Washingtonians had not seen the last of Barry, however, for in 1992 he was released from prison and elected to the city council by the capital's poorest ward, thus continuing one of the oddest political journeys in recent history.
Marion S. Barry was born on March 6, 1936, in tiny Itta Bena, Mississippi. When he was four, his sharecropper father died and his mother, Mattie B. Barry, moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where she worked as a domestic and married a butcher named David Cummings. Barry thrived in Memphis, earning high grades in school and becoming an Eagle scout. At the same time, he picked cotton, waited tables, and delivered papers to help his parents and seven younger sisters.
Barry's poor background made him an unlikely candidate for higher education, but his good grades led him to Memphis's all-black LeMoyne College, where he earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1958. Barry received his first taste of activism as a member of the college's chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). As chapter president, Barry led an effort to force a white college trustee to retract a disparaging remark he made about blacks while representing Memphis in a bus desegregation trial.
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