Marion Barry

Marion Barry, who has died aged 78, was a civil rights campaigner and former mayor of Washington DC whose four terms were overshadowed by his 1990 arrest after being caught on videotape smoking crack cocaine.

Mr Barry was first elected mayor in 1978 after building a political career as an official of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, which fought to help black people in the South register to vote in elections. Re-elected in 1982 and 1986, he was dubbed Mayor for Life.

But he gained international notoriety in 1990 when he was videotaped in an FBI undercover operation smoking crack in a Washington hotel room. He famously cursed "Bitch set me up" when he was arrested, referring to the woman who had helped the FBI set up the sting. He was convicted of a single count of drug possession (jurors had deadlocked on most counts) and sentenced to six months in prison.

Despite the embarrassment, Mr Barry's political career was far from over. In 1992, he made it back to city government, winning a council seat representing the poorest of the city's eight wards. That victory helped propel him to a fourth, and final, term as mayor in 1994.

"Marion Barry changed America with his unmitigated gall to stand up in the ashes of where he had fallen and come back to win," said poet Maya Angelou in 1999.

But his 1994 vote was divided sharply along racial lines and his political revival drew criticism from many. Congress moved to strip Mr Barry of much of his mayoral authority in 1995 as the city flirted with bankruptcy.

Congress installed a financial control board and Mr Barry decided not to seek a fifth term. He held authority over little more than the city's parks, libraries and community access cable TV station in his last years as mayor.

Despite his problems, Mr Barry maintained a solid following, particularly in lower-income, primarily black sections of the city. He staged yet another political comeback in 2004, returning to the DC Council representing Ward Eight. He was re-elected in 2008 and 2012.

In his later years on the council, Mr Barry played the role of elder statesman but sometimes exasperated his colleagues with his wavering attention at meetings and rambling references to his tenure as mayor.

He also battled legal problems, including tax, as well as drug charges. Even as he was fighting kidney disease in early 2009, prosecutors were seeking to revoke probation in a tax case, saying he had not kept a promise to file annual returns. The council also censured him twice for ethical violations.

Mr Barry was born in the small Mississippi delta town of Itta Bena and was raised in Memphis, Tennessee, after the death of his father.

While an undergraduate at LeMoyne College, he picked up the nickname Shep in reference to Soviet propagandist Dmitri Shepilov for his ardent support of the civil rights movement.

He left graduate school at Fisk University short of a doctorate in chemistry to work in the civil rights movement.

His political rise began in 1960 when he became the first national chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, which sent young people into the South to register black voters and became known as one of the most militant civil rights groups of that era.

His work with the committee brought him to Washington, where he became immersed in local issues, joining boycotts of the bus system and leading rallies in support of the city's fledgling home rule efforts. His activism propelled him into local politics. In 1974, he became a member of the first elected city council organised under home rule legislation.

He suffered his first personal crisis in 1977 when he was wounded by a shotgun blast in the Hanafi Muslim takeover of DC's city hall. A young reporter was killed.

In 1978, he defeated incumbent Mayor Walter Washington in the Democratic primary and went on to easily win the election.

The early years of Mr Barry's long tenure were marked by improvement in many city services and a dramatic expansion of the government payroll, creating a thriving black middle class in the US capital.

During much of the period between 1984 and 1990, he was under federal investigation for his ties to drug suspects. He consistently denied using drugs, but his late-night partying began to take a toll on his job performance.

On January 19, 1990, FBI agents videotaped him buying and smoking crack cocaine in a hotel room not far from the White House. The tape, which included his subsequent arrest, was widely distributed to the media and made Barry infamous worldwide.

Sharon Pratt Dixon was elected mayor later in 1990 and served one term before Mr Barry retook city hall in the 1994 election.

After retreating from mayoral politics in the late 1990s, Mr Barry spent a few years working as a municipal bond consultant, but he could not stay away from politics. In 2004, he returned to the city council.

He later suffered kidney problems stemming from diabetes and high blood pressure and underwent a kidney transplant in February 2009. He was married four times and is survived by his wife Cora Masters and one son, Marion Christopher Barry.