Norton Remarks for Funeral of Marion Barry

(Norton speaking at the funeral of Marion Barry, 12/6/14, courtesy: Washington Post)

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Office of Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) today released Norton's written remarks ahead of the funeral service of former District of Columbia mayor Marion Barry, Jr. Norton has been asked to speak about the influence of civil rights on his life. The service will begin at 11:00 a.m. at the Washington Convention Center, 801 Mt. Vernon Place NW.

Norton's remarks follow:

Remarks of Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton
at the Funeral of Marion Barry, Jr.

Walter E. Washington Convention Center

December 6, 2014

I offer my love and condolences yet again to my good friend Cora Barry and to Christopher.

I have been asked to speak about Marion Barry, whom I first met when we were both in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC. In speaking about Marion as a son of the civil rights movement, I speak not only for myself. I speak in memory of some who knew and worked with Marion but have passed on, for other of his movement colleagues, who wanted to be here but could not, and for still others who are here. The roll of those who first worked with Marion in the movement is too long to call, but among them are and were John Lewis, Frank Smith, Joyce and Dorie Ladner, Bob Moses, Julian Bond, Ruby Robinson, Courtland Cox, Chuck McDew, Diane Nash, James Foreman, Stokely Carmichael, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, Gloria Richardson, Bernard Lafayette, and Rev. Jessie Jackson, who will deliver the eulogy. All of us knew Marion Barry when he was being formed as a man by the civil rights movement.

Years later, here in Washington, when Marion and I had different roles, I was fond of teasing him on the dance floor about bringing his cotton chopping moves to the big city, as Marion did what he called "dancing." He laughed, knowing that this was my way, as a D.C. girl from up South, of saying to my old friend from the southern civil rights movement, "You have come a long way, buddy, from picking cotton in Itta Bena, Mississippi to running the nation's capital." But those cotton picking roots served Marion Barry Jr. well. He challenged poverty by working himself out of it. "Coming from the cotton fields of Mississippi, I was used to hard work. It doesn't bother me," he wrote in his autobiography. But, it was the civil rights movement that equipped Marion to challenge segregation and prepared him to become our mayor.

If you want to understand Marion Barry, don't start with his years as mayor. Go first to the boy who chopped cotton at 7, while going to school in a one room school house in Itta Bena and sold newspapers and rags in Memphis. Then go to his first years as a man, and you will find him in the civil rights movement.

For Marion Barry, Jr., it was those beginnings in sharecropping poverty deep in the bosom of segregated Mississippi and Tennessee that led him to the civil rights movement. That childhood imbedded in him a dedication to civil rights and to the poor throughout his years as mayor and as Ward 8 Council Member. As a child, he saw sharecropping bind Black people to the plantation economy and make any attempt to vote a life threating act. "I had no choice but to join the fight for civil rights," he wrote. "The injustice of segregation was all around me."

Marion Barry, as a boy, grew up knowing only segregation. As a man, he groomed himself to challenge it. He had used his fine mind and penchant for hard work to write his own ticket into the professional class, but Marion gave up his chemistry graduate school fellowship, along with it his PhD, although he had finished all the course work except for the thesis.

But Marion could not resist the call of the movement. He moved from chemistry classes to James Lawson's non-violent resistance workshops and to leadership along with Diane Nash of the Nashville sit-ins, to Raleigh where he became the first chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and to the Mississippi movement and the work of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. During those early years, Marion not only was steeped in non-violent resistance, but in active strategic organization. What Marion Barry learned about organizing in the deep South held him in good stead for the rest of his life. He brought community organizing to D.C. and organized his way into the leadership of this city.

A man can choose to escape and forget childhood poverty and merely reminisce about his early years in the movement. Instead, Marion joined his childhood poverty and his life-changing years in the civil rights movement to form his world view.

Whatever else we take from Marion Barry's life, we must recognize the roots that shaped him. Today, we rejoice that the civil rights movement brought him to the next – or is it last – frontier for civil rights. People will choose their own part of Marion Barry's life to remember. As we struggle for statehood in the District, let us always celebrate Marion Barry, Jr., the freedom fighter.