Effi Barry Dies at 63 Effi Barry, 63, a regal first lady of Washington who endured with dignity her husband's very public sex and drug scandal during his tenure as mayor, died early this morning of leukemia at Anne Arundel Medical Center in Annapolis.
Ms. Barry, who most recently worked as program director for the D.C. health department's HIV-AIDS administration, was married to former mayor Marion Barry for 14 years. They separated in 1990, not long after he was captured on videotape smoking crack cocaine in a hotel room with an ex-model. The Barrys divorced three years later.
After leaving Washington, Ms. Barry taught health and sex education at Hampton University, her alma mater, before returning to Washington and supporting her former husband in his successful bid for the Ward 8 D.C. Council seat in 2004. In recent years, she used her battle with leukemia to campaign for more African Americans to join the registry for bone marrow transplants.
She was born Effi Slaughter in Toledo, Ohio, to a 14-year-old single mother. Ms. Barry told The Washington Post in 1980 that she was 30 years old before she asked her mother about her white father.
"It was like a family secret I didn't know about," she said. "And I don't know whether I didn't ask her out of respect for her privacy or fear for my own feelings."
She received a degree in home economics in 1967 from what was then Hampton Institute in southern Virginia and moved to New York to join her childhood sweetheart, Stanley Cowell, an accomplished jazz pianist who played with Stan Getz's group. She worked as a flight attendant before she and Cowell married and moved to Europe.
When she and her husband returned to New York, she became a teacher in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. She also received a master's degree in public health from City College of New York. She moved to Washington when her marriage to Cowell ended in 1975.
She met Barry in 1976 at a bicentennial celebration in Southwest Park. She told The Post in 2004 that she was apolitical at the time and had no idea that he was the former head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a former school board member and a D.C. Council member. Although he was married -- to his second wife, Mary Treadwell -- she gave him her number and Barry called the next day. They married in 1978, after Barry announced that he was running for mayor.
As first lady, Ms. Barry was often under scrutiny, long before her husband's spectacular escapade. She was criticized for taking a birthday gift of $1,150 in clothing from a lobbyist who met regularly with the mayor and for a discounted home loan she and her husband received from a bank on whose board she sat. She took a job with a public relations firm with a city contract and then quit amid conflict-of-interest allegations.
"I didn't know what it meant to be a first lady," she told an interviewer this year. "Needless to say, it was a trial by fire."
Despite the difficulties, she considered that period of her life a time of service. As a health educator, she was involved in a number of health-related issues, including efforts to encourage the city to take seriously the threat of HIV-AIDS. She also was proud of her project to open the mayor's office to the work of local artists.
Whatever problems she experienced as first lady paled in comparison to her husband's 1990 arrest on a cocaine possession charge. The FBI taped Barry meeting with Hazel Diane "Rasheeda" Moore, a woman with whom he acknowledged having a relationship. The grainy videotape of the mayor smoking crack cocaine and asking for sex was shown worldwide. Ms. Barry, always graceful and dignified, sat in the courtroom day after day during her husband's trial listening to often lurid testimony while she calmly hooked a rug.
Ms. Barry told The Post in 1990 that she warned her husband he was "going to be set up with a woman" and that when she learned of his arrest, her only question was, "Who was she?" She said the mayor was so demoralized after his arrest that, despite her anger, she refrained from telling him, "I told you so."
"You don't kick a dog when he's down," she said.
After her diagnosis of leukemia in February 2006, Ms. Barry searched for a suitable donor for a bone marrow transplant but was unsuccessful.
Her faith was her anchor, she said recently. "I am not afraid," she said.
Survivors include a son from her marriage to Barry, Christopher Barry, and her mother, Polly Lee Harris, both of the District.
RIP Effi Barry
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