Effi Barry, a regal first lady of Washington who endured her husband’s very public sex and drug scandal during his tenure as mayor, died early Thursday of leukemia. She was 63.
Ms. Barry, who most recently worked as an employee in the city health department, 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 a District of Columbia 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 Effie Slaughter in Toledo, Ohio. Her mother was 16 and unmarried. Ms. Barry told The Washington Post in 1980 that she was 30 years old before she asked her mother about her father, who was Italian.
“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 Hampton University in southern Virginia and then moved to New York to join her childhood sweetheart, Stanley Cowell, an accomplished jazz pianist who played with Stan Getz’s group.
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 and 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.
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, criticized 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.
Her own problems 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 was shown worldwide.
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.
