Marion Berry Knots

Outside a pizza restaurant at the heart of D.C.’s vibrant U Street corridor, a crowd of protesters gathered last Friday, enraged, they said, by an appalling insult to a hero of theirs whose legacy they had showed up to defend.

They railed, stomped and chanted outside the empty restaurant at 12th and U streets NW, which had closed in advance of the widely advertised demonstration after a few days of escalating outrage over a menu item lampooning the cocaine addiction of Marion Barry, an icon of a vanished era in the capital city, a man who was called “mayor for life.”

In today’s gentrified Washington, some protesters fear, Barry’s long-ago accomplishments are fading from communal memory, even as his notorious transgressions stick. What appeared to be a White-led business’s attempt to profit off a Black leader’s pain left many native Washingtonians more than furious; their anger seemed tinged with sadness, with a deepening sense of loss in a city transformed over a quarter-century of rapid change.

“It’s like they’re participating in cultural erasure,” Ronald Moten, a protest organizer, said of the &Pizza restaurant chain, which debuted and then quickly scrapped a pastry dubbed “Marion Berry knots,” coated with powdered sugar, and an ad campaign featuring thinly veiled references to Barry’s struggles with addiction and his notorious 1990 drug arrest.

“These type of insults happen to my community every day,” Moten said. “They just usually go unchecked. But not this time.”

In a private meeting this week, the pizza chain, which lists 43 outlets in the Mid-Atlantic region, and a coalition of activists dubbed Knot in DC reached a tentative peace. In a statement Thursday, &Pizza promised several steps to make amends, including partnerships and financial investments to help minority-owned businesses in D.C.; internships for students from local high schools and historically Black colleges; and additional “cultural awareness programs,” including mentorship efforts and diversity training within the company.

“We must do better,” the statement said, “and we will.” The activists, meanwhile, have suspended plans for future protests while they and &Pizza’s chief executive continue to talk.

In some ways, the Friday night protest seemed less about a pastry than about endangered history and who would protect it; it seemed less about Barry than about the memory of a bygone generation of Black leaders who are understood and revered by a dwindling number of D.C. families. That a pizza chain founded in 2012 would ridicule the late mayor’s human weaknesses — as if that were the most notable aspect of his life — seemed to aggravate the cultural anxiety of Washingtonians who feel alienated amid the city’s vast transformation in the new millennium.

“It was not funny,” said Michael Crowder, 51, standing in the crowd at 12th and U. “I don’t think that could’ve been done 20 years ago.”

This trend of cultural erasure — illustrated by the Marion Berry knots and accompanying ad campaign — has impacted communities across the country, said author Brandi T. Summers, a Columbia University sociologist who studies the phenomenon and has written about the District.

As an example, she recalled a sandwich shop and bar that opened in a gentrifying area of Brooklyn in 2017. Its White owner advertised an old “bullet hole-ridden wall” on the premises, as a news release put it, and sold 40-ounce bottles of rosé in paper bags, like malt liquor, in a tone-deaf nod to the neighborhood’s downtrodden past. Protesters descended en masse, decrying the gimmicks as racist.

“It’s very common,” Summers said. “And it’s particularly offensive to people who have been there for a long time and are trying to hold onto their hopes and their places in the city.” Worse still, she said, “they’re making a mockery of these people’s past. It’s not just that Marion Barry’s time is gone, but also that they’re making fun of his particular time.”...............

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/a...S&cvid=787b5565d3a344c88933c8bdc41f6ce9&ei=22
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/11/01/marion-barry-pizza-protest-dc/