NAMES IN THE NEWS : Barry’s Wife Sought Darker Skin

WASHINGTON — Effi Barry, wife of Mayor Marion Barry, says she tried to darken her skin, at her husband’s request, after a reporter erroneously said she was white.

“I’m mulatto,” Effi Barry said in a recorded interview with the syndicated television show “A Current Affair.”

Her husband, “the consummate politician,” urged her to “get a suntan” after the press “tremors” shook his first mayoral campaign in 1978.

The sunlamp treatments did not work, she added.

“So, a group of us, of my friends, we went to Hilton Head (S.C.) and the mission was to get me a suntan so I would not appear to be too white in pictures.

“These are some of the kinds of things that are really silly when it comes to color and race,” she said.

Effi Barry said she remembered teaching in New York City in the 1960s and being too white to be part of the civil rights movement. “So you really can’t win sometimes,” she said.

Effi Barry, whose father was white and mother was black, made the comments in the interview, which will be broadcast Tuesday.