Marion Barry Jr., the Mississippi sharecropper’s son and civil rights activist who served three terms as mayor of the District of Columbia, survived a drug arrest and jail sentence, and then came back to win a fourth term as the city’s chief executive, died Sunday in Washington. He was 78.
United Medical Center spokeswoman Natalie Williams said Barry arrived at the hospital about 12:30 a.m. Sunday and died at 1:46 a.m. He had been released from Howard University Hospital on Saturday after a brief stay.
His death was announced by his family in a statement released through a spokeswoman for Barry. No cause was given, but he had suffered from many health problems over the years, including diabetes, prostate cancer and kidney ailments.
Barry, who also served on the D.C. Council for 15 years and had been president of the city’s old Board of Education, was the most influential and savvy local politician of his generation. He dominated the city’s political landscape in the final quarter of the 20th century. There was a time when his critics, in sarcasm but not entirely in jest, called him “Mayor for Life.”
His personal and public life was fraught with high drama and irony. He struggled with alcohol and drug addiction, relapse and recovery. He was married four times, divorced three times and separated from his fourth wife. He had extramarital liaisons and legal trouble over unpaid taxes.
He came to Washington as a champion of the downtrodden and the dispossessed and rose to the pinnacle of power and prestige. As mayor of the District, Barry became a national symbol of self-governance and home rule for urban blacks.
His programs helped provide summer jobs for youths, home-buying assistance for the working-class and food for senior citizens. And he placed blacks in thousands of middle- and upper-level management positions in the city government that in previous generations had been reserved for whites.
“He was really the architect of creating a local government infrastructure in the early days of home rule,” said Frederick D. Cooke Jr., a longtime friend who served as Barry’s attorney, in a 2014 interview. “He helped it to diversify to be more inclusive. It had been a stilted, segregated entity, and he made it possible for people to believe they could have a seat at the table.”
When Barry took office, so chaotic had the District’s finances been that the city didn’t even know how much money it had in the bank. He instituted budgetary and fiscal accounting procedures to figure that out. But by the end of his last term as mayor, Congress and the courts had stripped him of much of his authority, complaining of graft, corruption and gross mismanagement in his administration.
In 1990, Barry was arrested on drug charges in a sting by the FBI and D.C. police after having been lured to a Washington hotel room by a woman with whom he’d previously had an amorous relationship. “(She) set me up!” he muttered aloud as he was being placed under arrest. The comment was captured on FBI videotapes of the sting and broadcast on television, and it would endure as a signature phrase in Barry’s vocal legacy. His conviction months later became front-page news around the world.
He completed a drug and alcohol rehabilitation program and served six months in a federal prison, then used the experience to his political advantage as a platform in his improbable comeback bid for elected office.
“Who can better help our city recover than someone who himself has gone through recovery?” he asked rhetorically.
Barry was born March 6, 1936, into a family of sharecroppers in the rural hamlet of Itta Bena, Miss.
He was married four times and is survived by his wife, Cora, and one son, Marion Christopher Barry.
Current Mayor Vincent Gray ordered flags in the city lowered in Barry’s honor.
