Marion Barry

At 78 years old, Marion Barry physical status not available right now. We will update Marion Barry's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Marion Shepilov Barry (born Marion Barry Jr., 1936 – November 23, 2014) was an American politician who served as the second mayor of Columbia from 1979 to 1991, and then as the fourth mayor from 1995 to 1999.

Barry, a Democrat, served three terms on the Council of the District of Columbia from 1975 to 1979, then as an at-large member from 1994 to 1995, and then again from 2005 to 2014.

He was active in the civil rights movement in the 1960s, first as a founder of the Nashville Student Movement and then as the first chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Barry rose to national prominence as the first well-known civil rights activist to serve as the president of a major American city.

At the 1984 Democratic National Convention, Jesse Jackson made the presidential nomination address for the first time.

His fame was born into international prominence in January 1990, when he was caught on crack cocaine during a sting operation and was arrested by federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) investigators on drug charges.

Barry was refused re-election after being arrested and convicted of serving six months in a federal jail, and he was sentenced to six months in jail for his troubles.

After his freedom, he was elected to the Council of the District of Columbia in 1992.

He was elected again as mayor in 1994, serving from 1995 to 1999. Despite his political and legal scandals, Barry was a well-known and influential figure in Washington, D.C., who died as a result of political and court scandals. The alternative weekly Washington City Paper dubbed him "Mayor for life," a term that remained long after Barry left the mayoralty.

"One must know the District of Columbia," the Washington Post wrote once.

1936–1954: Early life

Marion Barry was born in rural Itta Bena, Mississippi, and was the third child of Mattie Cummings and Marion Barry. His father died when he was four years old, and a year later his mother moved the family to Memphis, Tennessee, where her career prospects were much better. His mother married David Cummings, a butcher, and the two children were born together. Marion Barry, a student at Florida Elementary and High School, grew up on Latham Street near South Parkway, and graduated from Booker T. Washington High.

When Barry had to walk to school when the white students were given a school bus to ride, he was the first time he noticed racial injustice. The schools were segregated, as well as public facilities. As a child, he did a variety of jobs, including picking cotton, selling and selling newspapers, and bagging groceries. When in high school, Barry served as a waiter at the American Legion post and earned the rank of Eagle Scout at age 17.

Marion Barry sparked his passion for civil rights activism in Memphis as a paperboy. He was working at a newspaper in which any boys who gained 15 new customers would win a trip to New Orleans. Since being refused admission to New Orleans, a segregated place, Barry and a few of the other black paperboys exceeded the quota of 15 new customers. The paper stated that it could not afford to employ two buses to comply with Mississippi's segregation laws. Barry decided against going back to the black paperboys until they promised to bring them on a trip. Barry resumed his newspaper route after the paper offered the black paperboys a chance to travel to St. Louis, Missouri on a trip because it was not a segregated town.

Education and civil rights activism in 1955-1970.

Barry LeMoyne-Owen College, in Memphis, graduated in 1958. The racial injustices he had witnessed in his junior year began to come together. He and his friends went to a segregated fairground in Memphis and went at a time reserved for whites to see the science exhibit. When they were near to the exhibit, a policeman intercepted them and asked them to leave. Barry and his allies were left homeless, and they were left homeless. Barry didn't know much about his race or why they were treated poorly, at the time, but he regretted the situation. As president LeMoyne-Owens, Barry became more involved in the NAACP chapter. It has often been said that his ardent support of the civil rights movement earned him the nickname "Shep," in honor of Soviet politician Dmitri Shepilov, and then Barry began using Shepilov as his middle name. After finding Shepilov's name in newspapers, Barry said in his autobiography that he chose the name for his middle initial S, which had initially stood for nothing: "I had picked out "Shepilov" as a middle name because it was the only one I knew and loved."

He chastised a college trustee for remarks he felt were demeaning to African Americans, who were practically kicked out of office in 1958. While visiting Walter Chandler, LeMoyne-Owen's only white member, making remarks that black people should be treated as a "younger brother, not as an adult." Barry wrote a letter to LeMoyne's president expressing skepticism to the remarks and asking if Walter Chandler could be banned from the board. Barry, a colleague of Barry's, was the editor of the school newspaper, the Magician, and he told Barry to run the letter in the school. The letter made it to Memphis' conservative morning newspaper's front page from there.

Barry obtained an M.S. In 1960, Fisk University obtained a degree in organic chemistry. He was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity. Barry was arrested several times while attending a sit-in to desegregate lunch counters and other Civil Rights Movement activities while attending Fisk's graduate school. Barry went back to work in the Civil Rights Movement after graduating from Fisk, primarily on the elimination of bus passengers' racial segregation.

Barry was elected as the first chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1960 (SNCC). In McComb, Mississippi, he was instrumental in the establishment of an organizing scheme. The initiative was both a voter registration drive and a direct action effort. Barry and other activists lived with the local people in order to remain safe, as well as learn how to live there. They could use the details to group the members of the SNCC in a more effective manner.

Barry began medical school at the University of Kansas but soon dropped out of the program. He considered going to law school to help with his activism but decided against it because the postponement of admission would mean he would have to miss a year of classes. If he had waited a year off, he might have been sent to the military if he was not drafted, but he didn't want to be drafted.

He wanted to attend the University of Tennessee, where he had been given a graduate fellowship. Despite being located in the South, the University of Tennessee was an integrated educational center, a new first for Barry. He began doctoral chemistry at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, the first African American in the program. He learned that he was forbidden from teaching white children, and that his wife, Blantie Evans, was not allowed to attend the white school. He left the program in favor of his current positions at SNCC.

In the spring of 1964, he attended a conference in Nashville and became one of the Southern Student Organizing Committee's founders (SSOC).

Barry, the current SNCC president, was leading demonstrations against racial discrimination and bigotry. After Barry left McComb, Barry's campaigned to persuade them to vote for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), the officially recognized Democratic party of Mississippi in the 1964 Democratic National Convention. African Americans had organized this movement to show that blacks wanted to vote and held a referendum, in a remembrance of their disenfranchisement. After speaking to the New Jersey Legislature, Barry slept on the boardwalk in Atlantic City the night.

After leaving the New York legislature, James Forman ordered Barry to move to Washington, D.C., to lead SNCC's Washington, D.C.'s office. At the time, over half of the population of the District of Columbia was black, but the District of Columbia is run as a special federal district, not as a state, and therefore does not have voting representation in Congress.

Barry and Evans established a local chapter of SNCC in Washington, D.C. in 1965. He was instrumental in organizing peaceful street marches as well as a resistance campaign against bus fare increases. Barry arranged rides to help those who needed them. Thousands of dollars were lost by the bus line, and Barry demonstrated his ability to organize.

He served as the head of the Free D.C. campaign, which is largely in favour of increased home rule as a Congressional committee exercised administrative control over the district. When H. Rap Brown became chairman of the group in 1967, Barry left SNCC in 1967. Barry and Mary Treadwell co-founded Pride, Inc., a Department of Labor-funded initiative that provides career training to unemployed black men. Hundreds of teenagers were hired by the organization to sweep the streets and alleys in the district. Barry and Treadwell met as students at Fisk University and then met again while picking up in front of the Washington Gas Light Company.

In 1972, Barry and Treadwell married. They broke up five years ago.

Barry was involved in the 1968 Washington, D.C. riots that followed Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in Memphis. He initiated Pride Inc., a scheme of free food distribution for poor black residents of the rioting, but the homes and communities had been destroyed in the rioting. Barry convinced the Giant Food supermarket chain to donate food and spent a week helping trucks and serving food around the city's housing projects. He also served as a member of the City's Economic Development Committee, helping to channel federal funds and venture capital to black-owned businesses that were struggling to recover from the riots.

President Richard Nixon declared National Day of Participation in honour of Apollo 11's landing on the moon, but Barry chastised him. On his birthday, Barry thought Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. deserved a national recognition day, which Nixon had opposed. "Why should blacks be elated when we see men eating on the moon when millions of blacks and poor whites don't have enough money to buy food here on earth?" Said Barry.

1971–1974: The D.C. Board of Education, D.C.

Barry declared his candidacy for an at-large member of the school board in 1971, versus Anita L. Allen, the incumbent. Barry said he wanted to return the school board to the "issues of education" rather than personality problems. Barry defeated Allen by 57% to Allen's 34 percent.

Barry was unanimously elected president of the board after being seated in 1972. He served as board president for two years, reorganizing the school system's budget and creating consensus on the board.

Barry forged Blacks Against Narcotics and Genocide, a resistance group that formed in reaction to the 1972 blaxploitation film Super Fly. (BANG). Barry said the film was harmful to black youth and that it glorified opioid abuse. The film has been boycotted by BANG.

Teachers' pay should be increased in conjunction with higher education funding and teacher raises, according to Barry. Barbara Sizemore was also in favor of the district's superintendent, bringing the district of Columbia, the country's first large urban area with a woman as the School Board Superintendent.

Barry requested for public hearings on the matter after the Senate withdrew annual payments to the district due to a controversies over whether the federal government should continue to pay for the district's partisan elections. "Since it is a known fact that the majority of an elected government will be black," he said, the conferees' deal shows that black people cannot be fiscally responsible, and therefore, must have a predominantly white congress controlling how our money be spent."

Personal life

Soon after announcing his candidacy for mayor in 1978, Barry married Effi Slaughter, his third wife. Marion Christopher Barry, the couple's one son, died of a drug overdose on August 14, 2016. The Barrys broke up in 1990, soon after being caught on videotape smoking crack cocaine with an ex-model and begging her for sex. They separated in 1993, but she returned to Washington and helped him in his bid for a seat on the city council in 2004. Effi died on September 6, 2007, following an 18-month battle with acute myeloid leukemia.

On January 8, 1993, Barry married Cora Masters. Masters, a political science professor at the University of Columbia and his former spokeswoman, was a political science professor at the University of Columbia. Mattie Cummings, Barry's mother, died in Memphis at the age of 92 on November 8, 2009.

Barry lived and raised his family at 3607 Suitland Road SE in the Anacostia section of DC during his first three terms as mayor.

Source