Marion Barry

Marion Shepilov Barry Jr. was born on March 6, 1936, in Itta Bena, Mississippi, the son of sharecroppers Marion Barry Sr. and Mattie Cummings. After his father's death the family moved to Memphis, where he became the city's first Black Eagle Scout and graduated from LeMoyne College in 1958 with a chemistry degree. He earned a master's at Fisk in 1960 and entered a doctoral program at the University of Tennessee before leaving for full-time civil-rights work.

He was elected the first national chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in April 1960 and moved to Washington, D.C., in 1965 to open the SNCC office there. He founded Pride Inc. in 1967 to train unemployed Black men, won a seat on the city school board in 1971, and moved to the new D.C. Council in 1974. On January 2, 1979, he was sworn in as the second elected mayor of the District of Columbia.

His three consecutive terms (1979–1991) brought summer-jobs programs and downtown construction but were dogged by federal scrutiny. On January 18, 1990, FBI agents filmed him smoking crack cocaine at the Vista Hotel with former girlfriend Rasheeda Moore; he served six months at Petersburg federal prison in 1991 on a misdemeanor possession count. Voters returned him to the Council in 1992 and to the mayoralty for a fourth term from 1995 to 1999, after which he represented Ward 8 on the Council until his death.

Barry died on November 23, 2014, at United Medical Center in Anacostia. He was married four times and had one son, Marion Christopher Barry.

The name Marion is a French diminutive of Marie, itself from the Hebrew Miryam; though now read as feminine, it has long been used for both sexes, and he wore it as a masculine variant.