>> If you want to be a leader, you have to stand for something, and you got to be willing to sacrifice and pay the price.

>> I want to bring the First Lady of the District of Columbia, Mrs.

Cora Masters Barry.

>> I stand today before you honored and humbled.

First and foremost, as a child of the creator, of course, that's what we all are.

Despite our seemingly differences of color, religion, culture.

I also want to say to you that I stand before you as the mother of two brilliant, beautiful, strong, moral and committed young women, Lalanya and Tamara.

But my presence here today is because I am the First Lady of the District of Columbia.

That is why I was asked to be here.

>> My mother was actually born in Oklahoma.

>> Cora Masters Barry didn't have a choice but to be the powerhouse who she is.

It was already in her DNA.

When we think about black women who ran for president, we automatically go to Shirley Chisholm.

But we cannot leave out Cora Masters Barry's mother, Isabell.

Cora Masters Barry's mother ran for president of the United States not once, not twice, not three times, but four times.

>> Some may say that's a crazy woman run for president.

She's black, she's a woman, and she's old, like our president drawing Social Security.

But I think if God had meant for a woman to be relegated to the rear of a man, he would have taken that rib from Adam's back instead of his side.

>> Well, it tracks, right?

She was raised by a woman who was extremely resourceful, including being a property owner in multiple states and raising her kids, her six kids, making sure all of them were college educated.

What was modeled for my mom was the importance of education, the possibility of being extraordinary.

>> My mother moved us to California when I was 2 years old.

She had gotten her bachelor's degree from Langston University.

My father had come home from the Marines.

She was very unusual.

She wanted to teach school, but because she graduated from at that time, they called it a colored college, they wouldn't give her a full teaching certificate, so she had to go back and get training another year.

So because she couldn't get a job, she moved us to a place called Jordan Downs Projects in Watts, California, and we lived there for about nine months.

And then when she graduated, she started buying property and selling it.

After those projects, we never lived in a house that we didn't own.

And all of that, watching her move through society, flipping homes, being an independent, strong black woman with an education, but yet also had an entrepreneurial spirit and a fighting spirit, that's what shaped who I am today.

We are all told you go to elementary school.

You go to junior high school.

You go to high school.

You go to college.

It was never a discussion.

And so she college- educated all six of her kids.

I went off to Texas Southern, and I never fell in love with learning.

I was a terrible student.

I didn't like being in the classroom.

I was very, very smart.

So it didn't take a lot for me.

So when I would go to college, I was good with C's.

I was all right with it.

But something about how she raised me and something about who I was that had me make a transition.

I was always a leader.

I led all the stuff, all the harassment of the first year seniors.

I mean, I had myself a good old time, and then I ran out of stuff to do and decided to flip to the other side and be another kind of leader.

Pledged Delta Sigma Theta, ran the chapter, ran the school, and left.

>> One of the many gifts that my mom gave to me and my sister were wonderful dads.

So my father's name is Moses Wilds, and one of the reasons I love Howard University is because if it was not for Howard, I would not be here.

My dad and my mom met in graduate school at Howard.

Another gift that they both gave me was knowing when it was time to end their marriage, while maintaining a healthy relationship with me as their daughter.

>> I was at Howard in graduate school, but also becoming immersed into the Washington, D.C., scene, which is when I met Marion.

Just a real serious story.

I'm Delta, and I was pledging Delta, and on Tuesdays you had to go to convocation.

I used to idolize Stokely Carmichael, and that day when he finished, I sat there for a good 20 minutes by myself and my whole life changed.

He taught me about black being beautiful.

He talked about white nationalism.

He talked about the power of the people.

He talked about our skin color.

And then as I matriculated through my silly period when I was getting in trouble and had gone to my serious period, little by little, got pulled into the politics of the city.

When I got my master's degree, I started doing -- I started working for the National Council of Negro Women on a contract called Sisters United.

One night in between class, we went to this club, a place called Billy Simpson's on Georgia Avenue.

Was eating or getting a drink or something, and this guy was sitting there and he asked us who we were, and he asked us, did we -- He said he was on his way to a meeting with Walter Fauntroy, who was thinking about running for non-voting delegate.

Did we want to go?

Yeah.

So I went.

I met Walter Fauntroy, John Hechinger, a whole bunch of people at that house that night.

And me and my friend and I started working on Walter fundraiser campaign.

>> With Mrs.

Barry, she's been the strategist, the one who's creating the blueprint, the one who is navigating the journey of how you're going to get to where you need to be, what you're trying to accomplish.

She's been that person and she's been amazing at it.

And we see the proof of her labor.

She was a significant part of what we saw with Marion Barry.

>> Marion won 1994 for the historic comeback, 1995, sworn in January 2nd.

And Minister Farrakhan came like about January 15th.

He wanted to do the Million Man March.

At a commemoration at Marion's grave site about five years ago, Minister Farrakhan spoke of that day and his version of it.

I sat down with the mayor, told my brother what I wanted to do.

He said he was going to do whatever I wanted.

The city was mine.

And then Mrs.

Barry got up and started working.

That was his version.

And it shocked me that he said that, because you know why?

That's exactly what happened.

Marion had the city to run, and one of the first hurdles were women.

Being very upset about a Million Man March.

And when I say women, I mean women who have power of the pen, people like my good friend Dr.

Julianne Malveaux.

They were all writing against the Million Man March.

They had a whole thing about that.

That's an example of a combination of collaboration between me and my friend Dorothy Height.

I had no problem with it.

I understood it, but I also understood that he had a problem.

>> From that earliest day, I do not know where the African American family would be today without the contribution of African American women.

I was here in 1963 for the March on Washington.

I have to say that while it was a very inclusive march, that it was an occasion when not a single female voice was heard except that of the beautiful singer Mahalia Jackson.

But there was no speaker.

>> So Dorothy and I, the first thing we did was reached out to the minister and said, you know, we're going to bring some women together to look at what you plan to do with the Million Man March.

Do you mind sharing with us?

He said, oh, no, sister, whatever my sisters want.

So we gathered on the second floor of the National Council of Negro Women with myself, Tina Lewis Tucker, Dr.

Height, Nisha Muhammad, Barbara Williams-Skinner.

And I don't know, about seven of us.

And they faxed, yeah, faxed, y'all, his mission statement.

We tore it up and sent it back.

We said, well, that'll be the end of women in the Million Man March.

He accepted all of those edits, except one.

But the major one he accepted was the fact that the name change.

It was called The Million Man March: A Day of Atonement.

But what was added to it was... >> Atonement and reconciliation and to reach out to other people.

>> Reconciliation.

That came from Barbara Skinner.

A lot of people don't know that.

So that started the journey.

We went on to the point that on that day, about seven women spoke on Million Man March.

While we were getting ready for that, minister called me and said, I want to talk to you.

Will you come to dinner?

We were sitting there, but it's pretty much like a choir.

He said something everybody says, yes, sir, he said to me, and I love him so much and he knows I imitate him, "Sister Cora, I need you to get my people registered."

I had registered 20,000 people for Marian's comeback, and he knew that.

And I looked down and I said, I'm sorry, Minister Farrakhan, I can't do that.

The whole room went still, and he said... Sure enough?

And I said, yes, mister, no disrespect.

All due respect, I just can't.

He said, well, why?

And I said, because you have been running around the country doing the pre-march meetings in different cities, registering black men.

He called for 10,000 black men in Philadelphia, 10,000 black men in Trenton, 10,000 black men in L.A.

He did that and it was great, but he was registering them as independents.

And I said, I can't do that.

I said, that works against our people.

He said, well, I said, the parties determine who we're going to vote for.

We don't have a say in who's going to be the nominee, then we have no say.

I said in the back in the day, it was called the white primary.

Want me to send you a paper on that?

He said, would you?

I said, I will.

And that's how it ended, and I did.

I was teaching then at political science.

I wrote a paper on the history of the black vote, sent it to him.

He called me from a plane and said, I just read it.

You know, I don't know nothing about all this, he said, but whatever you want to do, you can do it.

I want you to chair the Million Man March voter registration drive, and I did.

>> Strong black men keep on a-coming.

Strong black men just keep on coming.

We love you.

>> She normalized being Cora.

Whether it was Cora Wilds, uh, Cora Masters, then Cora Masters Barry.

She was unapologetically and is unapologetically herself, particularly in an environment like academia.

And then later in an environment like the boxing world.

And then again, uh, in the tennis world, she, I think, defied the environment and she did it over and over and over again.

And organically, what that meant is that she had women watching her.

>> The decision of the mayor to appoint me to the Boxing and Wrestling Commission seemed like a very normal thing at the time, but it ended up being highly controversial.

And the fact that a woman was going to enter into that bastion of male dominance.

>> Oh, I want to get -- I want to get to that.

I was going to get to that.

Okay?

Because around that time is when I first met her.

She was the chairman or the chairperson of the DC Boxing Commission.

Okay?

See, and this is where history often gets rewritten, even in the sport of boxing.

Cora came on the scene when boxing was really hot.

I mean, that was boxing's heydays, especially here in the state of New Jersey.

In case you didn't know, in 1978, the advent of casino gambling came to the New Jersey, to Atlantic City, and along with casino gambling came goo gobs of boxing.

You don't play boxing, even though they refer to it often as the boxing game or the fight game.

Boxing is not a game.

It's serious business.

Fighters actually put their lives on the line when they go in to the ring.

So the responsibility that the commissioner, that top person that oversees the sport, it's tremendous to be a female in a predominantly male sport.

You know, it was tremendous.

She just was very knowledgeable.

Let's start with personality.

Certainly has to be a no nonsense personality, which Cora Masters Barry is.

>> I'll put it in context, some of it.

The Boxing Commission at that time was being run very raggedy for the record.

People were coming in late, you know, people weren't getting paid.

The ring wasn't up by fight time.

It was just some raggedy stuff going on with these great men.

So my first time going to the first live boxing match as a woman in Washington, D.C., I wore a fur coat.

Uh, great choice, right?

Fur coat.

Uh.

And the ring hadn't been up, so we sat there for three hours waiting for the ring to get put up.

So when they had a fight and somebody got hit, the ring didn't hold them because it was not put up correctly.

And the guy fell off the ring and onto my table, and I yelled, oh, my coat!

[ Laughs ] So I think I set women back 40 years on that one.

But yeah, we went from there and you know, I held my ground and eventually I ended up being on the World Boxing Council.

And one of the things that I, that I hold high in the things that happened in my life in boxing was, you know in boxing or any other bill when you finally been accepted.

They finally said, okay, she's been tested this way, that way, this way, that way.

It's time to let her in.

And when the president of the World Boxing Council called, Suleiman called and assigned me to supervise the Marvin Hagler and Sugar Ray Leonard fight.

>> And I attribute a lot of this to her educational background because, you know, she was an educator too, and she very, very intelligent, smart.

She was very progressive.

She brought a lot to the sport from the intellectual side.

Today, we have a system of identification for fighters that was the brainchild of Cora Barry, but they will never tell you that.

>> For those who don't understand, a commissioner is a regulator.

Our job is to license and to regulate the sport.

So one day, Joe Frazier's son came and fought.

Somebody threw in the towel.

I think Joe might have threw in the towel.

So it was time to pay the boxers.

If any of you are familiar with it, after that, you usually pay the boxers, well, back in the day, but I used to bring the purse and give it to them.

All that stuff was archaic, but we'd pay the boxers, they'd show up.

So I paid him, and I gave him a 60-day suspension.

And he went out, told his dad.

His dad, Joe Frazier, came in and called me out of my name.

And you don't know what you're doing.

He don't need no 60-day suspension.

He ain't -- He ain't nothing wrong with him.

I read him tense.

I said, well, you must have thought so.

You threw in the towel.

I said, that's a knockout.

That's a technical knockout.

And he looked at me and he turned around and he said to somebody, she's a real bitch.

And the last thing he said, I'm going to let him fight anyway.

And I thought to myself, we got to stop this.

And so that is what was the impetus to me trying to figure out how we could.

And I said, well, let's do it like a passport.

>> Cora came up with the idea of a boxer identification system and in that book would be a record of all of their fights and medical conditions, things of that nature.

And that was actually the forerunner to a system that we have today known as BoxRec all over the world.

And that's what's used in boxing today.

>> My mother was amazing, and she never raised us with any conversation about what women did and didn't do.

So I didn't even realize that that was a thing until I did get involved in the movement, and they were male chauvinists.

From Marion Barry to Stokely Carmichael, all of them, all the men, John Lewis, they were all chauvinists.

That's why we're just now hearing about the women of the movement.

We did the work.

They took the glory.

Not that they didn't do a few things, but they were very chauvinistic.

But it kind of didn't bother me because I was so sure of who I was that it took me a minute to really realize that there was a woman's place.

In my later life, and even as I became first lady, I would say the most influential woman in my life would have been Dorothy Height.

>> She had her own serious sister circle who poured into her.

And that's everyone from Dorothy Height and Maya Angelou and so forth.

But then she took that, and she poured it into others.

Other women, other women leaders are now Senator of Maryland, Angela Alsobrooks, our mayor, Muriel Bowser, Tamika Mallory, and she continues to pour.

We're here at the Southeast Tennis and Learning Center, where she pours into our youth every single day.

She's that person.

>> There are few advocates who are as effective as Cora Masters Barry, whether it is building a tennis center or having a street named after her late husband.

She is just a spirit that is an unstoppable spirit, but rooted in all of it is strategy.

She's deeply intelligent, and that intelligence is not just IQ, intellectual quotient, but you have to have very strong emotional intelligence as well in order to be able to persuade people to do the thing that you feel is important.

>> The most important thing for me, I'm my mother's child, and what motivates me in life is service to others.

My attraction to people are based on what they're doing for the greater good, not what they're doing for themselves.

And I think that people should fight for other people and not just fight for themselves.

And when they see inequities and unfairness, I think they should stand up to it.

And so I have a reputation sometimes of being a little tough, but that doesn't bother me.

>> My mother's tenure on the Arts and Humanities Commission is indicative of who she is as a advocate for the people.

>> And so the mayor put me on the Arts Commission, Arts and Humanities, which my husband founded.

And I found a great deal of inequities there to just sum it up.

When I got on the Commission for Arts and Humanities of the District of Columbia, they had close to a $50 million budget.

And on that $50 million budget, $800,000 of it was all that was there for east of the river.

So long story short, there's a lot of documentation, it was in a lot of the newspapers, there started a fight for equity.

And at the end of the day, we were able to help level the playing field or begin that journey.

And then when I was reappointed to the Arts Commission that the chairman of the City Council resisted my appointment, did not want me back on.

Call me disruptive and confrontational, which of course I was, but I was disrupting the corruption of taking the taxpayers' money and deciding that other people's art is more important than our people's art.

And I'll do that again.

That's called good trouble.

>> I think all of us understand this.

You prefer to have Cora Masters Barry on your team.

Let me just -- And I know that everyone listening knows exactly what I mean.

She is not a person you want on the opposite side of you.

She is -- Because if she believes it, she believes it all the way in her soul and she knows how to win.

>> I also have found her to be an amazing confidante as it relates to everything in my life.

Cora Barry always knows how to help strategize your way out of or around serious issues.

You know, this isn't the neighbor wants to fight me.

That's one thing.

And she can do that, too, by the way, She can strategize around that, as well.

But this is, I'm in the press with 300, 400 articles being replicated about me mislabeling me or determining my career done, and to have someone like her who's like, oh, no, I've seen this before.

That has been extremely helpful in my life.

>> I love teaching.

I love young people.

When I got my master's degree, there were three universities in the District of Columbia.

One was Federal City College, one was Washington Technical Institute, and one was D.C.

Teachers.

So Washington Technical Institute offered me a position to teach social science there.

I accepted that position.

So I was teaching social science, anthropology, social studies, and all.

And then Marion became mayor, and he wanted to consolidate those three schools, and they consolidated those three schools into the University of the District of Columbia.

I was among the first class that taught at the university, and we had lifetime tenure.

So I taught there for 22 years.

I taught political science.

>> I'm going to give a Cora-ism.

She says this best when she says, if you want to know how these current times are going to turn out, read a book or a Bible.

And I say that to women everywhere, especially black women, to say, stay planted.

>> For everything that I've ever done in my life has been very organic.

I did not have a great plan for my life.

I just followed the spirit.

And when I started learning how to hear God, I started following the Holy Spirit because sometimes my spirit take me over there.

One day I was riding down the street and I saw this vast field and it looked like there were some poles, you know, like the tennis poles.

I said, somebody used to play tennis.

So I go over just to go places and put in stuff to keep our kids off the street.

Boxing gyms, we did all of it.

And then I did a little research and found out that it actually used to be some tennis courts.

So we built seven tennis courts there.

And then one day I used to come, and he used to come.

We used to play on the courts in the morning before he'd go off and all.

I used to watch the kids come play, and they were fighting after it was over, flipping the bird, doing stuff you're not supposed to do because, you know, I come from pretty much middle class family.

I didn't come up no place where people settle things on the corner.

So I said to the coach, I said, I think you should kick them off the court and kick them out of the program.

And he said, oh, I can't do that, Mrs.

Barry.

And I said, why?

And he said, because where would they go?

And the Holy Spirit said, build a building.

>> Well, I think a leader first has to be a visionary because they have to rise above the crowd.

I really first met Cora Masters Barry when Cicely Tyson had a school named after her in New Jersey, and it was a fundraiser as well.

So they also auctioned off some items as fundraising items, and Cora donated the two tennis rackets of the Williams sisters when they played in the US Open in 2008.

And I bought them.

And so then actually Susan Taylor, formerly of Essence magazine, who was a friend of mine, said, oh, Reggie, you should meet Cora.

She has this program for kids here in D.C.

I know you want to support.

I was expecting her just to come and ask me for money for her school, which everybody does all the time.

But she was quite wise.

She said no, I don't want your money now.

I want you to come and see the program.

>> This will be Cora's greatest legacy will be the investment that she made in youth.

And for those who know history, understand that even what we've enjoyed with the Marion Barry Youth Leadership Institute, you can look right back to Cora Masters Barry.

You see her hand prints all over this program that has continued for generations.

I was in the Marion Barry Youth Leadership Institute.

>> Cora Masters Barry is continuing a tradition that I know very well because this is how we grew.

We had teachers who taught us this way.

That's the greatest gift we can give a young person is the understanding and the experience that they are smart.

>> You can also see it through her tennis center, where she is developing not only expert tennis players, but she's pouring into them other life lessons, surrounding them with people who love them.

And that tennis center is a model of excellence.

Cora Masters Barry started Blacks in Wax because she believed so strongly in passing along our history that she every year pours her whole heart and soul into teaching history.

>> I have been at the tennis center since I was 3 years old, so that's 2010 up until now, as a freshman in college.

Mrs.

Barry has been a very influential mentor for me.

I'm currently a first year at American University studying political science.

Being at the center and learning all about my history and the struggle that we've gone through as a people, and just being able to meet all these influential people who are doing so much for our people has definitely inspired me to become a criminal defense attorney.

This center being here is really important.

Just through these kids can have somewhere to go after school, somewhere that teaches them how to code, teach them how to sew, putting them in fashion shows, teaching them about their history.

That's what Blacks in Wax is mainly about.

>> She understands the African proverb that says that young people who do not feel the embrace of their village will burn it down to feel its warmth.

>> Women have historically gotten things done, you know.

Even if we're not elected to office, there isn't one person in elected office who would be there if it wasn't for the brilliance and the strategy and the vision of women.

It's so important.

And I learned that and have observed that in my mom.

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