Marion Barry, who eventually became a politician in Washington, DC, was a doctoral student at UT from 1961 to 1964. He held a graduate fellowship and served as a graduate research assistant in chemistry, but he did not receive the degree. He held the BS from Lemoyne College (now Lemoyne-Owen College, 1958) and the MS from Fisk (1960). Before enrolling at UT in 1961, he had begun doctoral studies at the University of Kansas. He was the first national chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1960. He founded the first African American group on campus, called SET (Students for Equal Treatment) and served as its first president in 1962–63.
He moved to Washington, DC, in 1965 to establish a local chapter of SNCC and left SNCC in 1967. He served as the leader of the Free D.C. Movement, strongly supporting increased home rule for the district. In 1967 Barry and Mary Treadwell cofounded Pride Inc., a program funded by the Department of Labor to provide job training to unemployed black men. The group employed hundreds of teenagers to clean littered streets and alleys in the district. In the aftermath of the 1968 riots in Washington, DC, he organized, through Pride Inc., a program of free food distribution for poor black residents whose homes and neighborhoods had been destroyed in the rioting. Barry convinced the Giant Food supermarket chain to donate food and spent a week driving trucks and delivering food throughout the city’s housing projects. He also became a board member of the city’s Economic Development Committee, helping to route federal funds and venture capital to black-owned businesses that were struggling to recover from the riots.
He was a member of the school board in Washington, DC, from 1971 to 1974 and served as its president in 1972–74. He served on the city council from 1974 to 1978 and from 1992 to 1995. When the radical Hanafi Muslims seized the city’s District Building in March 1977, Councilman Barry was among their hostages. Before being released, he suffered a serious gunshot wound that was inflicted by one of the terrorists.
In 1979 he became the second African American mayor of Washington, DC, serving from 1979 to 1991. He was elected again and served from 1995 to 1999. He became a member of the Council of the District of Columbia as an at-large member from 1975 to 1979 and represented Ward 8 from 1993 to 1995. He was again elected to the council to represent Ward 8 in 2005.
Following a lengthy investigation, he was arrested in January 1990 in a sting operation for possession and smoking crack cocaine and served six months in a federal prison. In October 2005 he pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges stemming from an IRS investigation. The mandatory drug testing for the hearing showed Barry as being positive for cocaine and marijuana. On March 9, 2006, he was sentenced to three years’ probation for misdemeanor charges of failing to pay federal and local taxes and underwent drug counseling. Following charges of conflicts of interest related to federal earmarks in 2010, the Council of the District of Columbia voted 12 to 0 in favor of stripping him of all committee assignments, ending his chairmanship of the Committee on Housing and Workforce Development, and removing him from the Committee on Finance and Revenue.
In 1984 he gave the presidential nomination speech for Jesse Jackson at the Democratic National Convention. In 1990 he was president of the National Conference of Black Mayors. In July 2007 he was chosen as one of 50 wax statues to debut in the franchise of Madame Tussauds Wax Museum in Washington, DC. Barry was chosen by a majority of Washington residents and tourists from Tussauds’ Top 10 Wish List in a contest that pitted him against Cal Ripken, Al Gore, Denzel Washington, Carl Bernstein, Halle Berry, Martin Sheen, Marilyn Monroe, Nancy Reagan, and Oprah Winfrey.
He is the author of Rebuilding America’s Cities (1986).