Whatever Happened To ... the first black Prince George's county executive

Wayne K. Curry had soared to the peak of his political career in September 1996 when he was featured in a Washington Post Magazine cover story. Two years earlier, Prince George's County voters had made him the first black executive and the nation's only black chief elected official of a county.

Curry, a real estate lawyer who had grown up in Prince George's and helped desegregate its public schools, was the most potent symbol of the demographic shift that had transformed the county from a predominantly white, blue-collar farming community into a haven for an emerging African American middle class. Curry described Prince George's then as "the jewel in the crown of the post-civil-rights era," a place whose new black leadership wanted prosperity and progress for everyone, not just its then-55-percent black majority.