The cocaine and perjury trial of Mayor Marion Barry has focused attention on race relations in the nation's capital, a city with a 70 percent black population and little recent history of racial strife. ``I think that there is a perception with a substantial number of the population that he is being picked on unfairly,'' said Kenneth Robinson, a local attorney who consulted with Barry's counsel. Robinson is white. ``I think the Barry trial is just another indication that people are very, very sensitive to race and how people are treated,'' said Ethelbert Miller, a poet who teaches at Howard University. Miller is black. A U.S. District Court jury began deliberating the Barry case Thursday afternoon. Two members, both men, are white. One of them has been chosen jury foreman. Barry admits that the trial has brought to the surface ``a simmering amount of polarization and racism that was already there.'' Some blacks agree with Barry's claim that he was the target of overzealous white prosecutors. Others feel betrayed by the mayor, who had claimed repeatedly that he didn't use drugs. ``The majority of whites are just plain annoyed and angry and just want this guy to go,'' D.C. Councilman Jim Nathanson said before the trial began. Nathanson, who is white, represents a predominantly white district. For all the talk about racial polarization, Barry is the one who was often credited with cooling the tempers that erupted after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. Ten people died, 1,191 were reported injured and 7,650 were arrested in the city's worst riots. Washington was then 63 percent black. Some black leaders, Jesse L. Jackson among them, have suggested that the climate exists for a resurgence of racial violence in Washington if Barry is convicted. Barry himself said it will not. ``Those who would even talk about that don't represent me, don't represent what I stand for,'' he told reporters last week. ``You obviously don't realize that we have grown as a people the last 20 years. We will not destroy that which we have worked so hard to build up.'' ``To equate this to the violence that would occur when a white man killed Martin Luther King is asinine,'' Robinson said. ``People will talk about it in bars and on the street, but I just don't believe that it is going to happen.'' ``Some of the noise that you hear is sort of par for the course,'' said Sam Smith, the white publisher of the Progressive Review, a Washington opinion journal. ``It's just that more people are paying attention to it now.'' The presiding judge in the trial, Thomas Penfield Jackson, is white. One of the prosecutors, Assistant U.S. Attorney Judith Retchin, is white. The other, Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Roberts, is black. Barry's lawyer, R. Kenneth Mundy, is black. Barry has called the case ``a political lynching'' and a case of ``satanic, dirt-like tactics.'' Jackson called it part of an ``ugly pattern'' of ``white judicial leadership attacking black political leadership.'' NAACP Executive Director Benjamin Hooks voiced a similar complaint. U.S. Attorney Jay Stephens said he believes in trying cases ``regardless of who the person is or what the political priorities are.'' The mayor and his allies have also sharply criticized news media coverage of the case. Abdul Alim Muhammad, a Muslim who is running for Congress in suburban Prince George's County, Md., said, ``What we are witnessing in D.C. is like an electronic lynching. In some respects, the media are no better than the red-necked tobacco chewing members of the Ku Klux Klan.'' Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, has shown his support for Barry by attending the trial despite efforts by the judge to have him barred as ``potentially disruptive.'' Barry, who broke into politics as a street organizer in the civil rights movement, has been mayor for 12 years. He is not seeking re-election, and six candidates are running to succeed him. When one of them, City Council Chairman David Clarke, was introduced at a rally for black South African leader Nelson Mandela, he was booed by members of the mostly black audience. Clarke is white. Although he still has a loyal following, especially among poor blacks, Barry is increasingly viewed as an embarrassment by members of Washington's large black middle class. Long-time civil rights advocate and educator Roger Wilkins, a past political supporter of the mayor, wrote recently in The Washington Post: ``Marion Barry used the elders and lied to the young. He has manipulated thousands of others with his cynical use of charges of racism to defend his malodorous personal failures.'' Robert Woodson, president of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, said Barry ``has certainly created a racial situation out of something that I do not think was. He is exploiting tensions and in some cases creating tensions that otherwise would not have existed.'' Woodson, who is black, was a member of a White House council on private sector initiatives in the Reagan administration. The Rev. James Bevel, a Barry supporter who conducted prayer meetings in a tent outside the courthouse through much of the trial, said; ``It is not affecting basic race relationships or hostilities in black folks toward white people. I don't see that in the people I'm around.'' The Rev. A. Knighton Stanley, the black pastor of People's Congregational Church, said he avoids raising the issue of possible violence. ``Am I uneasy? My answer is yes,'' said Stanley. ``My judgment is we will not have it, and my prayer is that my judgment is right.''
