lisa Gayle Hazirjian, ed., The War on Poverty: A New Grassroots History, 1964-1980. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011: 231-55. Green, Constance McLaughlin. The Secret City: A History of Race Relations in the Nation’s Capital. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967. Haskins, Faye P. “The Art of D.C. Politics: Broadsides, Banners, and Bumper Stickers. Washington History 12, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2001/2001): 46-63.

149

Hechinger, John W., Sr. and Gavin Taylor. “Black and Blue: The D.C. City Council vs. Police Brutality, 1967-69. Washington History 11, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 1999/200): 4-23. Hill, Laura Warren. “FIGHTing for the Soul of Black Capitalism: Struggles for Black Economic Development in Postrebellion Rochester.” In The Business of Black Power: Community Development, Capitalism, and Corporate Responsibility in Postwar America, 45–67. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2012. Hill, Laura Warren, and Julia Rabig. “Toward a History of the Business of Black Power.” In The Business of Black Power: Community Development, Capitalism, and Corporate Responsibility in Postwar America, 15–44. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2012. Hinton, Elizabeth. “’A War within Our Own Boundaries’: Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and the Rise of the Carceral State.” Journal of American History 102 no. 1 (June 2015): 100-112. Jaffe, Harry S. and Tom Sherwood. Dream City: Race, Power, and the Decline of Washington, D.C. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994. Jeffries, Hasan Kwame. Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt. New York: New York University Press, 2009. Johnson, Haynes. Dusk at the Mountain: The Negro, the Nation, and the Capital—A Report on Problems and Progress. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1963. Joseph, Peniel E. “The Black Power Movement: A State of the Field.” Journal of American History 96, no. 3 (December 2009): 751-776. --- “Historians and the Black Power Movement.” OAH Magazine of History 22, no. 3 (July 2008): 8-15. ---“Rethinking the Black Power Era.” Journal of Southern History LXXV, no. 3 (August 2009): 707-716. King, Jr., Martin Luther. Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? Boston: Beacon Press, 1968. Kotlowski, Dean. “Black Power-Nixon Style: The Nixon Administration and Minority Business Enterprise.” The Business History Review 72, no. 3 (October 1, 1998): 409–45. Maddison, Catherine. “‘In Chains 400 Years... And Still in Chains in DC!’ The 1966 Free DC Movement and the Challenges of Organizing in the City.” Journal of American Studies 41, no. 1 (April 2007): 169–92.

150

Masur, Kate. An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle Over Equality in Washington, D.C. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010. McKee, Guian A. “’This Government Is with Us’: Lyndon Johnson and the Grassroots War on Poverty,” in Annelise Orleck and Lisa Gayle Hazirjian, ed. The War on Poverty: A New Grassroots History, 1964-1980. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011: 31-62. Muhammad, Khalil Gibran. The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010. Musgrove, George Derek. “A King for Washington and D.C.” The Hill Rag (August 2011). Musgrove, George Derek and Hasan Kwame Jeffries. “’The Community Don’t Know What’s Good for Them’: Local Politics in the Alabama Black Belt during the Post-Civil Rights Era,” in Danelle L. McGuire and John Dittmer, Eds., Freedom Rights: New Perspectives on the Civil Rights Movement. Louisville: University of Kentucky Press, 2011: 305-27. Nichols, David A. “’The Showpiece of Our Nation’: Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Desegregation of the District of Columbia.” Washington History16, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2004/2005): 44-65. The Nine Lies of Marion Barry. DVD. Directed by Dana Flor and Toby Oppenheimer. 2009; New York: IndiePix, 2010. O’Connor, Alice. “Fighting Poverty with Knowledge: The Office of Economic Opportunity and the Analytic Revolution in Government.” In Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy & the Poor in 20th Century U.S. History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002: 166-195. Orleck, Annelise and Lisa Gayle Hazirjian, ed. The War on Poverty: A New Grassroots History, 1964-1980. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011. Pacifico, Michele F. “’Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work’: The New Negro Alliance of Washington.” Washington History 6, no. 1(Spring/Summer 1994): 66-88. Pearlman, Lauren Elizabeth. “Democracy’s Capital: Local Protest, National Politics, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Washington, D.C., 1933-1978.” Doctoral Dissertation in Philosophy. Yale University, 2013. Preusser, John. “The Washington Chapter of the Black Panther Party: From Revolutionary Militants to Community Activists.” Master of Arts in History, University of North Carolina Wilmington, 2006.

151

Quigley, Joan. Just Another Southern Town: Mary Church Terrell and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Nation’s Capital. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Self, Robert O. American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Siegel, Fred. The Future Once Happened Here: New York, D.C., L.A., and the Fate of America’s Big Cities. New York: The Free Press, 1997. Sugrue, Thomas J. Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North. New York: Random House, 2008. Thompson, Heather Ann. “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History.” Journal of American History 97, no. 3 (December 2010): 703-734.

Ture, Kwame and Charles V. Hamilton. Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America, with New Afterword by the Authors. New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 1992.

Valk, Anne M. Radical Sisters: Second-Wave Feminism and Black Liberation in Washington, D.C. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008. Weems, Robert E., Jr., and Lewis A. Randolph. “The Ideological Origins of Richard M. Nixon’s ‘Black Capitalism’ Initiative.” The Review of Black Political Economy 29, no. 1 (Summer 2001): 49–61. Williams, Rhonda Y. Concrete Demands: The Search for Black Power in the 20th Century. New York: Routledge, 2015. Woodard, Komozi. A Nation Within A Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power Politics. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. Zinn, Howard. SNCC: The New Abolitionists. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964.

152