♪ CORA MASTERS BARRY: The story begins with the vision of Marion Barry Jr., but it started when he was 14-years-old.

Uh, Marion was a very special child.

He was very ambitious, he was very bright, always wanted to be busy, wanted to work, but he couldn't because he grew up in the Jim Crow South in Memphis, Tennessee, born in Mississippi.

And the only kind of job he could get was to deliver newspapers in the colored neighborhoods.

You know, there are two things, not being able to get a job because he was colored.

And the other thing was as simple as they could only go to the zoo on Thursday.

The colored day for the zoo in Memphis was Thursday.

The combination of the discrimination and the oppression and the hardcore negative feelings that that puts into a human being, and the understanding that in order to combat that you have to have the ability to earn a living, is what that's at the core of what drove him.

Only being able to go to the zoo on Thursday and only being able to deliver papers was the bedrock of who he became, not only, uh, at SNCC, but before SNCC when he, uh, got the president of the College of Des Moines to resign.

He was a activist throughout, and so that had a big mark on him.

And he used to always say that, if I'm ever in a position to help young people get a job, I'm gonna do it.

So, it actually started at the age of when the summer job program starts at the age of 14.

That was his inspiration.

And, uh, he was working on his PhD, uh, in chemistry when he just decided he had to go to the movement.

And as they say, the rest is history.

THENNIE FREEMAN: Marion Barry was intentional about creating a program that would teach young people how to advocate.

He himself was a student advocate because he was a member of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

And through that, it was advocacy.

It was young people advocating for what they needed.

There are legendary pictures of him and John Lewis at the time they went before the DNC, all the things, the voting rights, housing, food, things that people talk about today, Marion Barry was doing it.

CORA: Marion was the first national president of SNCC.

There was a guy named Benjamin Hooks, who was the president of NAACP, one of Marion's mentors wanted him to come to Washington to start a chapter, and said, you need to go to DC and start a SNCC chapter.

But when he got here, he found a whole different plantation that he had never experienced anywhere else, just a whole town of disenfranchised Black people.

And, uh, he kind of got in, involved in establishing as the Free DC movement, of course, Pride, Incorporated.

(phone ringing) RECEPTIONIST: Mr.

Barry's office, may I help you?

CORA: Marion couldn't believe how the city of Washington, DC, was the last plantation, but they had no votes.

And, um, I'm a political science professor, I taught it for 22 years, and one of my favorite topics was the presidency, and so one of the things I used to do is study them, biographies, autobiographies, uh, their tapes.

And, uh, when I started listening to Lyndon Baines Johnson's tapes, I thought Marion's first name was "son of a bitch."

You know, he was on tape, "That son of a bitch, Barry, that son of a bitch, Barry," I didn't know anything about him, he walked in, and I said, "Who is that?"

And they said, "That's Marion Barry."

I was like, "Ugh, gee, he's so arrogant."

That's how he came into this city, with that dashiki.

Marion was raising so much hell in Washington, DC, he was causing problems with the President of the United States.

MARION BARRY: The issue is whether people outside can come in.

The issue is whether people outside can come in or not.

MAN: The meeting has come to order.

MARION: So what?

MAN: To order.

MARION: Bang, again, it is order.

We want the people outside, inside.

That's all.

MAN: Then go out there and join them.

MARION: No, I'm gonna stay in here where I... CORA: And at some point, I started working with Walter Fauntroy, and then I started working on Marion's campaign, his first campaign for school board.

And never lost an election from that point on.

He called the, the, the police force, "a occupied army."

I mean, he put on his dashiki.

MARION: We got to try to create some what, some love and some feeling in our community for ourselves, right?

What do you think about the police?

KID: They ain't nothing but pigs, man.

MARION: Everybody and his mother knows that the police is the number one problem in America; they oughta to get something for people out here in the community.

I think that's my role as a leader or in leadership position, is to get something if I can do it and be beat to death, if I can do it.

But if I'm gonna be beat to death, I might as well get something for it.

And I'm talking about the control of this, uh, whole program.

That's why I can't move ahead.

That's why I got problems.

That's why I, uh, I can't get the enthusiasm to go.

AUDREY ROWE: It was the summer of '68, there was a lot going on.

It was just after the riots, you know, he was an emerging leader.

And a, a lot of the work that they did at Pride brought in many young people, getting them job training, giving them education.

CORA: He used the strategies that they had developed in the Civil Rights Movement and applied them to empowering Black people, increasing also entrepreneurship.

And he, at the end of the day, when it was all done and said, there's a whole lot of Black millionaires in this country, because of him.

THENNIE: Every major movement in this country was started by youth.

Every major movement was started by young people.

People who don't have the mortgages, they don't have the cars, they don't have the inhibitions.

They have a will and a desire to change the trajectory, not just for themselves, but from those who come behind them.

Whether it's the sit-ins, whether it's the Greek organizations who participated in the Women's March, every major movement.

And that's what Marion understood, that was his position.

He wanted to teach, empower young people how to advocate for themselves.

MARION: We can conduct our own meeting in the third district.

And I live in the third district; I live in the third district.

See, you dig it?

I work in the third district, dig it?

And I deserve the people out there live there, deserve the right to be here.

And they gonna come in here as long as I'm in here, and ain't nobody gonna put me out either.

AUDREY: I'm from New York, but I spent most of my adult life in Washington, DC.

I was probably late 20s.

A lot of our work dovetailed very much together.

And he was president of the school board, so he was very much involved in education.

He was on the city council, and at that time, he was one of the individuals who was very much involved in promoting youth programs and funding youth programs, so he was always engaged in working on behalf of young people in District of Columbia.

And I was interested because I was at that time thinking about going into education, did a little bit of work for him, but when he ran for city council, was when I really put effort into his campaign, and then when he ran for mayor.

So, I've always tried to be as engaged with some of the youth activities.

I think Marion ushered in a more activist type government, both at school board level and to the city council, and then certainly in the mayor's office.

KEMRY HUGHES: My name is Kemry Hughes, I'm a native Washingtonian, originally living in Ward 8.

Born at DC General Hospital to the parents of Carol Harland and Kemry Hughes.

I did not get my first start under the Marion Barry brand of, uh, summer youth employment program.

NIXON: The mayor of the Capital City, Walter Washington, is here tonight.

There's been some speculation in the press for the effect of, because he was a Democrat and his term expires in February, that he would not be reappointed to that position.

However, in checking with both Democrats and Republicans in the District of Columbia, I find that he gets very high marks, and consequently, today I have asked him to serve for another term; he's agreed to do so.

(applause).

KEMRY: So, I originally, um, worked in the summer youth employment program when Mayor Walter E. Washington was the mayor in 1976.

AUDREY: I mean, I remember, Walter Washington, I knew he was here.

I was actually on a board that he had appointed me to, um, but he wasn't engaged in the way that Marion, I felt, was engaged with people in the community.

KEMRY: I was 14 years old in 1976, upon leaving high school, I didn't graduate.

I went into the Youth Leadership Institute training that Marion created in 1979, um, and, and I came into the institute in 1980.

MARION: I think we've gotten a green light to go forward and propose anything we want to.

AUDREY: He's one of these people who carried in his pocket, um, a notepad and a pen.

And he would meet people, and they would tell him issues, and if I was with him or somebody else was with him, he'd write it down, put some information down, hand it to us, and say, "follow up."

MARION: We really need that initial program committed to start jotting down some ideas for us to consider.

And we desperately need on this Saturday to meet and adopt a structure of some kind so we can start moving.

AUDREY: All of us had been part of the Civil Rights Movement um, and when Marion first said to me, um, me called me up on the phone and said, "Listen, we've had great opportunity.

We learned a lot of things, why don't we create an opportunity for young people to have similar experiences?"

And we had the Summer Youth Employment Program, and in that year, he had decided that we were going to have 30,000 young people employed, from like 4,000.

It was to create opportunities for young people to both experience leadership and to learn what leadership is all about.

So it was, you know, looking for different kinds of programs that would work in that kind of growth.

And so, he said, you know, can you think about it and send me something?

So unfortunately, it's one of those lessons learned; we all learn lessons as we come through our careers.

I asked somebody else on who was working with me, 'cause I was head of the youth office, to put it together for me.

And they did.

And they gave it to me.

And lesson learned, I glanced at it and sent it directly to the mayor.

It didn't take, but an hour before I got a telephone call saying, "What in the, what is this, um, Audrey?"

And it was from his chief of staff, Ivanhoe Donaldson.

"Audrey, Marion is so upset.

He is angry, he is annoyed.

He doesn't know what you're thinking.

He, he's disappointed in you."

And I just felt awful.

So, then he said, and he said, "I'm sending this document back."

I won't use the language they used, "I'm sending this document back down to you, take a look at it, and give me something tomorrow morning."

So, I get it back, and I look at it, and it's awful.

I went home.

It's about four or five o'clock in the afternoon, sat down, started reading through a number of youth development books that I had.

things that I had worked on, pulled some things together, and started thinking about, okay, what experiences did I have as a organizer, a civil rights organizer?

What experiences did I have, and why were those experiences important?

And I was up the entire night; I typed it up probably around four or five o'clock in the morning.

Read it very carefully.

Um, and when I got into the office, I took it up to Ivanhoe Donaldson's office, and he looked through it.

He said, "I'll pass this on."

He passed it on.

The mayor called me and said, "This is more like it.

Now I want you to add this and this and this."

And what we thought about was to be a good leader, first of all, you have to understand not only your community, but you need to understand if you're gonna work on issues, how to approach, how to do the research, how to understand the legislative process, um, how rulemaking, all of those kinds things that you would assume young people were learning in school but we didn't have civics going on then.

So now this was a way of adding civics in, so the mayor's Youth Leadership Institute became the work site for those young people who applied.

KEMRY: Prior to Marion coming in office in 1979, DC only used federal dollars, which came from the Department of Labor, to hire summer youth employees.

Marion, coming from his civil rights background and understanding the struggle of Black families, decided that he wanted to increase the summer job.

CORA: He said, I'd have decided that we're going to offer a job to every youth in the District of Columbia, that wants one.

So, what a lot of people don't know is that our first summer job program really was a, was a partnership between the district government and the national government, because Nancy Reagan was a part of that, a lot of people don't know that.

KEMRY: So, he identified local dollars, which we call appropriated.

We went from prior to 1979, hiring 1500, to 30,000 his first year.

And that was done by him introducing the Summer Youth Employment Act of 1979.

So, we were the Chocolate City, about 80% Black, um, by 1954, 1955, DC started evolving from a predominantly White city to a predominantly Black city.

Cultural explosion in the community, you... we were soon after the 1968 uprising, after Dr.

King's assassination, the city had many dilapidated communities and housing.

Um, communities were torn up.

And so, prior to Marion come in office, we were considered this sleepy southern town, believe it or not, we are below the Mason-Dixon line, going through its evolution and it had not really reached the prominence that Marion helped usher in when he came in office.

AUDREY: We worked together day and night.

So, another component that we added was a residential, at least for two weeks.

KEMRY: Predominantly on Howard's campus, we were on Howard University's campus.

AUDREY: Young people would be living and working and learning from each other.

So, we were bringing young, uh, individuals from Ward 3, Ward 7, Ward 8.

We had counselors who, at night they would get together in small groups and talk about what it means to be a leader, what their concerns are in their communities.

And you started to see some momentum evolve.

And then one of the things that we decided was to have a mayor and have a council for the Youth Leadership Institute.

KEMRY: I went to the institute with the wrong impression, but it was the second night for me.

This guy came out spitting what I call verbal gymnastics, talking about, my name is LB, Triple P, Platta Pan, Papa, young and slick.

So, he caught my attention, but then he talked about why Marion created the Youth Leadership Institute.

See, he expanded the, the summer jobs, but he created the institute, and Marion created institute, to give young people of this generation opportunity for leadership training so that whatever we do in our lives, that we would take responsibility and be leaders.

But more important, he knew the importance of teaching government and engagement, and advocacy.

And so, he created a mock government where you were elected mayor of the Youth Leadership Institute and City Council.

And so, this guy spitting that verbal gymnastics was the motivational speaker we know of today, Les Brown, after he talked about the power of the young people, the voice of the city, um, being engaged, setting policy, and whatnot, that night I decided to run for mayor of the program.

NORMAN NIXON: My experience that summer was like a life-altering, um, experience because I had graduated that same summer at the age of 16 and really did not know where I was going to go.

And so, I went into the, the, uh, Youth Leadership Program, and we learned about self-exploration and planning for your future, things that a high school counselor never said to me in the three years that I went to high school, and, uh, they ended up letting me work, uh, down at the program, uh, during the school year.

LOU HALL: First and foremost, the program wanted to give young people a voice.

And he did everything he could to make sure that young people got various opportunities through city government, community-based organizations, faith-based organizations.

He made sure that young people were exposed to all of those avenues.

KEMRY: It made me become more focused on my voice, my energy, and my action towards uplifting our communities, in particular Black youth, and so that was the kind of, um, embryonic stages of my get, becoming engaged in the political world and civic engagement.

TED GLOSTER: Internally, what we started doing was, because we noticed the one thing that the program did not do was competition.

You compete for everything in life, and jobs was one, so we started setting up, um, internal mechanisms for competition within the pool without letting everybody know.

A perfect example would be, there was always distinction between 14 and 15-year-old youth versus 16 and, and 16 above.

Mainly because the 14, 15-year-olds, you know, they were, they were under child labor laws.

You were limited to the, to the number of hours that you could work just by the structure alone, that limited 14, 15-year-olds.

What we started doing on the registration was a high achiever.

You looked at your report cards.

If you were "A" student, we figured that you, you had something going on great.

So, then we started taking the high achiever 15-year-olds, and placing them with the 16-and-older population.

What that did was, now I'm rewarding you for what you're doing year-round.

Well, what you should have been doing anyway, another thing that, that we tried to do is, again, most of the time we talked about summer jobs, it was male and then females, Marion Barry's program equalized, all that.

But we went even step further.

We would do programs specifically for females.

It was for teen pregnancy, uh, youth teen parenting.

So, then that allows, allowed us, the females to even, even have a greater foothold, or at least a equal foothold to their male counterparts.

THENNIE: In my previous capacity, I served as the associate director for over a decade, for, um, the Office of Youth Programs, which is the home of the Marion Barry Summer Youth Employment Program and the Marion Barry Youth Leadership Institute.

Now, the interesting thing about both programs, I was the director in office prior to his death and at the time of his death.

So, they were not named after him until he passed away.

PATRICIA VILLONE: Well, Marion Barry died from natural causes on Sunday after having been released from Howard University Hospital on Saturday.

CALVIN HAWKINS: My father was one of his drivers.

Marion Barry gave me my first summer job.

I'm sure you hear a lot of that.

THENNIE: The last thing that Vincent Gray did while he was in office was change the name from the Mayor's Youth Leadership Institute to the Marion Barry Youth Leadership Institute.

CORA: Muriel Bowser, when she became mayor, her first official act... THENNIE: Was changed the name from the Summer Youth Employment Program to officially the Marion S. Barry Summer Youth Employment Program.

I happened to be there and serve during his transition and while he was on council.

Now, the interesting thing about being the person in charge of a program that the Marion Barry created is that you could get a call at any time about what you were doing right, what you were doing wrong, and what you needed to improve.

I would also get calls in the middle of the summer, "Uh, uh, Ms.

Freeman, I, I, I, I'm standing right here on the corner, uh, Atlantic Street Southwest, and you know, and, and I'm standing right here and I'm talking to Antonio.

And Antonio told me he not working.

And I'm telling him right now, he coming down to see you and I, I, I better, he better be working, and I'm gonna call you back tomorrow to make sure that he working.

And Antonio, you got that?

Ms.

Freeman, you got that?"

And my response was always, "I got it, Mayor Barry.

I got it."

There was never a youth that he met that it was too late to serve.

There was never a youth that he encountered that was impossible to serve.

He wanted to know why we weren't knocking on doors of homes to make sure that every youth had an opportunity.

Before Instagram and all of the current social media aspects, he realized that we needed to connect to young people in ways outside of government, outside of traditional approaches.

Youth are proactive, reactive, and inactive.

So, your proactive youth are gonna do all the right things always.

Then you have your reactive youth who are going to do what their friends are doing.

Your inactive youth, they're not doing anything for many reasons.

And that's where we come in and ensure that they're doing something.

STEPHANIE CAMPBELL: You always hear everybody say the older people, "Marion Barry gave me my first job, you better sign up for that program."

That's all you would hear people say.

And it never really clicked or meant anything to the young people, 'cause it's like, okay, he gave you your first job until it was time for us to get our first job.

And then that US Bank card, Citibank card.

That's what really meant something.

When you see your friends walking around, they go to the ATM with their Citibank card and they taking out their money, you like, hold up, I need a job.

They will always walk around like they was a call, "If it is to be, it's up to me," was their slogan.

So, I just wanted to be a part of it.

I was like, I gotta join this and see what's going on.

But to be able to join it, to be a young girl in high school and to have these adults, you know, really support you, really lean in and teach you different things and they wanna see you succeed, um, and for them to say, no, no, no, we'll collect a college fund for you to stay here and do this.

That's the legacy.

And that's what Marion Barry wanted.

It was all about community.

It was about making money, but it was about really exposing the youth in the District of Columbia to something different.

So Theenie Freeman, working under her, we used to have the saying, "Great leaders breed great leaders."

My mom used to always tell me, "Know your job, and two more above yours."

KEMRY: His legacy lives in the folks that have benefited from his, from his programs, uh, like myself, like a Norm Nixon, like a, um, Kenyan McDuffie, like a Robert Contee, who became the chief of police, Sheila Bunn, uh, Danette Tucker, all of those folks went through the Youth Leadership Institute.

Those things are part of the legacy that Marion helped to embody for our young people who are now in leadership positions.

SUNDIATA RAMIN: Well, this is my city.

Uh the, the fact that my family's been here since 1895.

We actually have our great-great-grandparents' home, our family still lives in that home that they purchased in 1915.

What people don't understand about DC is, first of all, DC is not a state.

You know, we have no representation in the, uh, government.

No, no senator, no congressman.

Well you know the history of his place from 1871 to 1967, we had no representation except three advisory, uh, members after that.

Walter Washington in 1967, who was a commissioner/mayor, but the first elected mayor was Mayor Marion Barry until 1979.

So, we really didn't have any representation on that end.

But DC was considered like the promised land for Black folks from the south who were descendants of sharecroppers.

Because once you got a job in the, you know, the stability of working in the government, that gave you some level of stability.

NORMAN: Having worked with him personally, I worked in the mayor's office for a few years, one of his campaign themes one year was "Everybody Matters."

He knew people by name would sit down and have dinner with people inside of their, their, their homes.

And so, he was a people's person.

He, even though he had, he was the mayor of, of the most powerful city in the world, he was one of us.

He was, he was somebody that you could relate to.

He was somebody that was about empowerment, and you knew that he cared because he came through the struggle.

KEMRY: Marion created the political will to make this city better.

Marion created a political will to make the legislative body, the city council, and the government work for its people.

He particularly was concerned about youth and elders.

And to this day, um, the Youth Leadership Institute is still thriving and, and, and, and doing its thing.

SUNDIATA: You can determine a nation or leadership by how they take care of the youth and the elderly.

Mayor Barry paid attention to the elderly.

He made sure senior citizens had places to live.

CORA: Well, that was a part of a larger agenda.

You know, summer job programs are one thing, uh, minority contract, and 33 and 1/3% of every contract had to go to African Americans.

Couldn't do bond business in the city unless some people sitting around the table look like you.

So, it was a whole economic empowerment plan.

Many of the people got their start in the summer job program.

As a matter of fact, um, there's not a day, and I'm not exaggerating, that if I leave my house, that somebody will not say to me, "I got my first job from Marion Barry," every day of my life.

That legacy goes deep, and it goes long.

And so that is the bedrock of many people.

But then other people can say, I got my first contract from Marion Barry.

I got my first opportunity to have bond business because of Marion Barry.

So that, that his legacy is an legacy of economic empowerment, actually.

KEMRY: So, Marion shifted the wealth gap in our city.

In my opinion, that was part of the problem that made him a target for investigations continuously, 'cause he was mo, moving the cart and moving it away from the people who are used to the power, imagine you used to getting 91% of the contracts.

Now you getting like, what, 62%.

That is a major shift for power folks and millionaires who used to gettin' the business.

So, Marion came in with a spirit of revolutionary ideals, um, he brought in some of the greatest, um, professionals in his administration.

CORA: Sustainability is the most important thing of all.

You know, there's a million people who do a million things and come up with a lot of ideas.