February 17 – Unheralded Hero, Dr. Mary Frances Berry

Unheralded Hero

Dr. Mary Frances Berry was born in Nashville, Tennessee on February 17, 1938. During her professional lifetime she has been an educator, a lawyer, a historian and a civil rights activist. Berry was the first Black woman to lead a major research university. She grew up with tremendous hardship and in poverty. Yet, she was able to rise from the meager offerings of her segregated schooling in Tennessee to attend Fisk University, before transferring to Howard University. 

Berry was serving as the chancellor of the University of Colorado in 1976, when she was appointed assistant secretary of education in the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare. In 1980, President Carter appointed Berry to the United States Commission on Civil Rights. When President Reagan attempted to remove Berry because she did not align with his views on Affirmative Action, she successfully sued to retain her position. 

A legal, constitutional and history scholar, Berry authored many publications, including over a dozen books, and a plethora of articles. In her voluminous body of work, she presciently spoke to the contemporary times, noting that “what we call the traditional family first emerged in the middle of the 19th century…The ideal became fully developed only in this century. The Ozzie and Harriet model [of the so-called ‘perfect family’] did not exist for most of history.” Op Ed authored by Berry in 1993.  In 2009, Berry memorialized the history of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission in And Justice For All: The United States Commission on Civil Rights and the Continuing Struggle for Freedom in America (2009).

Berry was a civil rights activist and an avid advocate of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Her activism was not limited to the United States. She was a vocal opponent of apartheid in South Africa. Along with Randall Robinson and Walter Fauntroy, she planned and executed a protest which led to their arrest on Thanksgiving Day’s eve in 1984. The trio held a press conference the day after Thanksgiving, a traditionally slow news day, which launched their Free South Africa Movement (FSAM), a movement that attracted a large following, including many famous and influential individuals.

Berry earned her bachelor’s degree and master’s degree from Howard University and her doctorate and law degree from the University of Michigan. She has been the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania since 1987.

Charles M Christian, Black Saga: The African American Experience (1995)

Jessie Carney Smith, The Handy African American History Answer Book (2014) 

https://live-sas-www-history.pantheon.sas.upenn.edu/people/faculty/mary-frances-berry

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