A Democrat , Barry had served three tenures on the Council of the District of Columbia , representing as an at-large member from to , in Ward 8 from to , and again from to In the s, he was involved in the civil rights movement , first as a member of the Nashville Student Movement and then serving as the first chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee SNCC.
Barry came to national prominence as mayor of the national capital, the first prominent civil rights activist to become chief executive of a major American city. His celebrity was transformed into international notoriety in January , when he was videotaped during a sting operation smoking crack cocaine and was arrested by Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI officials on drug charges.
The arrest and subsequent trial precluded Barry from seeking re-election, and he served six months in a federal prison. After his release, he was elected to the Council of the District of Columbia in He was elected again as mayor in , serving from to Despite his history of political and legal controversies, Barry was a popular and influential figure in Washington, D. The alternative weekly Washington City Paper nicknamed him "Mayor for life", a designation that remained long after Barry left the mayoralty.
Washington High. The first time Barry noticed racial issues was when he had to walk to school while the white students were assigned a school bus to ride. The schools were segregated, as were public facilities. Marion Barry first began his civil rights activism when he was a paperboy in Memphis.
The paper he worked for organized a contest in which any boys who gained 15 new customers could win a trip to New Orleans. Barry and a couple of the other black paperboys reached the quota of 15 new customers yet were not allowed to go on the trip to New Orleans, a segregated city. The paper said it could not afford to hire two buses to satisfy Mississippi's segregation rules. Barry decided to boycott his paper route until they agreed to send the black paperboys on a trip.
