If you’re of an age approximately 35 or older, you actually already know Effi Barry. Well, you know her husband.
Infamous, reviled, dedicated, conflicted, deeply flawed and beloved former Washington, D.C., Mayor Marion Barry was a kind of premium strain of viral social media long before those platforms existed.
He smoked crack-cocaine with a prostitute on hidden VHS camcorder in January, 1990, for one. The low-lit 83-minute footage of the FBI sting existed in a confusing air between the shows Cops and America’s Funniest Home Videos, the predominant “clip” shows of the ‘90s, when it was real labor to hatch a plan and get something recorded ... on a video cassette.
The scandal doesn’t seem innocent by today’s standards, but certainly less alarming. But back then it was too absurd to fathom as a reality.
And he was re-elected mayor of D.C. after that in 1995!
But Marion had an angel of a wife from Toledo, a southern-born Scott High School graduate, model, and school teacher originally named Effi Slaughter, described by the Associated Press as “the stoic former first lady” of Washington, D.C.
She was a proud-chinned, clear-eyed, objectively beautiful woman who sat through all of her husband’s trials — literal legal trials, visibly, in the front row ... knitting. She was quoted in an interview at the time of the three-month trial, reprinted by the AP, “For certain our years have not been without controversy, have not been without difficulty. But you take everything in stride. And getting through the trial is just something else to do. It doesn't sidetrack you.”
But infidelity and drug abuse were hardly new to their marriage. “There are — there is — a caliber of female in this world ... (who) tend to gravitate towards a power figure. This kind of involvement is a necessary nuisance that the wife of a power figure has to deal with,” she said in a D.C. television interview in 1987.
The couple separated after the trial and divorced in 1993. Marion Barry was sentenced to six months in prison. But she later helped Barry get elected to D.C. city council in 2004.
Not much could sidetrack Effi when she fixed on determination. She had divorced Toledo’s last living original jazz piano legend Stanley Cowell, moved to D.C. and met Marion in 1976, when he was married to his second wife. They married in ‘78. She raised funds for AIDS awareness programs for the poor. She was was an anti-apartheid protestor outside the South African Embassy and got arrested for it. She taught sex education at Hampton University, her alma mater.
In this Blade photo from April 25, 1980, she is with revered Toledo artist LeMaxie Glover at the Toledo Museum of Art, after she spoke at a reception for him.
In Marion Barry’s 2014 obituary in The Blade, we wrote, “Barry, who also served on the D.C. Council for 15 years and had been president of the city's old Board of Education, was the most influential and savvy local politician of his generation. He dominated the city's political landscape in the final quarter of the 20th century.”
And the Barrys were the unmitigated power couple in the district through their time together.
She died in 2007 of leukemia at 63 in Annapolis, Md. Marion Barry said of her passing, “The city is better off because of the great work she did in bringing hope to our neighborhoods. Effi was D.C.; we will all miss her."
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First Published April 20, 2020, 10:00 a.m.
