Marion Barry is arguably the most controversial character in DC’s history as a city, yet it is hard to deny the extreme reverence he inspires in much of the population; to much of DC’s population Barry will always remain their “Mayor for Life”. Marion Barry translated in action what many African-Americans of his time wanted but were scared to actually do. Barry lived and breathed among the people. Barry felt what they felt; he embodied their anger and their frustration. Marion Barry was the first big city mayor to rise from the civil rights movement; his strategy for winning political power was something that had never been seen before. Barry didn't achieve political success by trying to be white, like some other black politicians did. Barry …show more content…
Early in his childhood, his mother said to him, “I’m tired of being poor and not being able to do what I want to do. This is not how I want to live” (Barry, Tyree, 2014). Marion Barry’s childhood was one of extreme poverty typical of many Southern African-Americans of his generation. Barry was born on March 6, 1936, in the small rural town of Itta Bena, Mississippi (Wankoff, Pendergast, 2004). He lived with his mother, Mattie B. Barry, his sharecropper father, Marion Barry Sr, and his two older sisters, in what they called a shotgun house; it went straight from the front door to the back door and had a tin roof that made noise when it rained. Barry and his sisters were born into the life of a Southern sharecropper, destined to pick chop and separate cotton until their hands curled (Barry, Tyree, 2014). In his biography Barry (2014) described his life on the farm: “We had an outhouse to use the bathroom, a pump for water and a kerosene lamp for light and for heat. We often went barefoot or had shoes that had holes in them. So we would strap cardboard on the inside to the bottoms. But on many days I went barefoot” (p. 23). After his father’s death in 1962, his mother, Mattie, fled Memphis, Mississippi with her three children in tow; she did not want them to grow up and live the life that their father had (Barry, Tyree,