Former D.C. Mayor Marion Barry dies at 78

Washington • A controversial and tireless advocate for the nation's capital who created jobs for generations of black families, Marion Barry was the ultimate District of Columbia politician, though his arrest for drug use in the midst of a crack-cocaine epidemic often 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. His spokeswoman, LaToya Foster, said he collapsed outside his home. Barry died naturally of heart problems caused by high blood pressure, and his kidney disease was a contributing factor, the D.C. medical examiner said. Barry had a kidney transplant several years ago.

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.

"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. "During his decades in elected office in D.C., he put in place historic programs to lift working people out of poverty, expand opportunity and begin to make real the promise of home rule."

Barry was born March 6, 1936, to Marion and Mattie Barry, in the Mississippi Delta.

Barry's work in the civil rights movement brought him to Washington. He was elected to City Council in 1974. 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.

The city's drug-fueled decline in the 1980s and 1990s mirrored Barry's battles with his personal demons, leading to the infamous hotel room arrest on Jan. 19, 1990. A video of the arrest, which showed him smoking crack cocaine, was widely distributed to the media and made him infamous worldwide.

"Bitch set me up," Barry famously cursed when FBI agents burst in, referring to the woman who helped the FBI set up the sting. His arrest and subsequent conviction — a jury deadlocked on most counts, convicting him of a single count of drug possession — was a turning point for Barry.

A six-month term in prison was hardly the end of Barry's political career.

Barry returned to the D.C. Council in 1992, representing the poorest of the city's eight wards. Two years later, he won his fourth and final term as mayor. 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.