Mary Frances Berry

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Mary Frances Berry is the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania and the former chairwoman of the United States Commission on Civil Rights. She is also the former board chair of Pacifica Radio. She is a past president of the Organization of American Historians, the primary professional organization for historians of the United States.

At Penn, Berry teaches American legal history. Before coming to Penn, Berry was provost of the College of Behavioral and Social Science at University of Maryland, College Park, and chancellor of the University of Colorado at Boulder. She received her graduate and law training at the University of Michigan. Berry has received 33 honorary degrees, including an honorary LL.D. from Bates College in 2001.

Berry was first appointed to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights by President Jimmy Carter. During her tenure she became involved in legal battles with presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. When Reagan attempted to remove her from the board, she went to court to keep her seat and won. In 1993 she was elevated to the chair by President Bill Clinton, who then reappointed her in 1999. During Berry's tenure, Peter Kirsanow sued Commissioner Victoria Wilson claiming her tenure had expired and he had been validly appointed to replace her by George Bush. She won in federal district court but ultimately lost on appeal and the court ordered the seating of Kirsanow. The dispute determined which political party would have a majority of the board's members. Berry left office before the expiration of her term in late 2004 and was succeeded by Gerald A. Reynolds.

Under Carter, before being appointed to the Civil Rights Commission, Berry was assistant secretary for education in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. After Dr. Berry returned from a trip to China and stated that Americans had no right to criticize Communist China's education system for requiring students to "develop what they call socialist consciousness and culture," Carter transferred her to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission (CRC). It has been pointed out that at that time, "China's higher education system was still reeling from the devastating effects of Mao's bloody Cultural Revolution, which forced millions of intellectuals, ordinary teachers and students into forced labor on collective farms, or sent them to re-education camps where they faced torture and death. Berry, then the government's top-ranking official in higher education, nonetheless praised China's education system as a model for the United States and publicly criticized the press for printing 'false' reports about the Chinese system." It is notable that Berry was known to carry Mao Zedong's Little Red Book of aphorisms in her purse. She also complained, for instance, that the U.S. media's "massive barrage of propaganda" had made black Americans blind to the Soviet Union's virtues, including its "safeguards for minorities," "equality of opportunity," and "equal provision of social services to its citizens." Moreover, she characterized the 1960s as an era when blacks in America lived under a "threat of genocide"' that was "roughly comparable" to what Jews faced in Hitler's Germany.

Berry's worldview holds that white racism remains an intractable and pervasive crisis in America. "The primary explanation for racially motivated violence against blacks," she has stated, "has been the need of a segment of the white population to preserve [its] belief in the inferiority of blacks, and to maintain the social and political subordination of an historically outcast group by any means, including violence." In a radio interview on National Public Radio in April 2005, Berry dismissed U.S. complaints of human rights violations in Cuba as examples of "the pot calling the kettle black."

1 Controversies as Chairperson of the US Commission on Civil Rights
2 Controversies as chair of Pacifica Radio Foundation National Board
3 Bibliography
4 References
5 External links

[edit] Controversies as Chairperson of the US Commission on Civil Rights

In 1984, as chair of the US Commission of Civil Rights, Berry stated "Civil rights laws were not passed to protect the rights of white men and do not apply to them." This comment drew considerable criticism.

[edit] Controversies as chair of Pacifica Radio Foundation National Board

In June 1997 Berry was named Chair of the Pacifica Radio Foundation's National Board. She drew great controversy from listeners, programmers, and station staff, after she and the board attempted to modify programing in order to expand the listeners of the stations and to attract a more diverse audience. "White male hippies over 50," is how Berry described the programmers and audience of KPFA in Berkeley. Rumors of board actions involving the sale of flagship stations such as KPFA were widely circulated by the programmers. (Unlike most public service stations, Pacifica stations hold valuable high wattage licenses at commercial frequencies in major urban markets including New York City.) In 1999 she and Pacifica's Executive Director Lynn Chadwick fired the station's manager and issued a gag order, threatening to fire anyone else who worked at the station who spoke of their actions. When one host tried to tell listeners what was happening, Berry had him arrested while he was live on the air. When people gathered peacefully outside the station to protest these firings, Berry used her connections in the Clinton Justice Department to lean on Berkeley police to arrest the protesters, which they promptly did.^{[citation needed]} Berry thereafter ordered a lockout of all KPFA personnel, in violation of station union agreements. She then proceeded to demand the imposition of racial preferences across the board at KPFA, though she refused to meet with minority staff people at the station, who mostly disagreed with her actions. Dr. Berry's actions in connection with Pacifica Radio brought protest from free speech groups such as the ACLU^[1]

The controversy was ultimately settled under pressure from incipient court and California legislative actions by listeners and their supporters via the institution of new board selection procedures (widely considered less self selecting and more Democratic in nature) and the resignation of a large proportion of the National Board members, including Mary Francis Berry.

[edit] Bibliography

My Face Is Black Is True: Callie House and the Struggle for Ex-Slave Reparations (2005)
The Pig Farmer's Daughter and Other Tales of American Justice: Episodes of Racism and Sexism in the Courts from 1865 to the Present (1999)
Black Resistance, White Law: A History of Constitutional Racism in America (1994, orig. 1971)
The Politics of Parenthood: Child Care, Women's Rights, and the Myth of the Good Mother (1993)
Why ERA Failed: Politics, Women's Rights, and the Amending Process of the Constitution (1986)
Long Memory: The Black Experience in America, with John Blassingame (1982)
Military Necessity and Civil Rights Policy: Black Citizenship and the Constitution, 1861-1868 (1977)

[edit] References

^ CLU-NC Letter to Mary Francis Berry on the Crisis at KPFA and Pacifica, July 28, 1999

John W, Blassingame and Mary Frances Berry Long Memory : the Black Experience in America (Oxford University Press, 1982)
Robert Pear, " 3 Reagan Rights Nominees Set Off Heated Clash in Senate , New York Times, July 14, 1983.
Jocelyn Frye, et al. "The Rise and Fall of the United States Commission on Civil rights," 22 Harv. Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Law Review 449 (1987)