Marion Barry

Marion Shepilov Barry Jr. was born on the sixth of March 1936 in Itta Bena, Mississippi, the eldest of eight children. His father, Marion Barry Sr., was a sharecropper, and his mother, Mattie, labored in the fields and as a domestic. His father was gone from his early childhood, and by 1944 his mother had carried the family north to Memphis, Tennessee, where the boy picked cotton, sold newspapers, and bagged groceries.

He rose by his mind. Barry earned a bachelor's degree from LeMoyne College in 1958 and a master's in chemistry from Fisk University in 1960. That same year he became a founding member and the first national chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, stepping from the laboratory into the front ranks of the civil rights movement.

Settling in Washington, Barry channeled protest into governance. He won a seat on the city's school board in 1971 and the city council in 1974, then was elected mayor in 1978, taking office in 1979. He served four terms across sixteen years, a fierce advocate of home rule and statehood who built summer-jobs programs for the city's young.

His path carried a public fall — a 1990 drug conviction and imprisonment — followed by one of the most remarkable comebacks in American politics, returning to the council and again to the mayoralty. To many Washingtonians he remained, simply, the Mayor for Life. May the son of Mississippi sharecroppers, who gave a voice to the voiceless of his city, be remembered with honor.