A native Washingtonian and the daughter of a judge, Sharon Pratt belonged to a prominent African American family, she was a leader who emerged in the 1990’s. She graduated from Howard University and from law school. Before a divorce in 1982, she had been the wife of Arrington Dixon, city council chair from 1978 to 1982. She was vice president of the Potomac Electric Power Company and worked in the Democratic Party organization during the 1980’s. Sharon Pratt Dixon ran for mayor in 1990 as a reformer.
She promised that if elected, she would immediately fire two thousand city employees and clean out the bureaucracy. Of the five candidates running, the Washington Post found Dixon the most appealing and endorsed her. With the Post’s backing, Dixon won the primary election, carrying 37 percent of the vote. She was victorious in the November general election. Elected mayor in 1990, Sharon Pratt Kelly, who succeeded briefly but then faced difficult budget and management problems, was a rival of Marion Barry.
Sharon Pratt Kelly was the third mayor of the District of Columbia from 1991 to 1995. Pratt was the first African-American woman to serve as mayor of a major American city. She is also to date the only woman to have served as mayor of Washington D.C. Despite her historic election, however, Kelly's administration of Washington is generally regarded as a failure. The city was facing a projected $1 billion budget deficit at the close of her single mayoral term, far greater than that of her predecessor Marion Barry, with Kelly being criticized for mismanagement and inability to deliver the reforms she had promised in her initial campaign.
In addition, she had strained relations with the DC Council, and allowed the popular Washington Redskins football franchise to relocate to the suburbs. Washington City Paper would later characterize her mayoral tenure as "one of the most ignominious periods in modern D.C. history." Once in office, Pratt's grassroots, reform posture met resistance. She made good on her promises to clean house, requesting the resignations of all Barry appointees the day after her election; however, as she began to slash the city employment payroll, her political support began to weaken. In particular, she angered labor leaders who claimed she had promised not to fire union employees, and made no friends among other employees when she began mandating unpaid furloughs and wage freezes citywide.
According to the Washington City Paper, Kelly "was never able to get control of a city government still loyal to Barry, and she often mistrusted the advice she got from aides." In the spring of 1992, just over a year into her term, Barry loyalists mounted a recall campaign, which, although unsuccessful, weakened her administration and forced Kelly to tread more carefully with the public, backing away from her reform efforts. Kelly also faced some racial opposition because she is a light-skinned black, often cited as a hallmark of elite African Americans in the District, thus distancing her from poor and working-class blacks in the city.
Kelly's drive to achieve D.C. statehood in order to improve the District's financial and political standing created fierce opposition from Republican members of Congress, who unleashed a barrage of attacks on the District as a "national disgrace" of "one-party rule...massive dependency, hellish crime...and unrelenting scandal." The attacks brought unwelcome negative press to DC, and the ultimate failure in the House of Representatives of DC statehood legislation depleted her capital with the federal government. She also lost standing with the DC Council when she supported Councilmember Linda Cropp to serve as acting Chair after the suicide of John A. Wilson in May 1993; instead, the Council chose John L. Ray.
Mayor Kelly’s critics complained about her remoteness and inability to reach out to poor and middle-class citizens. Her shift of the mayor’s office from the rundown District Building on Pennsylvania Avenue to an expensive new building ten blocks away solidified the image of remoteness. The offices at One Judiciary Square included an elegant suite designed to Kelly’s orders. The new building added to the costs of running the city government. The Kelly administration took credit for reducing infant mortality, increasing services for families and young people, improving the emergency ambulance system, and making other gains.
Yet too many people still worked for the city. Programs such as public housing and public assistance remained unchanged. Officials manipulated financial data to give the appearance of a balanced budget. Mayor Kelly urged Congress to pass measures such as statehood for the District and a commuter tax to bring in more revenues, even though these goals were generally considered politically impossible. After four years, D.C. voters found her achievements disappointing. In 1994, in a three-way primary, Kelly failed to carry even one of the city’s election precincts.
Kelly was also blamed for then-Washington Redskins owner Jack Kent Cooke moving the Redskins out of the city. Cooke attempted to pressure the city to build a new stadium for the team, instead of the aging RFK Stadium where they then played, with the threat of moving the team to nearby Alexandria, Virginia. After negotiations stalled and Cooke was publicly courted by Virginia's governor, Kelly denounced Cooke vocally, saying that "I will not allow our good community to be steamrolled by a billionaire bully."
Although an agreement was ultimately reached, it fell through in late 1993 when Cooke became frustrated with Kelly and the District government. He ultimately moved the team to Landover, Maryland, where as of 2010 it still resides. The Washington Post, which had sealed Kelly's victory in 1990 with its endorsement, turned on her in 1994, reflecting that the mayor "has not been a coalition builder, which a mayor - and perhaps particularly the mayor of a city under enormous financial and social stress - needs to be...the most aggressive members of the city council, those most sympathetic to her cost-cutting message, are not with her.
Nor are key elements in the business community. She has lost them and with them, we believe, her chance to enact the measures she has stood for." The paper instead endorsed Councilmember John Ray. In the Democratic primary that September, Kelly finished a distant third, with only 14% of the vote. Barry won the primary and would go on to win the general election in November.
Another new face among the city’s political leaders in the 1990’s was Eleanor Holmes Norton. Like Kelly, Norton was born in Washington. She graduated from Dunbar High School, Antioch College, and Yale Law School. She had been a civil rights lawyer and a public official in New York City, and then returned to Washington in 1977 as chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
As fiscal year 1994 began for DC government (in October 1993), DC faced a $500 million budget deficit, with financial experts predicting a cumulative $1 billion deficit by 1999. Kelly had begun her term having extremely good relations with Congress, successfully lobbying them to increase federal aid for D.C. by $100 million and to authorize the sale of $300 million in deficit reduction bonds. However, when in early 1994 Kelly admitted that the District could not pay its bills, Congress commissioned a federal audit of the city finances by the GAO.
In February 1994, in the face of a ballooning deficit, Kelly faced heavy criticism when the Washington Post reported that she regularly spent taxpayer funds on makeup for cable television appearances. Kelly was reported to have set aside $14,000 of city money to pay her makeup artist. In the weeks following, Kelly came under fire for other inappropriate uses of city funds, including the addition of bulletproof glass and a marble fireplace in her office and a series of 1993 televised town hall meetings that she had promised would be paid for with private financing. The stories were seized by her opponents in that year's mayoral race, particularly the comeback campaign of Marion Barry.
The GAO's report on DC finances was published on June 22, 1994, and estimated that the city would run out of money in two years and "may be forced to borrow from the U.S. Treasury by fiscal year 1995." The report specifically singled out Kelly's administration for gross mismanagement of city funds and agencies, and accused her of concealing the city's perilous fiscal condition from Congress for two years, "using gimmicks and violating the federal anti-deficiency act, which prohibits over-spending of a federally approved budget." The report, coupled with Congress' subsequent assertion of power over DC's budget (including deep cuts and new requirements for mayoral compliance), provided political ammunition for her challengers and effectively destroyed Kelly's reelection campaign.
In 1990 Norton ran for the office of delegate to the House of Representatives for the District of Columbia to succeed the incumbent, Walter Fauntroy. Despite damage to her campaign by disclosures that her husband had failed to pay District income taxes for eight years, she won the delegate’s post. Norton later paid all the back taxes that were due and divorced her husband. Although Norton entered Congress under a cloud, she soon earned high praise as a voice of reason and authority. She was hard working, thoughtful and an able negotiator. Delegate Norton worked successfully with Mayor Kelly to get additional federal money for the city in 1991 and 1992. She attended hundreds of community meeting and events all over the city.
Bibliography
· Kealoha, Samantha Nichols. "Kelly, Sharon Pratt Dixon (1944- ) | The Black Past: Remembered and Reclaimed." | The Black Past: Remembered and Reclaimed. June-July 2009. Web. 16 Jan. 2011. <http://www.blackpast.org/?q=aah/kelly-sharon-pratt-dixon-1944>.
· "The HistoryMakers." The HistoryMakers.com - African American History Archive. Apr. 2010. Web. 17 Jan. 2011. <http://www.thehistorymakers.com/biography/biography.asp?bioindex=1693>.
· "Kelly, Sharon Pratt." Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopaedia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite. Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 2010.
· "Sharon Pratt Dixon." Notable Black American Women, Book 1. Gale Research, 1992. Updated: 12/20/1992 Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Michigan: Gale, 2009. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC, Document Number: K1623000108. Fee, via Fairfax County Public Library 2009-04-10.
· "Post Plays Down Impact of Endorsement; Not Everyone Agrees". The Washington Post. 90-09-13 url=http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-1147449.html
- James Ragland (July 23, 1992). "Kelly Says D.C. Won't Bow To `Billionaire Bully' Cooke; Mayor Rules Out More Concessions to Keep Redskins". The Washington Post. Retrieved 2010-10-28. http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/citydesk/2010/06/04/vincent-gray-heres-how-you-defend-sharon-pratt-connection/
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