"To understand the District of Columbia, one must understand Marion Barry.'' - Washington Post.
Hope you enjoy this dynamic preservation of oral history and the context that entails creating a permanent record to contribute to our understanding of the past, and blending the social and cultural aspect for richer comprehension.
Please, you may send us a note if you believe a salient piece is missing in this summarized installment - through Mayor Marion Barry's maiden election in 1978. This is a non-profit and non-commercial Project for educational purposes only.
| Save the Date June 19, 2021 at Anacostia Park, Washington, DC.
Jah Kente International Presents Weaving History in the Garment of Arts. The Piece of Peace for Sustainable Development. Marion Barry Exhibition: Mayor for Life with Multicultural Flair and Flavor. Marion, Muriel is Bad Ass - Salon Recordings. MBSYEP 2021. |
15th Anniversary of Jah Kente International Performing Arts (HARLEM RENAISSANCE). | | A Day in Class on Soft Skills and Integrated Arts: Jah Kente International-Marion Barry Summer Youth Employment Program (MBSYEP) 2020 included real life job interviews and hiring. In the video, watch 14 year old David Whittington! He aced the interview and landed a job. Meet him on June 19 as our broadcaster. | |
The Griot: "Marion, Muriel is Bad Ass."
Born of the inquiry by youths in the Jah Kente International program and adults who generously spared the time to share their firsthand knowledge of the era in Washington, DC, who personally knew Mayor Marion Barry, some in different parts of the world today, and coming today for common cause, the Project is set in oral tradition and versed in cultural expressions. | |
The Griot, the storyteller, preserves history. The setting is outdoor and without fail, African coffee and delicacies are served with anything else.
The Jah Kente International Tiefing Spring Salon starts on March 27 and the recordings begin.
| | Mayor Marion S. Barry dubbed Mayor for Life in this City. | | . It is civic history through the eyes of the time, conveyed with the spoken word, song, dance, drama, and visual depictions of the epic events to make sense of the context in which they occurred, and to teach children and adults about Washington, DC shaped by Mayor Marion Shepilov Barry and how the gains are sustained by current Mayor Muriel Bowser.
Jah Kente International collects, assembles, preserves, and interprets the voices, memories, commentaries of people in ethnic communities in audio and video formats. The narrations are excerpted in text publications, radio, video documentary, visual exhibitions, dramatization, and public presentations to generate conversation.
The conversation is authentically expressed to immortalize the experience with no author, as the story emerges from those who evolved from the margins to the center of participation in life in Washington, DC for Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access to have meaning. | | Marion Barry speaking at an Urban Coalition Meeting. | | . Tempting as it is to bow to the brutal force of racial injustice as the meta-narrative, it is truer that Marion Barry understood this injustice but did not just ride on race to the top as a reckoning force.
He instinctively built coalitions from the left out, the impaired, the gay community, the immigrants, to the progressive white establishment, with an uncanny ability to reinvent with a comeback in a particular sociopolitical climate.
Naturally, the setting reaches back to fetch why and how Mayor Marion Barry came to Washington, DC. The campaign manager of his 1978 mayoral campaign, Ivanhoe Donaldson, told the Campaign Oral History Project at the George Washington University's Gelman Library on Mayor Marion that he began to run for mayor of D.C. "the day he was born."
But the future Mayor didn't seem like the mayoral caliber when he came to town. "The champion of the street dudes" is how fellow activist Courtland Cox recalled the time — a dashiki-wearing orator who spoke casually of the possibility of getting "beat to death" by the police who had arrested him multiple times in D.C.
Speaking to WTOP Radio on "the Making of Marion Barry," seasoned journalist and political commentator, Tom Sherwood, explained the phenomenon of white voters backing the most activist black candidate in the campaign because some of the issues he brought up transcended race. "The white vote in the District of Columbia is a liberal white vote," Sherwood told WTOP.… "And the white people are politically attuned, both to national and local issues. The civil rights movement was a moral imperative; Barry represented that — the chance to have black people run the city government like never before."
Mr. Sherwood has covered D.C. politics for years and co-authored "Dream City," with Harry Jaffe. He said "The '60s were an amazing time of discomfort and demands that things had to be better. And that moved on into the '70s. … There was less tolerance about getting along and going along. Power doesn't give up easily — you have to confront power. That's what Barry was able to do."
Marion Barry could move between "the suits and the streets," as Mr. Sherwood described the political versality. He put his stamp on his signature job program he created for the underdog, including ex-convicts, and he eventually put on a suit, ran for the School Board and the D.C. Council. In both arenas, Marion Barry talked about holding the line on taxes.
In the realm, the Councilman Barry proved his mastery of the budgetary process that might have stunned those who didn't know he was a dissertation shy of a Ph.D. Observers and veterans of D.C. politics say Marion Barry demonstrated how the activism of the 1960s could be adapted to new dynamics in the changing decade.
In sum, Marion Barry arrived in town as a young civil rights activist, some black folks viewed him as a troublemaker upsetting their perch, he led a bus boycott, alternated between street clothes and boardroom suits, he moved seamlessly into mainstream politics, and marched unstoppable to the mayor's office. | | Mayor Marion Barry is memorialized with an 8-foot statue outside of the Wilson Building, which houses the mayor's office and the D.C. Council on Pennsylvania Avenue in Northwest D.C. | | How is it now?
More exactly, how are those defining and pivotal gains maintained by current Mayor Muriel Bowser? By no intent is this a political and partisan banter, and it is certainly not an exhaustive account. Rather, Bad Ass denotes the legacy upheld by Mayor Bowser for successive generations to tell the story. | | The narratives are attributed to many sources, including secondary data obtained through censuses, libraries, DC council records, and interviews by external organizations.
Introduction for the Salon The Story is told and young people enact the scenes.
Marion Barry was born on March 6, 1936 in Itta Bena, Mississippi. In 2011, he told the Oral History Project of McComb (Mississippi) High School that his parents were sharecroppers and they lived in a shotgun house.
Shotgun houses are small, single-story houses that are only one room wide and typically not more than 12 feet across. Rooms are arranged - one behind the other and doors at each end of the house. They did not have electricity or indoor plumbing. Before he was old enough to go to school, his mother would take him into the fields while she worked.
Based on the telling, he went to a one-room schoolhouse with one teacher for 40 kids. "I don't remember learning very much," the future Mayor said. Usually, he would watch the Greyhound bus go by on its way to Chicago, and wish "we were on that bus, getting the hell out of there."
When young Barry was 8 years old, his mother moved the family to Memphis, Tennessee. He wrote that his mother worked as a domestic for white women in Arkansas, "but she had a rule where she always insisted that she go in through the front door and not through the back. She told them to call her by her last name, Ms. Barry. … My mother earned her respect and showed me how to earn it."
'Nobody was protesting.'
Marion Barry was a senior at LeMoyne-Owen College in 1958. The NAACP, of which he was LeMoyne's chapter president, sued Memphis over segregated seating on the city buses.
A white man on the LeMoyne Board of Trustees "said some negative things about black folks in his argument to the court," remarks Barry found "condescending," as he told the McComb students.
Marion Barry heard 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". He criticized Mr. Chandler for remarks he felt were demeaning to African Americans.
He wrote a letter to LeMoyne's President objecting to the comments and asking if Walter Chandler could be removed from the board - to resign or apologize. A friend of Marion Barry was the editor of the school newspaper, the Magician. He reportedly told him to run the letter in the paper. From there, the letter made its way to the front page of Memphis' conservative morning paper. This letter was published on the front page of the Memphis Commercial Appeal.
The next day, the LeMoyne President — a black man — called Barry "an embarrassment to the college" and said he had to dismiss him. It was three weeks before graduation. "I said no, you're not going to dismiss me," Barry remembered. "We'll close this college down."
He was not dismissed — the president "thought it was better to get rid of me," Barry wrote later." Marion Barry graduated.
"Nobody was protesting," Barry told the students; "nobody was raising hell. People were accepting that segregated situation because white people had conditioned us to accept that." | | In 1960, Marion Barry (middle in the picture above) was working on a master degree in chemistry at Fisk University when he helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and was elected as its first National Chairman. He began spending more time at sit-ins, marches and demonstrations, including some of the first sit-ins at lunch counters in Memphis.
SNCC is commonly pronounced as SNIK. | |
The SNCC was founded as an interracial group in early 1960 in Raleigh, North Carolina, to capitalize on the success of a surge of sits-ins in Southern college towns, where Black students refused to leave restaurants in which they were denied service based on their race.
Ella Baker was an educator, organizer, and human rights activist. She worked alongside W.E.B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, A. Philip Randolph and Martin Luther King Jr.
Ms Baker also mentored emerging activists such as Diane Nash (Howard University; Fisk University), Stokely Carmichael (Howard University), Rosa Parks (Alabama State Teachers College for Negroes), in her role of primary advisor and strategist for SNCC.
She invited Black college students who had participated in the early 1960 sit-ins to an April 1960 gathering at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina. In May 1960, the group constituted itself as the SNCC and Marion Barry (Fisk University) was elected SNCC's first National Chairman.
In Summer 1960, Marion Barry represented SNCC before the Platform Committee at the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles and the Republican National Convention in Chicago.
In early August, SNCC staff members, James Forman (third from left in the picture above) and Paul Brooks (Fisk University), began planning a Freedom Ride in solidarity with Robert F. Williams (Johnson C. Smith University).
| | SNCC Staff singing in Raymond Street, Atlanta SNCC office in 1963. From left to right: Mike Sayer, Macarthur Cotton, James Forman, Marion Barry (in trench coat), Lester McKinney, Mike Thelwell, Lawrence Guyot, Judy Richardson, John Lewis, Jean Wheeler . | |
The method of nonviolent protest brought SNCC to national prominence, throwing a harsh public light, including global awareness, on structural and crude white racism in the South. In subsequent years, SNCC strengthened its activities, including supporting Freedom Rides in 1961, the March on Washington in 1963, and agitated for the Civil Rights Act (1964). In 1966 SNCC officially threw its support behind the broader protest of the Vietnam War.
Many of the Historical Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) students who became notable civil rights activists and leaders were members of SNCC, Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Student Central Committee of the Nashville Christian Leadership Council (Nashville Student Movement), Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the Voter Registration Project during the 1960s. Some HBCU students were, however, engaged in non-violent civil rights activism before these groups were formed.
Marion Barry continued his activism when he began working on a Ph.D. in chemistry, first from Kansas University and then from the University of Tennessee. His passion for the Civil Rights Movement kept him from completing his doctorate. Instead, Barry's undivided efforts went into the SNCC.
What use was getting an education if you couldn't get a job, or vote, teach where you wanted to teach, or live where you wanted to live? — Marion Barry He explained in his own book that students had the most to gain from civil rights: "What use was getting an education if you couldn't get a job, or vote, teach where you wanted to teach, or live where you wanted to live?"
The future DC Mayor was back in Mississippi — to McComb, to organize. In 1961, Marion Barry helped develop an organizing project in McComb, Mississippi. The project was both a voter registration and direct action.
In 1964 Marion Barry wrote, "if you were heading down South from New York and sitting in the front section of the train, you would get up and move to the back section once you reached Washington. But, if you were coming from the South and headed North, you would start out in the back section of the train and move to the front once you got to Washington."
In 1964-65 Marion Barry headed up the SNCC's New York City office. He worked at SNCC in New York for a few months before being sent to D.C. in 1965 to launch a local chapter of SNCC. As Director of the DC SNCC Office, the work involved issues covering civil rights, human rights and equitable inclusions.
"He was dispatched to raise funds, not hell," Milton Coleman wrote in The Washington Post decades later. "But, that didn't last long."
Based on U.S. Census, in 1950, 64.6 percent of the population of D.C. was white and 35 percent black; in 1960, it was 45.2 percent white, 53.9 percent black. By the time Marion Barry arrived in Washington in 1965, the city was 66 percent black. But, the President of the Board of Commissioners, a three-Member Executive Board appointed by the U.S. President was white. This was the closet thing D.C. had to a mayor.
Almost all D.C.'s police officers and firefighters were white. The House and Senate committees that made the laws for the District were overwhelmingly white Southern men.
In 1967, President Lyndon Johnson used his presidential power under Reorganization Plan No. 3 of 1967 to replace the three-commissioner government that had run the capital since 1871 under congressional supervision. He implemented a more moderated government headed by a single commissioner, assistant commissioner, and a nine-member city council, all appointed by the US President.
President Johnson appointed the Washington Commissioner, which by this time had been informally retitled as "Mayor-Commissioner." Mr. Walter Washington of Washington, DC, was appointed. In 1967, he was one of three blacks chosen to lead major cities. But Richard Hatcher of Gary, Indiana and Carl Stokes of Cleveland were elected.
John McMillan, a Democrat from South Carolina who headed the House District Committee for 24 years, once mailed Mr. Walter Washington a watermelon, calling it "a letter from home."
The insight into this: When Mr. Washington sent his first budget to Congress in late 1967, Mr. McMillan responded by having a truckload of watermelons delivered to Washington's office. (Harry S. Jaffe and Tom Sherwood. Dream City: Race, Power, and the Decline of Washington D.C. Simon & Schuster, 1994, p.62).
Some referred to Mr. Washington as "a ribbon cutter" to depict and deride the powerlessness of the office.
During his long tenure as District Committee chairman, which began long before home rule and at the close of World War 11, Mr. McMillan was implacably opposed to home rule.
In an article in Washington Post, Mr. McMillan was viewed and described as "holder of ultimate authority for almost every aspect of life in the city from parking space assignments to public employee payrolls." His outlook and actions as Chairman won points and praise from city business interests and conservative congressmen who were his ardent allies in opposing home rule for the District.
By January 1966, Marion Barry had began organizing a bus boycott in Washington, DC that he called "mancott,'' in protest of a 5-cent fare hike. The increase was rescinded the next day. It was the first victory for Barry's "Free DC" movement, an attempt at organizing the black population and creating genuine home rule.
Years later, Max Berry, who became the finance chair of Barry's 1978 first mayoral campaign, spoke to the Marion Barry 1978 Mayoral Campaign Oral History Project at the George Washington University's Gelman Library. It was about his first impression: "Barry would stand in the park in a dashiki speaking to anybody who would speak to him. It was almost like London in Hyde Park, only he wasn't crazy or anything; he was just talking about the District."
Max Berry continued: "I was immediately sort of impressed because I thought I was going to get … the wild guy to try to sell me something ridiculous, and I could tell he was a man of intelligence, even though he looked a little funny to start with."
Years before Marion Barry was on terms of endearment with the District's white voters, he had made some waves. After the 1968 uprising in D.C. following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Barry said, "White people should be allowed to come back only if the majority of the ownership is in the hands of blacks. That is, they should come back and give their experience and their expertise — and, then, they should leave."
He did not appear impressed the following year. After the 1969 moon landing, Marion Barry was moved to wonder aloud: "Why should black rejoice when two white Americans land on the moon when white America's money and technology have not even reached" the inner city.
He] recognized that in order to make real change, he had to become a part of the system he'd been fighting against. … And, he made a lot of change. — Former D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray and current Council Member representing Ward 7.
| | Photo: Pride Inc. headquarters at 1536 U Street, NW, c1968. | |
In 1967, Marion Barry launched the first version of a program whose legacy would follow him the rest of his life and beyond. It was Pride Inc., which he founded with his then wife, Mary Treadwell, and other cofounders.
Back then in 1968, an update read: On Monday 8 January 1968 Pride Inc. began working on its contract to clean and paint Clifton Terrace at 13th & Clifton Streets, NW. Pride Inc. was co-founded by Marion Barry, Carroll Harvey, David Rusk, Mary Treadwell, among others, in July 1967, as a "youth-run corporation" and "job training program" to help "hard-core dudes become self-sufficient."
Generations, including in a family, got their first job experience through the now Mayor Marion Summer Youth Employment Program and its predecessor - Pride Inc. Pride was funded by the U.S. Department of Labor, and Marion Barry worked with Labor Secretary Willard Wirtz - a white man. Mr. Wirtz held the post of Labor Secretary throughout the John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson administrations.
He developed programs for the Johnson administration's War on Poverty, advocated for remedial education for school dropouts; and promoted retraining programs for unemployed workers. Mr. Wirtz's relationship with President Johnson was reportedly strained by Mr. Wirtz sending a private memorandum to the President expressing concerns about the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War. (Weil, Martin (April 25, 2010). "Labor secretary for Kennedy, Johnson". Washington Post. p. C6.)
In Pride Inc., working with the federal government and local population, Marion Barry proved the genius of his political and communication skills, and dexterity in adapting to the circumstances to obtain the larger goal for the constituency.
One of the organization's ingenious approach Barry (himself) remembered was for members to stay in the houses of local families to give them the kind of connection that could come in handy in the face of a backlash from white local police, and also to form a bond of understanding. | |
The truth is, it not just changed my generation, but my son's and my grandson's generation. — Gerald Bruce Lee, retired federal judge
One of those kids who got a job in 1967 through Pride Inc. was Gerald Bruce Lee from Anacostia. He swept the streets.
"It changed everything," Mr. Lee told WTOP in its serialization of the "Making of Marion Barry."
"I learned leadership; I learned how to work … It opened up a lot of doors and windows of opportunity. …" "And, the beauty of it was we were cleaning up our own communities. We were working and earning funds that we could take home. … You go into a community where there's trash and dirt, and you clean it up. And, it looked good. And, you felt pride in it," Lee said.
By 1969, Pride Inc. was connected with American University, and students could get help with applications and interviews at various colleges. Mr. Lee and several of his friends were admitted to American before they had finished high school.
"For most of us in that group, we had never thought about college," he said. The retired judge went to his first college class – "baseball caps cocked to the sides, sunglasses" – and remembered thinking, "My mother told me that people who went to college had to be really smart. And, I sat there and listened, and … I heard the teacher say something, and I thought, 'I was thinking that.'"
He marveled or was mesmerized by possibilities. "They picked us up at the corner of 16th and U Street … and drove us up Massachusetts Avenue. As I was riding up Massachusetts Avenue, I saw manicured lawns and fountains. [I asked] 'Is this somebody's house? Is this Washington?' They said, 'Yes, this is Washington, D.C.'"
Mr. Lee remembered: "I don't think American University would have looked at me, coming from Southeast, were it not for Pride," he said. "Pride also worked with ex-offenders, including those who were handicapped by drug problems. They got counseling and training, and some of them went back to crime. But, more succeeded," Mr. Lee said. "Who wanted to take the ex-offenders? Well, Pride did. We embraced them. We knew they were part of our family and our community," he said.
Mr. Lee recalled that he had a supervisor who earned his high school diploma at the prison in Lorton, went to college with the help of Pride, and helped others do the same. Other Pride workers, including ex-offenders, were trained in professions such as computer science and accounting.
"The truth is, it not just changed my generation, but my son's and my grandson's generation," Mr. Lee said. "Barry and Treadwell "were determined to show that there was talent in our community that just needed an opportunity."
Mr. Gerald Bruce Lee served as United States District Judge for the Eastern District of Virginia. Prior to ascending to the bench, he was a trial lawyer for fifteen years, representing individuals and businesses in civil and criminal cases in state and federal courts. He was a partner at Cohen, Dunn & Sinclair, an Alexandria, Virginia, law firm.
As an attorney, Mr. Lee was involved in a number of notable cases. He was one of the first to assert the "battered woman defense" in a murder case in 1978 and his client was acquitted of murder. He successfully defended a Vietnam veteran in a criminal case and arranged for the veteran to receive proper medical treatment for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and drug treatment. As counsel for local civil rights organization, he defended the principal of a local high school against disciplinary action after school officials learned he was in an interracial marriage.
As noted in an article in Washington Post, he increased diversity in the legal profession.
Mr. Lee was an active member of the Virginia State Bar. He was an elected member of the Virginia State Bar Council, Chairman of the General Practice of Law Section, President of the Northern Virginia Black Attorneys Association, and Chairman of the Judicial Selection Committee of the Alexandria Bar Association.
In 1990, Governor Douglas Wilder appointed him to serve on the Board of Directors of the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, the managers of Washington National and Dulles International Airports. Mr. Lee received the highest rating possible for all twelve bar associations for the appointment.
As a federal judge, Mr. Lee retired from active service on September 30, 2017.
He is a mentor/role-model, motivational and educational speaker, teacher, and a leader of Kamp Kappa, a summer camp sponsored by the Alexandria-Fairfax Chapter of Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity.
This is just one among numerous success stories of Pride Inc. - the power of empathy that generates opportunity.
"You don't understand the conditions until you really are in the conditions, and seeing people live the way they do," Marion Barry told the McComb High School students nearly half a century later. "You never get it until you get it right up here — right in your front door. When you've got to live it, and you see the hurt, see the pain, see the tiredness." | | Above; November 2, 1971: Marion Barry, seeking a Board of Education at-large seat, casts his ballot at the Ward 1 voting precinct at Cardozo High School (13th and Clifton Sts. NW) | |
In 1972, as part of the gradual implementation of home rule, the D.C. School Board was the highest office that D.C. voters could choose directly.
The retired Judge Lee recalled: "It was exciting to us," "The idea that the Marion we knew … wanted to go inside was huge. … It was an exciting time to see that someone we knew, who cared about the community, who cared about us, was going to become a member of the school board."
Marion Barry ran for the Presidency of the School Board and won.
Congress passed the District Home Rule Act of 1973 that allowed DC residents to vote for a mayor and a 13-member Council. Legislative powers were given to the District Council and Executive powers to the mayor. | | Then D.C. Delegate Walter Fauntroy holds Marion Barry's hand in the air to celebrate the latter's victory in a D.C. school board election on Nov. 2, 1971. This was Barry's first D.C. office. Fauntroy -- who was succeeded by Eleanor Holmes Norton in 1991 -- is still alive. | |
In 1974, Marion Barry was elected to the DC Council. His actions on the Council helped to break the economic stranglehold that whites had on business in the city.
On the Council, he was Chairman of the Committee on Finance and Revenue, where he combined his activism with sense for numbers.
"You had to be able to count," former Washington Post writer Milton Coleman told the George Washington project. "And, folks always felt black folks can't count."
In a report issued during the summer of 1975, Councilman Barry wrote, "Every time the District is faced with a financial bind, the same tired 'solutions' are trotted out: more income taxes, bigger sales taxes, increased property taxes. Perhaps our city administrators figure that the taxpayer is so dispirited that s/he can tolerate anything."
Marion Barry did not stray far from the activist mode. He continued to operate as an activist in various segments of the community.
Richard Maulsby, the founder of the Gertrude Stein Democratic Club, D.C.'s oldest gay Democratic association, told the George Washington Project, "I can remember [Council President] Sterling Tucker slinking into a Gay Pride Day event when it was down at the Lambda Rising [book store] on R Street, like 6 o'clock, after everybody had left. But, Marion was there in the middle of the whole thing, giving a speech, rousing people up, working the audience. I mean, there just wasn't anybody like him on the City Council."
One of Barry's early moves as Chairman of the DC Council's Finance Committee was loosening the grip that excluded minorities. He initiated a requirement that all contracts for the District government for services, supplies and development include a mandatory 35 percent participation for minority-owned companies.
When the City Commission passed that law, African American, Continental Africans (African immigrant community), and Latino businesses began to fairly compete for contracts, opening the doors for businesses of color to share in the city's fortune, resulting in the emergence of a black middle-class in D.C.
Overall, the law provided economic inclusion for those groups shut out of the economic system including Latinos, Africans, Asians and Pacific Islanders, and women of all nationalities. | | Councilman Marion Barry in the hospital after suffering from a wound from a gunshot pellet in 1977. | |
The gunmen killed 24-year-old Maurice Williams, a radio reporter from WHUR-FM, who stepped off a fifth-floor elevator into the crisis (the fifth floor is where the mayor and Council Chairmen have their offices). The gunmen also shot D.C. Protective Service Division police officer Mack Cantrell, who died in the hospital a few days later of a heart attack.
When Councilman Marion Barry walked into the hallway after hearing a commotion, he was hit by a ricocheted shotgun pellet, which lodged just above his heart. He was taken out through a window and rushed to a hospital.
After a 39-hour standoff, the gunmen surrendered and all remaining hostages were released.
| | A hand-knit campaign button at the Marion Barry 1978 Campaign Oral History Project, housed at the George Washington University's Gelman Library. | | A campaign button at the Marion Barry 1978 Campaign Oral History Project, housed at the George Washington University's Gelman Library. | | In January 1978, Marion Barry announced his candidacy for mayor. Under his belt, he could point to his record on the D.C. Board of Education and the D.C. Council, where he had been Chairman of the Finance and Revenue Committee and had proposed more than a few innovative ideas for bringing more money into the District while holding the line on taxes.
But with the sitting Mayor Walter Washington and Council Chairman Sterling Tucker also in the ring, the Democratic duel for nomination looked like a farfetched idea for an insurgent. For Marion Barry, it was the start of the proverbial cat with nine lives. | | A Vint Lawrence cartoon shows Marion Barry between "His Highness" Council President Sterling Tucker and "His Honor" Mayor Walter Washington. | |
Barry wrote, "I learned early on during my civil rights activism that dangerous events can either slow you down or speed you up."
Based on interviews, the then Councilman Barry explained that supporters initiated and put together a campaign organization "without me really knowing or asking," and that may be true. However, Sterling Tucker, the then D.C. Council chairman whom Barry beat in the primary, recalled, "Oh, Marion came to the council [and] we knew Marion was starting to run for mayor."
"He ran all the traps," said Ivan Brandon, a media consultant who has known Barry since 1967. "He did all the hard work to get to the point where he could run for mayor."
Brandon indicated that Barry's supporters were diverse during his maiden mayoral run. "The white community in D.C. — the folks who had been here a long time, the people who were the actual power brokers," Brandon said. "Marion managed to appeal to those folks. They saw him as an agent of change."
On Aug. 30, 1978, The Washington Post — the voice of DC white establishment - did the shocking thing, endorsing Marion Barry, the former street activist, for mayor of D.C.
While praising his opponent's qualification, the Washington Post placed more weight on Barry's "energy, nerve, initiative, toughness of mind, an active concern for people in distress." It concluded that Marion Barry would bring to the mayor's office a "genuinely bold, alive commitment to actually making things happen, and a critically important belief that things can be done." … there was really something special about him, about the times, generally, and about that moment for this city. — Kwame Holman | |
Marion Barry became the second elected mayor of DC. He was sworn in by US Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first black Supreme Court Justice who was appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson. At 42 years old, Barry was one of the youngest mayors to lead a major US city. | | A year after he began his first mayoral term in 1979, Barry remarked at a February 1980 conference:
"In Washington, as in every other major urban center in America, we have entire sections of our city which have been abandoned and neglected by the mainstream of economic activity…Although private enterprise has neglected or abandoned some areas of our city, we must not give up the fight. It is time for the citizens of these areas themselves to become owners and providers of the basic services needed for daily life. The cooperative movement is just what is needed to provide this opportunity." | | President Jimmy Carter talks with Mayor Barry on the South Lawn of the White House in 1980. | |
Marion Barry years as a street activist defined much of his first term as mayor, characterized by compassion, energy and an almost uncommon talent for connecting with people from all walks of life, particularly the poor and disenfranchised.
First Term as Mayor, 1978-1982 Some of the notable achievements:
- Opened city government to those who had been excluded. (Senior citizens, the poor, gays, blacks and other minorities)
- Opened the Minority Business Opportunity Center which listed minority owned companies for government contracting. At this time white businesses controlled 97% of government contracts in DC.
- Created summer jobs programs which employed high school aged minorities.
- Expanded Pride, Inc. programs to local universities such as American, GW and Howard, providing youth leadership training.
- Placed thousands of African Americans in mid-level government jobs previously held by whites.
- Appointed women to top management positions previously held by white men.
- Fought for completion of Metro Green Line crossing Anacostia River into SE, DC.
On May 21, 1998, in rather dramatic fashion, Mayor Marion Barry announced he will not run for a fifth term as mayor, in an acknowledgment that the "mean-spirited Republican Congress" will never restore home rule as long as he remains in office.
In times of Barry's own difficulties, "ask the people who he's helped," as the late Professor Ronald Walters, a professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland, said.
"One of the reasons Barry was able to come back into office [after his release from prison] is that these people he's helped over the years haven't forgotten him. . . . At the end of the day, you've got to explain why this guy has been able to maintain a power base."
Whatever the biases, personal, and ideological persuasions, it is hard to deny the fact: Marion Barry remains the District's most charismatic political figure who defined, dominated, and shaped Washington DC's modern political landscape.
| | 4th time Mayor Marion Barry, Mayor for life, died on November 23, 2014 at 78. At his death, he was a Councilmember representing Ward 8. He had endorsed Muriel Bowser for Mayor.
"It is not the measure the man, it is who Marion Barry remained at heart.'' - Jah Kente International. | | This article is compiled, and from secondary source data; researched; and written by Evelyn Joe. This is a non-profit project meant for educational purposes only. | | | | | | |
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