{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["http://norton.house.gov//media-center/press-releases/norton-remarks-for-funeral-of-marion-barry", "Norton Remarks for Funeral of Marion Barry", "2014-12-06", "2014", "2014-12", "Democrat", "House", "DC", "Eleanor Norton", "N000147", "norton.house.gov", null, null, "legacy", "(Norton speaking at the funeral of Marion Barry, 12/6/14, courtesy: Washington Post)\nWASHINGTON, D.C. \u2013 The Office of Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) today released Norton\u2019s written remarks ahead of the funeral service of former District of Columbia mayor Marion Barry, Jr.\u00a0 Norton has been asked to speak about the influence of civil rights on his life.\u00a0 The service will begin at 11:00 a.m. at the Washington Convention Center, 801 Mt. Vernon Place NW.\nNorton\u2019s remarks follow:\nRemarks of Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton\n\tat the Funeral of Marion Barry, Jr.\n  Walter E. Washington Convention Center\nDecember 6, 2014\n\u00a0\nI offer my love and condolences yet again to my good friend Cora Barry and to Christopher.\u00a0\nI have been asked to speak about Marion Barry, whom I first met when we were both in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC.\u00a0 In speaking about Marion as a son of the civil rights movement, I speak not only for myself.\u00a0 I speak in memory of some who knew and worked with Marion but have passed on, for other of his movement colleagues, who wanted to be here but could not, and for still others who are here.\u00a0 The roll of those who first worked with Marion in the movement is too long to call, but among them are and were John Lewis, Frank Smith, Joyce and Dorie Ladner, Bob Moses, Julian Bond, Ruby Robinson, Courtland Cox, Chuck McDew, Diane Nash, James Foreman, Stokely Carmichael, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, Gloria Richardson, Bernard Lafayette, and Rev. Jessie Jackson, who will deliver the eulogy.\u00a0 All of us knew Marion Barry when he was being formed as a man by the civil rights movement.\u00a0\nYears later, here in Washington, when Marion and I had different roles, I was fond of teasing him on the dance floor about bringing his cotton chopping moves to the big city, as Marion did what he called \u201cdancing.\u201d\u00a0 He laughed, knowing that this was my way, as a D.C. girl from up South, of saying to my old friend from the southern civil rights movement, \u201cYou have come a long way, buddy, from picking cotton in Itta Bena, Mississippi to running the nation\u2019s capital.\u201d\u00a0 But those cotton picking roots served Marion Barry Jr. well.\u00a0 He challenged poverty by working himself out of it.\u00a0 \u201cComing from the cotton fields of Mississippi, I was used to hard work.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t bother me,\u201d he wrote in his autobiography.\u00a0 But, it was the civil rights movement that equipped Marion to challenge segregation and prepared him to become our mayor.\u00a0\nIf you want to understand Marion Barry, don\u2019t start with his years as mayor.\u00a0 Go first to the boy who chopped cotton at 7, while going to school in a one room school house in Itta Bena and sold newspapers and rags in Memphis.\u00a0 Then go to his first years as a man, and you will find him in the civil rights movement.\nFor Marion Barry, Jr., it was those beginnings in sharecropping poverty deep in the bosom of segregated Mississippi and Tennessee that led him to the civil rights movement.\u00a0 That childhood imbedded in him a dedication to civil rights and to the poor throughout his years as mayor and as Ward 8 Council Member.\u00a0 As a child, he saw sharecropping bind Black people to the plantation economy and make any attempt to vote a life threating act.\u00a0 \u201cI had no choice but to join the fight for civil rights,\u201d he wrote.\u00a0 \u201cThe injustice of segregation was all around me.\u201d\nMarion Barry, as a boy, grew up knowing only segregation.\u00a0 As a man, he groomed himself to challenge it.\u00a0 He had used his fine mind and penchant for hard work to write his own ticket into the professional class, but Marion gave up his chemistry graduate school fellowship, along with it his PhD, although he had finished all the course work except for the thesis.\u00a0\nBut Marion could not resist the call of the movement.\u00a0 He moved from chemistry classes to James Lawson\u2019s non-violent resistance workshops and to leadership along with Diane Nash of the Nashville sit-ins, to Raleigh where he became the first chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and to the Mississippi movement and the work of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.\u00a0 During those early years, Marion not only was steeped in non-violent resistance, but in active strategic organization.\u00a0 What Marion Barry learned about organizing in the deep South held him in good stead for the rest of his life.\u00a0 He brought community organizing to D.C. and organized his way into the leadership of this city.\nA man can choose to escape and forget childhood poverty and merely reminisce about his early years in the movement.\u00a0 Instead, Marion joined his childhood poverty and his life-changing years in the civil rights movement to form his world view.\nWhatever else we take from Marion Barry\u2019s life, we must recognize the roots that shaped him.\u00a0 Today, we rejoice that the civil rights movement brought him to the next \u2013 or is it last \u2013 frontier for civil rights.\u00a0 People will choose their own part of Marion Barry\u2019s life to remember.\u00a0 As we struggle for statehood in the District, let us always celebrate Marion Barry, Jr., the freedom fighter.", 1, "2026-03-30T12:14:52Z", "2026-03-30T12:14:52Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["http://norton.house.gov//media-center/press-releases/norton-remarks-for-funeral-of-marion-barry"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 0.9018401615321636, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}