Marion Barry

Marion Shepilov Barry Jr. was born on the sixth of March 1936 at Itta Bena, Mississippi, the elder of two children of Marion Barry Sr. — a sharecropper who left the family before Marion was four — and Mattie Cummings Barry, a domestic worker. The family migrated north to Memphis in 1944 in the Great Migration. He was raised in straitened circumstances at the LeMoyne Gardens public-housing project of Memphis. He attended Booker T. Washington High School and graduated in 1954 as the only African American Eagle Scout in Tennessee.

He completed the bachelor's at the historically Black LeMoyne College in Memphis in 1958 and the master's in chemistry at Fisk University in 1960. He undertook doctoral study at the University of Kansas and then at the University of Tennessee from 1960 to 1964 but withdrew before completing the dissertation. He became at Fisk in 1960 the first national chairman of the new Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee at its founding meeting at Shaw University. He left graduate school in 1964 to work full-time for SNCC.

He moved to Washington in 1965 as SNCC's local-organising director and founded in 1967 Pride Inc. — the federal-grant-funded Black-male youth-employment programme of Washington that became the principal local-organising vehicle of his subsequent political career.

He was elected to the District of Columbia City Council in November 1974 at the founding home-rule election — succeeding Walter Washington's (placed in this archive) appointed mayoral commissioner regime. He served as chair of the Council Finance Committee from 1974 to 1978.

He stood for mayor of the District in 1978 against the incumbent Walter Washington and Sterling Tucker in the Democratic primary and won the primary by twenty-five hundred votes. He took office on the second of January 1979 and was re-elected by expanding margins in 1982 and 1986.

He was arrested on the eighteenth of January 1990 at the Vista International Hotel of Washington in an FBI surveillance operation involving the use of crack cocaine. He was tried in 1990, convicted of one count of misdemeanour cocaine possession, and served six months at the federal correctional facility at Petersburg. He returned to political life on his release.

He stood for mayor again in 1994 and won. He served the fourth term from 1995 to 1999 and the District Council from 2005 until his death.

He died of complications of cardiac surgery at Washington on the twenty-third of November 2014, at seventy-eight.

He is honored here as the principal political figure of post-home-rule Washington.