A History Lesson for Mayor Fenty

The extraordinary $122 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to help prepare and send to college more than 2,000 youths in the District's poorest wards could, if those goals are achieved, transform the city's future economic and social landscape.

Converting potential high school dropouts into college-educated citizens has never been attempted in this city on such a scale. But with careful targeting and tight administration, the District should earn a rich return on the Gates investment in the form of a generation of educated, well-grounded and productive young adults.

Whether the infusion of Gates funds can alter the intersection of race and governance in the District is another matter. Our history is not encouraging.

That point was brought home last week in the Washington City Paper's "Loose Lips" column.

"Not only has [Mayor Adrian] Fenty shopped west of the river for his appointees," the column observed, "but he's also shown an affinity for white ones, especially in the public-safety realm.

"Police Chief designee Cathy Lanier, Fire Chief designee Dennis Rubin, and Attorney General nominee Linda Singer are white. So are City Administrator Dan Tangherlini and the mayor's legal counsel, Peter Nickles."

And in the unkindest cut of all, the column referred to a comment by Ward 8 political activist Philip Pannell, who told WJLA-TV that the makeup of Fenty's cabinet, and his nominations to boards and commissions, "makes Tony Williams look like Shaka Zulu."

Whoomp, there it is. A hot topic of conversation among black residents was suddenly on display in a popular newspaper column.

Is this focus on race a holdover from the Marion Barry era? No. It's been part of the District for more than a century.

Read " The Senator and the Socialite," Lawrence Otis Graham's new book about former slave Blanche Kelso Bruce, the first black man to serve a full term in the U.S. Senate.

Bruce, a senator from Mississippi during Reconstruction, and his wife, Josephine, the daughter of a wealthy black Philadelphia physician, were the toast of Washington in the 1870s. Their son, Roscoe, a graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard University and a protege of Booker T. Washington, was appointed superintendent of the District's "Colored Schools" in 1907.

Roscoe Bruce's promising career here ended in disaster when he lost favor with black parents and supporters. Consider these observations in the book: