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Soon he must decide whether to run for a fourth term as mayor of the nation's capital, but a cloud of questions hovers ominously over this former civil rights leader, long known for his passion for the powerless. His once loyal subjects, largely black voters, are angry. More than 60% of the city's residents call him an embarrassment, and nearly three-quarters label his government corrupt, according to a recent Washington Post poll. While he fends off the scandal of the month or the latest grand jury probe, the homeless litter the sidewalks, and drug toughs kill each other over rocks of cocaine, giving Washington the ironic title of the nation's "Murder Capital." Tiny babies die, and the poor remain powerless. Worse yet for Barry, a new force threatens his reign: Jesse Jackson may have his eyes on the kingdom. Although the former presidential candidate says he would not run for mayor against Barry, his longtime ally, many see Jackson as this city's savior.
Once Barry tried to play that role. He stormed into Washington in 1965, donned his trademark dashiki and began raising money for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). He had momentum, passion and the aura of an achiever. The son of a Mississippi Delta sharecropper, he had taken a long road to Washington. His father died when he was four, and the family moved to Memphis. In his neighborhood, recalls Barry, "nobody went anywhere except reform school or jail."
But Barry had talent and drive. He learned knot tying, earned a passel of Boy Scout merit badges and soon became an eagle scout. He hustled money by hawking newspapers, waiting on tables, picking cotton. He even joined the choir at a church whose minister offered each member 25 cents a week for bus fare. Barry walked and spent the quarter at the ice-cream parlor. His income brought the trappings of status. While in high school he bought a $50 suit from a store on Memphis' fashionable Beale Street. "You really had arrived when you had a tailor-made suit," says Barry, who now favors Christian Diors off the rack.
In the 1950s the world was beginning to tremble, particularly for a young black man in the South. As a teenager, Barry tossed cups at whites from a movie-theater balcony and sat in the front of the bus. At Memphis' Le Moyne- Owen College, he emerged as a civil rights leader, waging a fight against a college trustee and trying to desegregate the zoo, the buses, the lunch counters and even the county fair.
After Le Moyne-Owen, Barry headed for graduate studies at Fisk University and became the first national chairman of SNCC, a job that took him to the national political conventions and in 1960 to McComb, Miss., a major civil rights battlefield. A few fellow activists began to question his motives even then. "He's enamored of the perks and privileges of position," says former SNCC worker Charlie Cobb. "I see very little difference between him now and 20 years ago."