Marion Barry
Marion Shepilov Barry was an American politician who served as mayor of the District of Columbia from 1979 to 1991 and 1995 to 1999. A Democrat, Barry had served three tenures on the Council of the District of Columbia, representing as an at-large member from 1975 to 1979, in Ward 8 from 1993 to 1995, and again from 2005 to 2014.
In the 1960s, he was involved in the civil rights movement, first as a member of the Nashville Student Movement and then serving as the first chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Barry came to national prominence as mayor of the national capital, the first prominent civil rights activist to become chief executive of a major American city. He gave the presidential nomination speech for Jesse Jackson at the 1984 Democratic National Convention. His celebrity status was transformed into international notoriety in January 1990, when he was videotaped during a sting operation smoking crack cocaine and was arrested by Federal Bureau of Investigation officials on drug charges. The arrest and subsequent trial precluded Barry from seeking re-election, and he served six months in a federal prison. After his release, he was elected to the Council of the District of Columbia in 1992. He was elected again as mayor in 1994, serving from 1995 to 1999.
Despite his history of political and legal controversies, Barry was an influential figure in Washington, D.C, enjoying varying popularity throughout his mayoral tenure. The alternative weekly Washington City Paper nicknamed him "Mayor for life". The Washington Post once stated that "to understand the District of Columbia, one must understand Marion Barry".
Early life
Marion Barry was born in rural Itta Bena, Mississippi, the third child of Mattie Cummings and Marion Barry. His father died when he was four years old, and a year later his mother moved the family to Memphis, Tennessee, where her employment prospects were better. His mother married David Cummings, a butcher, and together they raised eight children. Growing up on Latham Street near South Parkway, Marion Barry attended Florida Elementary and graduated from Booker T. Washington High.The first time Barry noticed racial issues was when he had to walk to school while the white students were assigned a school bus to ride. The schools were segregated, as were public facilities. He had a number of jobs as a child, including picking cotton, delivering and selling newspapers, and bagging groceries. While in high school, Barry worked as a waiter at the American Legion post and, at age 17, earned the rank of Eagle Scout.
Marion Barry first began his civil rights activism when he was a paperboy in Memphis. The paper he worked for organized a contest in which any boys who gained 15 new customers could win a trip to New Orleans. Barry and a couple of the other black paperboys reached the quota of 15 new customers yet were not allowed to go on the trip to New Orleans, a segregated city. The paper said it could not afford to hire two buses to satisfy Mississippi's segregation rules. Barry decided to boycott his paper route until they agreed to send the black paperboys on a trip. After the paper offered the black paperboys a chance to go to St. Louis, Missouri, on a trip, because it was not a segregated city, Barry resumed his paper route.
1955–1970: Education and civil rights activism
Undergraduate studies at LeMoyne-Owen College
Barry attended LeMoyne–Owen College, in Memphis, graduating in 1958. In his junior year, the racial injustices he had seen started to come together. He and his friends went to a segregated fairground in Memphis, and went at a time reserved for whites, because they wanted to see the science exhibit. When they were close to the exhibit, a policeman stopped them and asked them to leave. Barry and his friends left without protest. At that time, Barry did not know much about his race, or why they were treated poorly, but he resented the incident. Barry became more active in the NAACP chapter at LeMoyne-Owens, serving as president. It is sometimes said that his ardent support of the civil rights movement earned him the nickname "Shep", in reference to Soviet politician Dmitri Shepilov, and then Barry began using Shepilov as his middle name. But Barry stated in his autobiography that he chose the name with regard to his middle initial S, which had initially stood for nothing, after having found Shepilov's name in newspapers: "I had picked out 'Shepilov' as a middle name because it was the only one that I knew and liked."In 1958, at LeMoyne-Owens, he criticized a college trustee for remarks he felt were demeaning to African Americans, for which he was nearly expelled. While a senior and the president of the NAACP chapter, Barry heard of Walter Chandler—the only white member on LeMoyne-Owen's board of trustees—making comments that black people should be treated as a "younger brother not as an adult". Barry wrote a letter to LeMoyne's president objecting to the comments and asking if Walter Chandler could be removed from the board. A friend of Barry's was the editor of the school newspaper, the Magician, and told Barry to run the letter in the paper. From there, the letter made it to the front page of Memphis' conservative morning paper.
Master's degree, Nashville Student Movement, SNCC
Barry earned an M.S. in organic chemistry from Fisk University in 1960. He was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity. While in graduate school at Fisk, Barry was arrested several times while participating in the Nashville sit-ins to desegregate lunch counters and other Civil Rights Movement events. After graduating from Fisk, Barry continued to work in the Civil Rights Movement, focusing on the elimination of the racial segregation of bus passengers.In 1960, Barry was elected as the first chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He helped develop an organizing project in McComb, Mississippi. The project was both a voter registration and a direct action endeavor. Barry said he and other activists lived with the local people in order to stay safe, as well as to learn what it was like to live there. They could use that information to organize the members of the SNCC accordingly.
Doctoral studies
Barry began doctoral studies at the University of Kansas, but soon quit the program. He contemplated law school to help with his activism, but decided against it, because the delayed admission would mean that he would have to take a year off from school. Had he taken a year off, there was a chance of his being drafted into the military, and he did not want to be drafted.He decided to go to the University of Tennessee where he was awarded a graduate fellowship. Despite being located in the South, the University of Tennessee was an integrated educational institution, a new experience for Barry. He began doctoral chemistry studies at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, the only African American in the program. He learned that he was prohibited from tutoring white children, and his wife Blantie Evans was not allowed to work at the white school. He quit the program in favor of his new duties at SNCC.
In the spring of 1964, he attended a conference in Nashville and became one of the founders of the Southern Student Organizing Committee.
Working for SNCC
As head of SNCC, Barry led protests against racial segregation and discrimination. After he left McComb, Barry lobbied the state legislatures to try to convince them to vote to make the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party the recognized Democratic party of Mississippi in the 1964 Democratic National Convention. In a protest of their continuing disenfranchisement, African Americans had organized this party to prove that blacks wanted to vote and conducted a trial election. Barry slept on the boardwalk in Atlantic City the night after speaking to the New Jersey Legislature.After he left the New York legislature, James Forman asked Barry to go to Washington, D.C., to manage SNCC's office. At the time, over half of the population of the District of Columbia was black; however, the District of Columbia was administered as a special federal district, not as a state, and therefore did not have voting representation in Congress.
In 1965, Barry and Evans moved to Washington, D.C., to open a local chapter of SNCC. He was deeply involved in coordinating peaceful street demonstrations as well as a boycott to protest bus fare increases. Barry organized rides to work for those who needed them. The boycott cost the bus line thousands of dollars, and Barry proved his ability to organize.
He also served as the leader of the Free D.C. Movement, strongly supporting increased home rule, as a Congressional committee exercised administrative rule over the district. Barry quit SNCC in 1967, when H. Rap Brown became chairman of the group. In 1967, Barry and Mary Treadwell co-founded Pride, Inc., a Department of Labor-funded program to provide job training to unemployed black men. The group employed hundreds of teenagers to clean littered streets and alleys in the district. Barry and Treadwell had met while students at Fisk University, and they later met again while picketing in front of the Washington Gas Light Company.
Barry and Treadwell married in 1972. They separated five years later.
Barry was active in the aftermath of the 1968 Washington, D.C., riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis. He organized through Pride Inc. a program of free food distribution for poor black residents whose homes and neighborhoods had been destroyed in the rioting. Barry convinced the Giant Food supermarket chain to donate food, and he spent a week driving trucks and delivering food throughout the city's housing projects. He also became a board member of the city's Economic Development Committee, helping to route federal funds and venture capital to black-owned businesses that were struggling to recover from the riots.
When President Richard Nixon declared July 21, 1969, National Day of Participation in honor of the Moon landing by Apollo 11, Barry criticized him. Barry believed that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. deserved a national honor day on his birthday, which Nixon had opposed. Said Barry, "Why should blacks feel elated when we see men eating on the moon when millions of blacks and poor whites don't have enough money to buy food here on earth?"