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Bush Finally Fires Mary Frances Berry
By Linda Chavez
December 14, 2004

Mary Frances Berry: A Relic Whose Time

Has Come
By George Will
December 17, 2001

Mary Frances Berry: Civil Rights Bully

By Linda Chavez  
December 11, 2001  Former Chair of U.S. Civil Rights
Commission
Contrary Mary Frances Berry  Supporter of racial preferences in
By The Washington Times employment and education
December 8, 2004

Born in 1938 in Nashville, Tennessee, Mary Frances

Berry has been the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of
American Social Thought and Professor of History
at the University of Pennsylvania since 1987.

Berry received a Bachelors degree from Howard

University in 1961 and a Masters degree from the
same institution a year later. She went on to earn
both a Ph.D. in history and a law degree from the
University of Michigan. She has held faculty
appointments at Central Michigan University,
Eastern Michigan University, the University of
Maryland, the University of Michigan, and Howard
University. In 1990-91, she served as President of
the Organization of American Historians, a
traditionally leftist group that has boasted among its
other past presidents Eric Foner, William Chafe, and
C.Vann Woodward. She has also held administrative
posts at the University of Maryland and served as
the Chancellor of the University of Colorado at
Boulder. 

Apart from her academic career, Berry has had a

long career in government, which she began as an
Assistant Secretary of Education in the former
Cabinet Department of Health, Education, and
Welfare under then-President Jimmy Carter. 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). As Linda Chavez points
out, "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. 

Denouncing America's multitude of alleged flaws,

and comparing the U.S. unfavorably to Communist
nations, has been a longstanding practice for Berry.
She 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 served on the CRC from 1980 until 2004.

Ronald Reagan, early in his presidency, attempted to
fire Berry from the Commission, arguing that as a
political appointment she served at the pleasure of
the President. But Berry sued and eventually won
the right to keep her CRC post. President Clinton
made her the Chair of the CRC in 1993, a position
she held until President George W. Bush eventually
dismissed her in 2004. 

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."

A strong advocate of racial preferences in

employment and education, Berry deems the
concept of race-neutrality in hiring and college
admissions unacceptable, given what she believes is
white America's ongoing desire to relegate blacks to
subservient roles. In his book The End of Racism,
scholar Dinesh D'Dsouza quotes Berry responding
to the idea that racial preferences are inconsistent
with the mandates of civil rights laws: "Civil rights
laws were not passed to give civil rights protection
to all Americans," she said.

Armed with this definition of civil rights, Berry

condemned President Reagan and his administration
as people who "never met a civil rights law they
liked." The laws to which she was referring were the
aforementioned race-based preferences; set-asides
that reserved a certain percentage of government
contracts for minority-owned firms; and "disparate
impact laws," which allowed minorities to "pass"
qualifying exams (upon whose results employers
base hiring and promotion decisions) with scores
lower than those required of their white counterparts
- on the theory that the tests themselves were
racially biased and therefore created a "disparate
impact" favoring whites over blacks and other
minorities. Reagan opposed all of these measures;
for this, he was condemned by Dr. Berry.

Notwithstanding Berry's assertions about Reagan's

hostility toward minorities, African Americans in
fact thrived during his presidency, making
impressive progress economically and
professionally. As columnist Larry Elder notes:
"From the end of 1982 to 1989, black
unemployment dropped 9 percentage points (from
20.4 percent to 11.4 percent), while white
unemployment dropped by only 4 percentage points.
Black household income went up 84 percent from
1980 to 1990, versus a white household income
increase of 68 percent. The number of black-owned
businesses increased from 308,000 in 1982 to
424,000 in 1987, a 38 percent rise versus a 14
percent increase in the total number of firms in the
United States. Receipts by black-owned firms more
than doubled, from $9.6 billion to $19.8 billion."

Berry charges that Republicans are, at heart, racists

who deviously exploit African Americans by hand-
picking a few conservative blacks - who, in Berry's
view, can scarcely be considered authentic blacks -
and parading them before the media in hollow
gestures of "inclusiveness." "It's going to get worse
for African Americans," Berry says. "They
[Republicans] have really figured out that, in terms
of diversity, 'If you want some black people, we'll
give you some black people. We'll give you some
black people in every kind of job. Because we know
some black people who want to do what we want to
do, either because they want to get ahead or because
they believe it. You want black people? You want
Latinos? You want Asians? We can give you them
all day long.'"

Reasoning from that planted axiom, Berry derided

President George H.W. Bush's appointment of
Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court as
nothing more than the crass exploitation, for Bush's
own political gain, of a black man whose views
were not only out of touch with those of most black
Americans, but would, because of Thomas'
influential position, actually do great harm to blacks.
"He [Bush] stood there talking about how he had
looked all over the world and found the best person
[Thomas] he could put there," said Berry, laughing.
"Even the guy he was talking about knew he was
lying. Everybody in the room knew he was lying."

In Berry's opinion, the appointment of such

individuals as Clarence Thomas, Condoleezza Rice,
and Colin Powell to positions of high authority
actually have the undesirable effect of fooling
blacks into thinking that they live in a nation where
they can in fact succeed on the strength of their own
merits, where white racism is not nearly the
imposing obstacle it once was, and where they are
no longer viewed or treated as second-class citizens.
It is this delusion - as Berry sees it - which, in
Berry's view, causes blacks to complacently accept a
status quo that is far more oppressive and
discriminatory than they realize. Says Berry: "The
reason there is no agitation among blacks — I don't
see any — is because the symbolism is such that you
could tell yourself - until something happens to you
- that nothing is wrong. You could say, 'Look at
Colin Powell. Blacks are everywhere. We can just
do anything.' Our people don't draw a distinction
between what people are doing."

Berry further contends that Republicans - although

their political candidates typically receive only
minimal black support - have learned to manipulate
black voters by appealing to their religious values.
"One of the things [Republicans have] done with the
rank-and-file black people is they know that many
of the black people who do vote or will vote are
religious," Berry says. "What they did was to figure
out if they could pull the religious string, people will
go crazy. For many black people, all they had to do
was to start talking about giving money for a faith-
based initiative, give some money to some
preachers, have some church social services and
then pull the same-sex marriage string. All they had
to do then was to have him [Bush] stand up and say,
'I'm a Christian.'"

Berry's contempt for conservatives and Republicans

is palpable, as exemplified by her sneering assertion
that Newt Gingrich "sometimes challenges my faith
in God." This contempt, coupled with her political
views generally, inform the instruction Berry gives
to her students at the University of Pennsylvania,
where she teaches three courses: (a) History of
American Law to 1877, which, according to Berry's
course description, places considerable emphasis on
the law of slavery, the status of women, and civil
liberties."; (b) History of American Law Since 1877,
which examines, among other things, "the legal
status of women and minorities"; and (c) History of
Law and Social Policy, which explores "the role
law, lawyers and judges have played in attempting
to solve selected social problems," and assigns
readings about "the history of such efforts as
developing effective housing, public health or
immigration policies, or remedies for invidious
discrimination."

Berry's scholarship focuses almost entirely on racial

issues and gender politics. Her books include: Black
Resistance, White Law:  A History of Constitutional
Racism in America; The Pig Farmer's Daughter
and Other Tales of American Justice:  Episodes of
Racism and Sexism in the Courts from 1865 to the
Present; The Politics of Parenthood:  Child Care,
Women's Rights, and the Myth of the Good Mother;
My Face Is Black Is True; Why ERA Failed:
Politics, Women's Rights, and the Amending
Process of the Constitution; Overcoming The Past,
Focusing On The Future: An Assessment Of The
U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's
Enforcement Efforts; Crisis Of The Young African
American Male In The Inner Cities; Health Care
Challenge: Acknowledging Disparity, Confronting
Discrimination, And Ensuring Equality; and
Military Necessity and Civil Rights Policy: Black
Citizenship and the Constitution, 1861-1868.  

Berry has received many awards over the years,

including the NAACP's Roy Wilkins Award, the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference's Rosa
Parks Award, the Ebony Magazine Black
Achievement Award, and 32 honorary doctorates.
She was designated one of the Women of the
Century by the Women's Hall of Fame.