In the fall of 1970 when I returned to Chesapeake & Potomac Telephone in Washington, D.C., I found a much different company than the one I’d left three years earlier as I departed for the U.S. Navy and a once in a lifetime opportunity to help keep Southeast Asia safe for democracy. AT&T, the nation’s largest employer, had executed a nationwide consent decree with the Nixon administration’s EEOC during my absence.

The skilled craft and management jobs that were almost exclusively filled by whites in the predominantly black city, characterized by John Kennedy as combining Northern charm with Southern efficiency, were rapidly integrating. The installation and repair crew that I was assigned to supervise near Dupont Circle was comprised of seven black and five white men. These outside jobs would not be opened to women for several more years.

The nation’s capitol was also changing and a young man named Marion Barry was winning favorable attention for operating a summer employment program directed at inner city youth called Pride, Inc. C&P Telephone was a participating employer together with many other members of the Washington Chamber of Commerce, which had been badly frightened in 1968 by the destructive riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King. Early in the summer of 1971, Pride scheduled a weekend long fundraising radio-a-thon in cooperation with the city’s most popular soul music station at a church located in the 1300 block of U St., NW. Located just a block from the drop zone for drug dealers each afternoon at 4 p.m., the company never scheduled orders there past noon each day. I was jolted during my job orientation by a C&P policy that limited its responsibility for reimbursement subsequent to a mugging to $200 in losses. If the money in your wallet and the value of your jewelry exceeded this amount, the loss was at your own expense. In other words, this was a rough, dangerous and largely unpoliced neighborhood.

About 11 a.m. on the Friday morning of the much advertised radio-a-thon my pager buzzed and I called into the Dupont dispatch center. I was told to round up half my crew, instructing them to drop the remainder of their orders for the day, and report to the church on U Street. The test desk could tell me where each installer was working, and by noon I had seven of them on their way. Whether through an oversight by Pride, or, as claimed by Marion Barry, a deliberate failure to issue the needed paperwork by C&P, phones had never been ordered to support his event. Sixteen lines and a T-carrier circuit for the radio broadcast were required before 5 p.m. In an age before cellular service, this meant we required 20 spare pairs of copper wires —16 for the call-in operators, and four more to configure a T-carrier. The test desk informed us there were only three spare, unused pairs at our location. Inspecting the alley behind the church, I noted a 25-pair cable that served a four-story building half way down the block. We determined that it was a senior residence with 24 units and a front desk phone.

If we were to activate Pride’s lines it was going to be necessary to commandeer these pairs for the weekend. It had been made abundantly clear to Roy Meyer, my garage mate and fellow foreman, that we were to have their service operating by 5 p.m. whatever the obstacles. We decided to cut the cable and then dispatched Bill Howard, my slickest speaking black installer, to visit each apartment in the retirement building and inform them that there had been an accidental cable cut that we expected to have repaired by Monday morning. We further promised to restore the front desk phone immediately so residents would continue to have access to an emergency phone. An hour later Bill returned grumbling, “Don’t ever ask me to do that again!” While my crew rerouted the cable to the back of the church, Roy had been surveying the interior installation. As I approached the front steps I found Marion Barry standing in the doorway and a group of our installers milling around. Roy informed me, “We’ve got a problem.”

Thinking we faced another technical problem, I asked, “What’s the matter now?” Roy replied, “Mr. Barry insists he wants an all black crew assigned to install his phones. You’re the college boy. See whether you can change his mind.” I could hardly believe what Roy was telling me. It was evident the company was moving heaven and earth to support Barry’s radio-a-thon, with a dozen installers pulled away from their regular work to provide him his dial tone. I also recognized he must have spent most of the morning jumping up and down on desks downtown to produce this result. When I approached Barry, an imposing man by any standard, to make the argument, “We are an equal opportunity employer. We don’t assign installers on the basis of race — customers are expected to accept the installer that is dispatched on their order,” Barry remained unmoved. He pointed out that I was standing in front of him only because he had raised hell at the highest levels in the company, and that he was prepared to go back and do it again. “Pride is a project for our kids. It’s a black initiative in a black community and we expect the phone company to honor that by providing us black installers,” he ranted.

At that point I decided to alter my tactics and quit defending the company. I told Barry I agreed with him, “Mr. Barry, I’m sure you’re right. I’m sure you can get back on the phone, not here of course, and you can yell loud enough and long enough that you will reach someone who will cave in to your demand. Then you will get the all black crew here that you say you want. But, I want you to think about one thing. If you don’t permit this group of men to install your phones, we’ll send them back to work installing phones for the black families in this neighborhood who thought they were going to see us today, but who won’t because we are here. Who knows, I’ll probably misplace my pager. And by the time you secure agreement for an all black installation crew I can promise you one thing — it will be well past 5 p.m. this afternoon.” Marion Barry slowly grinned, stepped sideways and waved his arms towards the church doors, “Mr. Hudson, please go ahead and install my phones.” Later that day, as we completed our work, we discovered 10 cases of Budweiser slipped into the rear of one of our vans.

I moved to Denver the following year to work at Mountain Bell. Marion Barry moved on to serve first with the D.C. school board, followed by a stint on city council and eventually was elected Mayor. Nearly 20 years later during a lunch at Phillips Crab House along the Potomac Waterfront a group of burly security men flooded into the restaurant taking up watchful positions. I expected a glimpse of some national leader. Instead, Mayor Barry swept in past my table. He glanced at me searching his memory for why I appeared familiar. Whether he actually placed me I can’t say, but he nodded and winked before rushing through to his luncheon in a private room. Shortly after that encounter drugs and misbehavior would stain Barry’s career, but for a period he was a spokesman for his community who deservedly earned the admiration of all. As Barry was wont to remind us, “When you don’t ask, you don’t get!”

Miller Hudson is a public affairs consultant and can be reached at mnhwriter@msn.com.