Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker and Washington, D.C., Mayor Adrian M. Fenty are sometimes mistaken for each other: Both of them have similarly shaven bald heads and are grouped among the new breed of black political leadership. Unlike their predecessors, who rode a wave out of the civil rights movement and into mayoralties of major…

There’s Washington. And there’s D.C., the District of Columbia, a city long fractured by race, class and its very geography. A park and a river act as natural fault lines between blacks and whites and low-income and wealthy residents. Those divisions and congressional oversight of the city’s legislation and budget have framed the African-American political…