Former D.C. Mayor Barry dies at 78

WASHINGTON – A controversial and tireless advocate for the nation’s capital, Marion Barry was the ultimate District of Columbia politician, though his arrest for drug use overshadows his accomplishments.

The former four-term mayor will long be remembered for one night in 1990 when he was caught on video lighting a crack pipe in an FBI sting operation.

Barry, 78, died Sunday at the United Medical Center, after having been released from a hospital a day earlier.

Barry, who had a kidney transplant several years ago, died naturally of heart problems caused by high blood pressure, and kidney disease was a contributing factor, the D.C. medical examiner said.

Barry first made a name for himself in the South as a leader in the civil rights movement and brought his fierce advocacy to D.C. to support the fight to free the city to manage its own city affairs, not Congress. That legacy was remembered Sunday at the White House upon news of Barry’s death.

“Marion was born a sharecropper’s son, came of age during the Civil Rights movement, and became a fixture in D.C. politics for decades,” President Barack Obama said.

Barry was born March 6, 1936, to Marion and Mattie Barry, in the Mississippi delta and was raised in Memphis, Tennessee, after the death of his father, a sharecropper.

His work in the civil rights movement brought him to Washington. He was elected to city council in 1974. Four years later, he was elected mayor.

Barry’s early years in office were marked by improvement in many city services and a dramatic expansion of the government payroll, creating a thriving black middle class in the nation’s capital. He established a summer jobs program that gave many young people their first work experience and earned him political capital.

A six-month term in federal prison was hardly the end of his political career.

Barry returned to the D.C. Council in 1992. Two years later, he won his fourth and final term as mayor. His political triumph was short-lived.

In 1995, with the city flirting with bankruptcy from years of bloated, unaccountable government, much of it under Barry, Congress stripped him of much of his power and installed a financial control board. He decided against seeking a fifth term.

Barry couldn’t stay away from politics, though. In 2004, he returned to the D.C. Council. He was re-elected in 2008 and 2012.