Chapter Two: 1975-81
By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Staff Writer
June 18, 1995
"No black man can handle this contract."
That's what Will R. Walker, son of a Virginia farmer and graduate of the seventh grade, heard when he inquired about selling auto parts to the District. The city already had a supplier: a white-owned company from Pennsylvania.
The year, however, was 1981. Home rule had been in place for six years, and the District had a law requiring aggressive recruiting of minority contractors. Insisting that he could supply car parts as well as out-of-town white men, Walker—who owned four auto-parts stores in the city—pestered the District until he found bureaucrats who would stick their necks out for a fellow black.
Walker, a self-taught entrepreneur who started his working life in a District brickyard walking the boss's dog, proceeded to corner the city's fleet-maintenance business. By the end of the 1980s, he controlled more than $4 million a year in District contracts and was responsible for keeping 8,000 vehicles on the road. He had 50 people on the company payroll, and he farmed out work to more than 150 subcontractors, almost all of them black.
"I employed a lot of people, and they made some good money," Walker said. "I didn't like anyone telling me what I couldn't do."
As home rule shifted into the early 1980s, no one was telling District blacks what they could and could not do. By that time, the city was on a roll. Marion Barry had replaced Walter E. Washington as mayor in 1979, and his brain trust of technocrats was performing management miracles.
City finances, such a mess in 1975 that they could not even be audited, were put into punctilious order; in 1982, the District won a national award for financial reporting. At the same time, Barry attacked the deficit, laying off 10 percent of the city's work force and slashing neighborhood services.
By 1981, the year Walker got his first auto-parts contract, Barry presided over a government that was beginning to run healthy surpluses and was paying down a $273 million debt inherited from the dark days of Johnny Mac.
A booming real estate market backstopped the mayor. New jobs and tax revenue surged. The redevelopment of Pennsylvania Avenue took off, the Georgetown waterfront was reclaimed and the first free-standing downtown department store in any U.S. city in four decades was being built by the Hecht Co. Largely because of the boom at the beginning of the decade, the District had the sharpest drop in poverty rates during the 1980s of any major U.S. city.
"Barry has done better than Congress" in running the city, Rep. Stewart B. McKinney, the ranking Republican on the House District Committee, conceded in 1982.
Not the least of his achievements was breaking up the old, mostly white network of city contractors. Barry doubled the percentage of city contracts that went to minorities. The shake-up, however, was neither simple nor cheap.
As Walker took over maintenance of the city's cars and trucks, he had to spend lots of money on job training. He also recalls being forced to buy auto parts through middlemen, paying excessive markups because some large wholesalers refused to deal directly with blacks. In the end, Walker lost his contracts with the District because his costs were too high.
The money that the Barry administration awarded private contractors was only part of a massive increase in spending. Surging tax revenues transformed Barry the budget hawk into Barry the munificent.
"Those of us who have money, those of us who have income . . . ought to be willing to show our humanity, our civility, by sharing that money through taxes with a government that's efficiently run," Barry told The Post in 1988. "That's the overriding philosophy."
That philosophy, along with the mayor's skill at building a political machine, put more and more blacks behind desks and counters in the District Building. It spelled generous pay raises for many unionized District workers. With the help of Congress, the payroll grew from 40,000 to 48,000. There were more police officers and teachers per capita than in any other major city in the country. The social service safety net was among the most generous and expensive in the nation.
Minority contracts and city jobs were supposed to help build a broader black middle class, and, to a considerable degree, they did. What Barry and his advisers did not expect (and what they tried to prevent with a residency law that Congress nixed) was that thousands of city workers would pack up their silverware and head for the suburbs. But that is what happened. About half of the city's employees now take their paychecks home to Maryland or Virginia.
Another unexpected and even more disturbing demographic trend emerged at the height of the boom years. The gap widened between the new white-collar, high-wage jobs in the District and the blue-collar, low-wage skills possessed by a large proportion of the city's inhabitants. The federal government compounded the job mismatch by moving thousands of low-level clerical jobs out of the District.
"The rosy sense of prospect in the early 1980s was in fact fool's gold. The trend meant that about half the black population would not qualify to participate in the city's occupational structure," said Jim Gibson, the urban planner who worked for Barry in the early 1980s.
Blacks eligible for high-skill jobs were far more likely to live in the suburbs. Indeed, although Will Walker prospered for a decade on D.C. contracts, he never considered living in the city. He owns a sprawling house with a swimming pool in leafy Upper Marlboro.
"I couldn't raise 13 kids in the city," Walker said. "We are country people."
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