• Biography 1  (U.S. Civil Rights Commission)
• Biography 2  (Encyclopedia Britannica)
• Biography 3  (African American Registry) 

• Long Memory: The Black Experience in America
• Black Resistance White Law
• The Pig Farmer's Daughter and Other Tales of American Justice
• Stability, Security, and Continuity
• Voting Irregularities in Florida During the 2000 Presidential Election
• Voting Rights in America
• Military Necessity and Civil Rights Policy
• Black Self-Determination: A Cultural History of African-American Resistance
• The Politics of Parenthood
• Why ERA Failed
• My Face Is Black Is True: Callie House and the Struggle for Ex-Slave Reparations

• "If Rosa Parks had taken a poll before she sat down in the bus in Montgomery, she'd still be standing."
• "The time when you need to do something is when no one else is willing to do it, when people are saying it can't be done."
• "Civil Rights opened the windows. When you open the windows, it does not mean that everybody will get through. We must create our own opportunities."
• "When it comes to the cause of justice, I take no prisoners and I don't believe in compromise."

To reflect on this July Fourth, I draw from the 19th-century African-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who turned out to be a bad choice for a speaker at an 1852 Independence Day celebration in Rochester, N.Y.
                His discordant voice unsettled the proceedings: "Fellow citizens, pardon me and allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I or those I represent to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of national justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer, a day that reveals to him more than all other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham."

The United States Supreme Court decision resolving the 2000 election in favor of George W. Bush has been praised and derided by commentators. Those who—believing that the Florida Supreme Court was culpable and that Albert Gore Jr. was trying to steal the election—wanted the Court to stop the recount may be pleased. A report commissioned by the television network CNN concluded that CNN itself was partly responsible for the impression that Gore was a culprit by the way it presented the election.1 Those who believe that they were disenfranchised and that Bush stole the election using five justices appointed during the Reagan and George Bush administrations may still be displeased.
          Constitutional lawyers of every political persuasion are still busily trying to rationalize the Supreme Court's decision. Most agree that the Court has, as Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes warned in another context, suffered a self-inflicted wound because of the political nature of its decision and the makeup of the narrow 5-4 majority.2 An apter chief justice might have avoided entanglement altogether or molded unanimity in one direction or the other. Supreme Court justices played a major role in another election, that of 1876, in which the rights of blacks were a footnote, compromised away along with other issues in giving the presidency to "his fraudulency," Rutherford B. Hayes.3 In the 2000 election likewise, hostility to the civil rights of African Americans seems a mere footnote in the Court's decision giving the election to George W. Bush. But the unabashed activism of the Bush v. Gore majority and their deviation from their usual approach of deferring to state supreme courts give pause....

The Civil Rights Commission has, in fact, supported ERA. We supported the amendment as necessary for women under our jurisdiction that we got over sex discrimination first in 1972, the year ERA was passed, and we have repeatedly affirmed our support for the amendment.
           We are not dissuaded because it is taking a lot of time to get ERA passed. If you look at the history, constitutional amendments, most of them, if they are substantive, take years to get passed. It does not bother me.
            I would have preferred it if it had been ratified a long time ago, but that does not mean that we don’t need it because it is taking a long time. We see that the basic principle that ERA embodies is that the law must not treat men and women differently on the basis of gender alone.
            The ERA, as we understand it, would not apply to private conduct that Government does not normally regulate. In other words, private personal relationships, for example, between men and women or decisions on the part of individuals that they would like to be homemakers or workers or whatever they would like to be, ERA has nothing to do with that. ERA applies only to action by Government and would bar sex discrimination in any law, policy, or practice involving governmental entities and institutions....

Source: Congress, House, Committee on the Judiciary, Equal Rights Amendment: Hearings before the Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, 98th Cong., 1st sess. on H.J. Res. 1, July 13, September 14, October 20, 26, and November 3, 1983, Serial No. 115 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1990).

by Judith Haney
USNewsLink/February 23, 2002

When Mary Frances Berry was asked recently about whether the United States Commission on Civil Rights (USCRC) had outlived its usefulness and mandate, she answered this way:
           "When the time comes that we stop getting complaints, or that people no longer feel they are being discriminated against, then that will be the time to dissolve the Commission."
           Since 1980, when she was first appointed Vice Chair of the USCRC, Mary Frances Berry's name has been synonymous with civil rights advocacy.
           But more recently as Chairwoman of the USCRC, Dr. Berry's name has been associated with a highly publicized fight with George Bush, #43. When President Bush attempted to replace a sitting board member of the USCRC, whose term had not expired, with an appointee of his own, Berry declared war, and she won.
           Anyone unfamiliar with Dr. Berry's professional background as a lawyer and civil rights activist might assume that the public fight with Bush #43 would have caused her to kick into self-preservation mode. After all, a high profile fight with the President of the United States in his first year of office is not an enviable position to find yourself in if you are a government appointee. The potential damage to Berry's career and professional reputation, not to mention negative media exposure, would be enough for most people to rethink their actions and strategy.

By Hermione Malone
Savannah Morning News

Reparations are part of the unfinished business of the civil rights movement, said Mary Frances Berry, guest lecturer in the first installment of Beach Institute's 2002 series on reparations.
         "In fact, no matter how we look at it, at this hour the civil rights movement was very successful," she said. "I know that in a place that Clarence Thomas came from it's kind of hard to say that. But, the civil rights movement was successful."
         After the laughter subsided, Berry spoke to the packed sanctuary Thursday night on how the nation has backslided in civil rights, the historical beginnings of the reparations movement, and where the movement is headed today.
          Listening to the distinguished academician, lawyer, and chairperson of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is, in many ways, like chatting with an old friend. In her brief lecture at Second African Baptist Church, Berry skillfully wove together history, humor and hard-hitting facts.

Mary Frances Berry, the noted author, University of Pennsylvania history professor and former chairwoman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, brought her "labor of love" to downtown Buffalo on Thursday.

Fresh off last month's publishing of her latest book, "My Face Is Black Is True: Callie House and the Struggle for Ex-Slave Reparations," Berry, along with five other distinguished African-American professors, held a two-hour panel discussion of her work at the Hyatt Regency Buffalo.

The hotel is serving as host to the 90th annual convention of the Association for the Study of African-American Life and History through Sunday.

Berry's book details the life of Callie House, a little-known but important leader in the struggle for civil rights in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. House, who lived from 1861 to 1928, was born into slavery and went on to found the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association, which campaigned for federal pensions to be provided for ex-slaves as compensation for their unpaid slave labor.

House was eventually convicted of mail fraud when her grass-roots organization grew larger and attracted the ire of government and post office officials who looked to stifle the movement, professors said.

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