Marion Barry, the longtime mayor of the District of Columbia who staged a remarkable political comeback after a 1990 FBI sting videotaped him smoking crack cocaine, died early Sunday. He was 78.
The D.C. City Council issued a statement confirming Barry’s death. Barry’s family said the former mayor died shortly after midnight Sunday at the United Medical Center, after having been released from Howard University Hospital the previous day. No cause of death was immediately specified. Barry had battled kidney problems stemming from diabetes and high blood pressure and underwent a kidney transplant in February 2009.
The statement said Barry’s family requested that their privacy be respected, and further details would be forthcoming.
Barry had served as a member of the city council since 2005, winning re-election twice. He was often still referred to in his Ward 8 constituency as “Mayor Barry” despite not having held the office since 1999.
“Marion was not just a colleague but also was a friend with whom I shared many fond moments about governing the city,” D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray said in a statement. “He loved the District of Columbia and so many Washingtonians loved him.”
Barry was first elected mayor in 1978 after building a political career as an official of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and a local activist in Washington. Re-elected in 1982 and 1986, he was dubbed “Mayor For Life.”
“I want to take the boards off of houses and put people in them,” he said shortly after being sworn in in 1979. “I want to provide minimal care for all people, regardless of their financial situation. And I want to live out (Dr. Martin Luther) King’s legacy of peace, brotherhood and survival.”
But he gained international notoriety when he was filmed smoking crack in a downtown Washington hotel room with a female friend. He was convicted of a single count of drug possession — jurors had deadlocked on most counts — and sentenced to six months in prison.
Despite the embarrassment, Barry’s political career was far from over. In 1992, he made it back to city government, winning a council seat representing the poorest of the city’s eight wards. That victory helped propel him to a fourth, and final, term as mayor in 1994.
“Marion Barry changed America with his unmitigated gall to stand up in the ashes of where he had fallen and come back to win,” poet Maya Angelou said in 1999.
But his 1994 vote was divided sharply along racial lines and his political revival drew criticism from many. Congress moved to strip Barry of much of his mayoral authority in 1995 as the city flirted with bankruptcy.
Congress installed a financial control board, and Barry decided not to seek a fifth term. He held authority over little more than the city’s parks, libraries and community access cable TV station in his last years as mayor.
“Marion Barry sadly turned the capital city into a national joke,” then-Sen. Lauch Faircloth, R-N.C., said in May 1998.
In his later years on the council, Barry played the role of elder statesman, but he sometimes exasperated his colleagues with his wavering attention at meetings and frequent, rambling references to his tenure as mayor.
He also battled legal problems, including tax as well as drug charges. Even as he was fighting kidney disease in early 2009, prosecutors were seeking to revoke probation in a tax case, saying he had not kept a promise to file annual returns. The council also censured him twice for ethical violations.
Barry was born March 6, 1936, to Marion and Mattie Barry, in the small Mississippi delta town of Itta Bena, and was raised in Memphis, Tenn., after the death of his father, a sharecropper.
While an undergraduate at LeMoyne College (now LeMoyne-Owen College), Barry picked up the nickname “Shep” in reference to Soviet propagandist Dmitri Shepilov for his ardent support of the civil rights movement. Barry began using Shepilov as his middle name.
Barry did graduate work in chemistry at Fisk University in Nashville, Tenn., earning a master’s degree. He left school short of a doctorate to work in the civil rights movement.
His political rise began in 1960, when he became the first national chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, which sent young people into the South to register black voters and became known as one of the most militant civil rights groups of that era.
Barry’s work with the committee brought him to Washington, where he became immersed in local issues, joining boycotts of the bus system and leading rallies in support of the city’s fledgling home rule efforts.
In 1970, The Washington Post wrote: “Four years ago widely considered a young Black Power Militant with almost no constituency, (Barry) has become a man who is listened to — if not fully accepted — on all sides.”
