Chapter One: 1972-75
By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Staff Writer
June 18, 1995
Walter E. Fauntroy, then the District's congressional delegate, took the call that night. Slamming down the phone, the civil rights leader and Baptist minister said, "Ain't that wonderful." He decided to lead a celebratory stroll up 14th Street NW. For nearly a decade, Fauntroy had been plotting Johnny Mac's demise. He and an army of civil rights workers had registered thousands of blacks in South Carolina and tens of thousands across the South.
"This victory," Fauntroy told the press, "serves as a warning to those who oppose self-determination for the District."
So on that muggy evening 23 years ago, Fauntroy marshaled his impromptu parade. He had marched up 14th Street with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He had been on the street in 1968 when word came that King was dead. Four hard years after the riots and flames sparked by that killing, Fauntroy was back, striding past charred storefronts and saying, "Good evening," to puzzled prostitutes and dope dealers who asked the reverend what his march was all about. Fauntroy thought to himself: Washington does not know it is free.
"We saw it that night," he recalls. "Oh, my goodness that was some kind of excitement."
The next year, Congress passed a Home Rule Charter that finally allowed the black-majority city to elect its own mayor and council. Still, this was not the dawn for which Fauntroy and other D.C. leaders had plotted and prayed. Home rule came with strings attached. Johnny Mac's hard-cheese brand of race baiting was supplanted by a more insidious tension between city and suburbs, between whites on the west side of Rock Creek Park and blacks on the east side. It wasn't old-school racism, although racial suspicion gave it an enduring bite.
White members of Congress who represented the Maryland and Virginia suburbs feared that they would not be reelected if their mostly white, commuting constituents were forced to pay income taxes to the District. They demanded explicit language that would ban the District from passing a nonresident income tax. As Fauntroy remembers it, suburban lawmakers chose to "cripple" what they could not stop.
In years to come, the tax ban made the District uniquely vulnerable to the urban flight that would curse all U.S. cities. While New York and Philadelphia could tap the income of commuters, federal law said the District government could not. Over time, two-thirds of the salaries paid inside the city became untaxable.
"Everybody knew the home rule law was flawed. The money situation was really not worked out at all," said Sterling Tucker, the first popularly elected chairman of the D.C. Council. But District residents weren't about to turn down home rule, whatever its problems. Tucker explained: "We were hungry for autonomy."
Besides swallowing an imperfect charter, eager District leaders inherited a poorly run and hugely bloated city government. During the final 13 years of Johnny Mac's rein, the District payroll had doubled to 40,000 workers, and spending jumped fourfold. In language that sounds as though it could have come out of the current Congress, a 1972 House report scolded the District government for mismanagement and for believing that public spending could "solve all problems."
But neither municipal bloat nor problematic legislation dampened the optimism that Washington leaders, both black and white, felt as home rule began. As Tucker recalled, "We had a lot of excellent relations racially. We worked so hard together, and we expected to improve the law in future sessions of Congress."
But Congress never got around to patching most of the holes in the Home Rule Charter. As they often do, members simply stopped paying attention.
Many "blacks and whites of good will," as Fauntroy described them, chose to downplay racial tensions in Washington. But those tensions did not leave town with Johnny Mac. A bloody reminder occurred on the Mall in 1975, the year home rule began. At a concert celebrating Human Kindness Day, an event aimed at building racial unity, young black men marauded through the mixed-race crowd, singling out whites. They stomped on, stabbed and robbed more than 400.
Rather than being viewed as a symptom of underlying racial division, the violence was dismissed as an anomaly. In an editorial about an event whose implications could not have been more racial, The Washington Post did not write a single word about race.
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