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Why would people in D.C. vote for that man again? Wasn’t he the one caught smoking crack in a hotel room?”
As a graduate of Howard University in Washington, D.C., who lived and worked in the District during the turbulent years of the early to mid 1990s, I’ve been asked those same questions about the former and late Washington, D.C. Mayor Marion Barry, Jr., for nearly 20 years now. Outsiders who never lived in D.C., or the Maryland or Northern Virginia suburbs still don’t get it. What made this black man so popular and beloved by the people, despite his personal setbacks?
I used to explain to the outsiders that Barry had been the black jobs czar in DC, who made certain the predominant population of African Americans received their fair share of employment, professional positions of power, affordable housing, construction contracts, healthcare and services for the elderly, new neighborhood and economic development projects, summer youth jobs and training, higher education programs for public school graduates, and other various opportunities for minorities, women and gays in the District.
It seemed that everyone had their own Marion Barry, Jr. story to brag about. “That man gave me my first job,” many still say. And those thousands of first jobs, homes, college degrees, government contracts and bountiful opportunities of personal, family and generational advancement meant a lot more to the people of the District than getting hung up on a man’s personal life, particularly when everyone knew that the FBI and the local police force had conspired to bring the mayor down. In fact, acknowledgment of the establishment’s ire and determination to destroy Barry’s good name, family, image and political career by any means necessary, made the people even more loyal to him. They felt a burning desire to stand guard and protect him.
Marion Barry was that bodacious brother with courage and swagger, who was bad enough to defy the odds of “the man” that were stacked against him and keep things moving on up for the people. He was that black action movie hero who strolled through the big screens that we all watched in the 1970s. Not only that, people genuinely liked him in D.C.. It wasn’t only about the jobs and the opportunities. Barry presented himself as one of them, a down-to-earth man from the South, who would shake your hand, look you in the eyes, speak to you as an equal and attend your church, neighborhood and citywide events and functions. So the people knew him, loved him and respected him for everything that he did for the city, feeling a real connection to the mayor for life.
But if you’ve never lived there, then you wouldn’t necessarily know any of this. That’s why completing a book about his life—in his own words—became so important to Barry in his twilight years. He wanted to tell his own story with all of the rich details that only he could provide.
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Barry sat me down and explained, in our first recorded interview for his book in early September 2012, that he did not want his full legacy tainted by the set-up at the Vista International Hotel room. He was determined that the grainy video footage recorded in January 1990, and distributed around the world, would not be all that he was remembered for.
And his first words on tape were explosive: “Most people don’t know me. They don’t know my work ethic, and they don’t know me as a person. They know me from a 10-second sound bite.”
So we went to work over the next 11 months of grueling, face-to-face interviews in D.C., right up into the heat of August 2013, to record all the important details of Barry’s life and journey, including all that he had done before he arrived in D.C. in the mid 1960s. By that time, the man was nearly 30 years old, had been married, and had traveled all around the country, fully active in the Civil Rights Movement.
Born in Mississippi in 1936, where he, his mother, father and two younger sisters picked cotton on a sharecropper farm, Barry was not originally fiery, nor was he much of a talker. But after his driven mother moved him to West Helena, Ark., and then on to Memphis, Tenn., where she raised her growing family with a new husband, Barry learned to be outspoken as the oldest child and make plenty of noise whenever needed. He once led a three day boycott of the local Memphis newspaper deliveries as a teenager, when he found that black delivery boys were not being treated as fairly as their white counterparts.
Not much of an athlete, Barry was still well-respected as a National Honor Society student and high school leader amongst his peers, who included football, basketball and track stars, who all became state champions at the famous Booker T. Washington High School. Barry graduated from Booker T. in a brand-new gymnasium in 1954. He then became one of the few students from his graduating class to attend college, filling out the paperwork himself and having his mother sign it.
Not having the finances to attend the nationally known schools that accepted his applications, including Morehouse College in Atlanta, Barry went on to become a young student leader at the local LeMoyne-Owen College, where he joined the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity and led a student run NAACP chapter. While studying chemistry, Barry was nearly expelled from the school in his senior year before graduation, because of a strong protest letter that he published in the local newspapers regarding a white Board of Trustees member, who continued to voice support of local busing segregation in Memphis. However, the college president backed down from expelling Barry when his protest article was read and championed by Martin Luther King, Jr., who was scheduled to speak in Memphis.
Barry was even invited to introduce the celebrated reverend to a packed audience of thousands. Barry then earned a Master’s Degree in chemistry at Fisk University in Nashville, before going after a PHD at the University of Kansas, and later transferring to the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. But by then, in the early 1960s, the political climate and the call to get involved in the full-fledged Civil Rights Movement had gotten too strong for Barry to turn away from. And his confidence, speaking abilities and experience as a student leader led him to become the first elected Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) with offices in Nashville, Atlanta, North Carolina, Alabama and Mississippi.
This was all before Barry even thought about coming to Washington. This man is a thousand times more than just a hotel room, and he never allowed obstacles, setbacks, struggles or humiliation to stop him in his goals. But don’t take my word for it. Now you have a full accounting to read in his book Mayor For Life: The Incredible Story of Marion Barry, Jr.
Photo credits: WALLY MCNAMEE/CORBIS; BETTMANN/CORBIS
Omar Tyree is a New York Times bestselling author, professional journalist, lecturer, advocate of urban literacy and an NAACP Image Award winner for Outstanding Fiction . He has published 27 books and sold more than 2.5 million copies worldwide. omartyree.com
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