Clinton Reaches Out With Stroll in D.C.’s Inner City : Cities: His demonstration of commitment to urban ills receives a joyous reception in a black neighborhood.
WASHINGTON — It was one of those memorable moments, like the day Jimmy Carter hoofed it from Capitol Hill to the White House at the head of his own inaugural parade.
Bill Clinton came to Washington to talk business in the Oval Office, but the President-elect’s first imprint on the nation’s capital was in a joyous black community where people shouted his name, reached for his hand and hoped that he will help them keep their tenuous hold on middle-class life.
“I pray for him every night,†said Mrs. E. L. Allen, an elderly widow who leaned on a cane as she waited for Clinton to make his way up Georgia Avenue, a couple of miles north of the White House. “I pray for the Lord to protect him and strengthen him and show him the way.â€
On his first visit to the city since his election, Clinton spent almost as much time in the predominantly black Petworth community in the Georgia Avenue business corridor as he did at the White House.
Politically, the imagery was compelling. A down-at-the-heels but still-battling inner-city neighborhood served as a metaphor for national social problems that await the new Administration in January: unemployment, homelessness, drugs, health care costs, struggling business.
The early outreach to the black community was reminiscent of Carter’s efforts to promote racial harmony, as were some of the themes and phrases that Clinton honed in the course of his successful campaign.
As President, Clinton said, he will try to never disappoint those who crowded the street for a glimpse of him. He will, he promised, stay in touch with them after he is in the White House.
Pausing to talk with owners of a shoe-repair shop, a beauty parlor, a Chinese carry out, a liquor store, and several other locally owned businesses, he said he had come to Petworth “to make a statement to America.â€
The message: He supports small businesses, wants to make more capital available to them and intends to talk with other Americans the way he talked with the people he encountered around the intersection of Georgia and Ingraham avenues.
Had he gone north or south on Georgia, he would have entered areas of severe urban blight that Petworth still struggles to ward off. But as it was, he plunged into a community where his move to the White House is viewed as a hopeful harbinger of better times.
The elderly, the unemployed, children ducking school, parents ducking jobs began collecting along the street while Clinton was still in the air on his way from Little Rock, Ark. The last to shake his hand had to wait until the autumn afternoon had given way to growing darkness.
Among the last to greet Clinton were Alonzo Williams and John English, retirees who now spend their nights patrolling their community as part of a citizens’ watch to discourage drug traffickers.
Having missed lunch, Williams confessed that he was growing weak from hunger. Waiting near Clinton’s limousine, he stretched to grasp the President-elect’s hand, only to be blindsided by the barrel of a television camera, one of more than three dozen contributing to an atmosphere of pandemonium.
The President-elect had arrived at a critical moment, said Michael Foster Bey, a 38-year-old hotel attendant who left Petworth for 15 years and roamed as far as California. He returned because this section of Georgia Avenue “was still home.â€
His neighborhood has reached the point, he said, where it will either recover or succumb to the drug infestation and violence that have swamped other areas of the Washington inner city.
“The problem is not just drugs,†he said. “We’ve got to have jobs.â€
The bad trouble in Petworth started in 1968. The area was spared the worst of the rioting that followed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, but there was ruin all around it. Jobs disappeared en masse, as did well-kept lawns and flower beds and the community’s confidence.
Cedric Cade, who arrived two hours before Clinton’s motorcade drove up the avenue from the White House, was 10 years old at the time of the riots. He had followed older boys through shattered windows into stores , in search of nothing more than candy.
Now he is 33 and out of work, a former D.C. government employee cut loose as the city cut its budget.
Cade brought no message for Clinton, he said. He had only come with a question. “Basically, I’ve just been scratching for the last six months,†he said. “I just want to ask him if he has a jobs program for the community.â€
The question was in a thousand forms on the lips of others along the avenue. Clinton heard it casually from the business people he encountered at their stores. He heard it shouted from a distance.
His answer was always more or less the same.
He is not a miracle worker, he cautioned, but he is a hard worker.
And, he suggested, he had heard the message that the people along the way had been telling a hoard of visitors all day.
Petworth wasn’t looking for a hand out. It was looking for a hand.
More to Read
Sign up for Essential California
The most important California stories and recommendations in your inbox every morning.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
