In Black America; Dr. Mary Frances Berry of The U.S. Civil Rights Commision

Prosperity and God. From the Longhorn Radio Network, the University of Texas at Austin, this is in Black America. Prosecutors play the race card quite frequently. It's considered an acceptable way and it can cut different ways. It's just one of the calculations that you make when you're trying to figure out who to prosecute.

Prosecutors are all together important though because you can get arrested for the same crime somebody else did and the prosecutor can decide not to pursue it. And he can decide to pursue it and he can decide what category he's going to charge you with. Dr. Mary Francis Berry, professor of law and history at the University of Pennsylvania and chairperson of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. She was the assistant secretary for health education and welfare during the card administration. As assistant secretary she coordinated and gave general supervision to nearly $13 billion of federal education funds. Also Berry was a provost at the University of Maryland College Park and chancellor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Through the years Berry has been a compassionate crusader for equal justice and was one of the co-founders of the free South Africa movement. I'm John L. Hanson Jr. and welcome to another edition of in Black America. On this week's program, U.S. Civil Rights Commission chairperson Dr. Mary Francis Berry in Black America. If you've got the right White House and you elect the people which is why it's so important for people to vote.

Like with our current Supreme Court for example, all the decisions that go against the interests of black people are 5 to 4. 5 to 4. All you need to change. If Mr. Clinton or Gore somebody is there who can not or build Bradley or somebody who will nominate good people and then if you vote and get the Senate, some more senators up there, you can get them confirmed. And you can change all of that law. And if you don't do it, then you cannot change them. So it is important who you vote for. Even for state and local offices, of course it's important who you elect when you go out and vote for a judge. But in the federal system, it's important who's president is key. And it would be worse than that if we had not elected Clinton and we had elected Dole or whoever was or ran against him or Bush. We would have by now, it wouldn't just be 5 to 4. It might be like, you know, 9 to 0 for something. But we're getting closer, but we need to get some more change there. Dr. Mary Francis Berry grew up in segregated Nashville, Tennessee.

She went on to a stellar academic career and a position on the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. In January 1980, President Carter appointed her a commissioner on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. After President Ronald Reagan was elected, he fired her for criticizing his civil rights policies. Berry sued and won reinstatement in federal district court. In 1993, President Clinton designated her a chairperson of the Civil Rights Commission. She often speaks out on the need for affirmative action programs, hate crimes, improving race relations in this country, and ending housing segregation. Berry has a new book out entitled The Pig Farmer's Daughter and Other Tales of American Justice. The book draws on hundreds of civil and criminal state appellate cases from the Civil War to the present. Recently in Black America spoke with Dr. Mary Francis Berry. I was born in Nashville, Tennessee, and I have two brothers. And my father left the family before I was at the age of two. I don't really have a recollection of seeing him.

I was born again until he was seventy something about a year before he died in all those years. But in any case, he left. My mother had trouble holding body and soul together. And she put us in an orphanage where she would visit us on the weekends. And she then went to school and ended up being a lot of work. And a lot of bad things happened being a licensed beautician. Meanwhile, we were in this awful orphanage in Nashville where the guy abused the children and did all the bad things that can happen to kids in places like that. But we got out and then my mother, as a single female head of a household, raised me and my two brothers. And grew up in Nashville, went to high school there, went to college at Howard University in Washington, D.C. And then a university in Michigan where I got a law degree and a PhD. But my mother did a good job as a single parent heading a household. It was hard.

And it would have been better if we had a father there who contributed to something in terms of love and support. But that's the way it was. Give us an example or background of some of your teachers in your early years that actually help mold and shape Dr. Mary Frances Berry to the woman she is today. Well, aside from my mother and my family, the most important people in my life were teachers. And I had a high school teacher who's my best friend today named Manurva Hawkins. She helped a lot of children in Pearl High School. And she looked at me and where other people would have seen this poor raggedy kid. She saw a diamond in the rough as she put it. And took me under her wing. There were other teachers before that. But she was the one who greatly stimulated my intellect, was nurturing and supportive and gave a direction to my life. I just can't say too much about how important teachers are. And you majored in chemistry in college? I majored in chemistry first because she thought that I should make...

She was a history teacher, but she thought you couldn't make any money being a historian. So she thought the science is, go major in chemistry. So I majored in chemistry and I took chemistry all the way through organic chemistry. And then I got tired of current chemistry. One summer, a friend of mine and I decided to take organic two semesters in the summer by staying all summer on how it campus. And going to class all day long and spending half the day in the labs with no air conditioning in the sweltering humid Washington summer. And by the time we finished that summer, I was fed up with chemistry. And then I switched to be a philosophy major. See my high school teacher said you couldn't make any money being a historian. So I thought maybe, well, I'll be a philosophy major. Not knowing you can't make any money doing that either. And I enjoyed philosophy, but then I decided to go back to my first love and in graduate school. I became a historian, but I was interested in the history of law. How the law operates. So I went to law school and I teach history of American law and courses on law and social policy. You spent your first year in college at fifth, then you transferred to Howard.

Right. I went to fifths for a while, then I moved to Washington. So Howard is in Washington. So I went to Howard University. Your mother told you at a very young age you need to be overqualified? Yes, she was always talking about, you know, people trying to get qualified for stuff. She said, don't just get qualified, get overqualified. Have more than they say, she meant to have more credentials than is necessary for the job. Don't just think you need to get, you know, the minimum of whatever they're asking. And then basically what that would mean is that you would be sitting in a room with people and you would have more credentials than anybody in the room. You know, that basically was her idea. That would help you to withstand the discrimination and everything else that you knew was going to happen to you. But at least if people said you weren't qualified, you always overqualified. Were there any positions before you became provost at the University of Maryland? Before I became provost at Maryland, I taught at various universities.

When I first got my PhD in law degree, I had trouble finding a job because a lot of the white places, of course, didn't want to hire as they said at the Negro, a black person. And I finally did teach, I wanted to teach, I taught, I did some writing. And then I went to the University of Maryland as a faculty member right during the middle of a bunch of student protests. The man to black studies program and various things. And I was the only black faculty member in those areas of history and social sciences. So they asked me if I would organize a black studies, African American studies program for them, which I did do. It still stands at the University of Maryland. And after that, they sucked me off into administration and became provost. And once you left University of Maryland, you became chancellor at the University of Colorado. Have I my mistaken? Yeah, I was, when I was provost, I was the only black woman to be a provost anywhere in some big white university. Or in a black university.

Then they invited me to come to Colorado. They had already searched and decided that I should come, even though I didn't apply for any job. And they asked me to come and I was the first woman to head a major research university, so I went on out there. Tell us what the experience was like being the assistant secretary for education in the US Department of Health Education and Welfare, which is now just health and education. Well, the, well, it's now education department. I'm okay. I was chancellor at Colorado and got a call from the Carter people asking me if I would come to Washington to run federal education programs. And I said, why? I'm not here in Colorado. And they just kept after me, kept after me, and finally the board of trustees out there gave me a lead to come to Washington. It's all the programs that have to do with education. About $13 billion worth at that time. It's more than that now. All the hits start. I mean, not hit start. But Title I and programs were capable of 12 kids, as well as student loans. Pell grants and college student loans and research and everything.

And so I decided to go there and run those programs. And then I helped the president to get President Carter to get a Department of Education carved out of the HEW. Because we were stuck in the middle of health and wealth there. And we got a new department. And then I left and I went to Howard University, my alma mater, and taught legal history there. In 1980, you were appointed a commissioner on the US commission on civil rights. Give us a synopsis of what the commission is all about. Okay. The Civil Rights Commission, I accepted an appointment from President Carter after I left the administration because he wanted me to do something in the government. And I was teaching and I took that post as a commissioner. What the Civil Rights Commission does is it monitors the enforcement of civil rights laws by all the federal agencies to see whether they're doing a good job. All like EEOC and the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division and the Civil Rights offices in every agency that monitors discrimination on who other people are being called.

Who other people are being discriminated in getting federal funds. We look, the commission looks to see if they are doing their jobs and issues report. The other thing the commission does is to have hearings and investigate issues that arise in the country that need to be looked into. For example, the commission is going on May the 26th to New York to hold hearings on the police community relations in New York City. And to see what all the other investigations have found out and to bring the mayor and the commissioner of police and all the unions and everybody in the community people forward. And then to try to make recommendations about what police should be doing. We've already held hearings like that in Los Angeles and in Chicago. The commission just recently held hearings on the crisis among young African-American men in our cities and will make recommendations to state, local government, to the private sector, to churches, to everybody who should be involved, community organizations, about what to do. So it's dealing with problems, identifying solutions, and then monitoring the enforcement of civil rights and then telling the president

and the Congress whether these agencies are doing a good job. We also get complaints from private citizens who write to us, who email us, who ask us to look into some complaint they filed with a federal agency whether agency never responded. So in that role it's sort of like an ombudsman. We go and try to make sure that this agency responds to people. And that's basically what the commission can be very controversial. It was controversial during the Reagan administration because the civil rights commission was standing up for civil rights and the Reagan policy was against civil rights. So I was criticizing Mr. Reagan publicly all over the place and he decided to fire me from the commission for doing so. And the press asked him why he fired me. He said I served at his pleasure and I wasn't giving him any pleasure. And I don't know what that means. But anyway, I sued him. And a federal district court with Judge Norma Holloway Johnson here in the district court agreed that the commission is a watchdog over civil rights. And that the president is when he's doing something and the commission watches him and wants to give a report, he cannot fire the watchdog for biting his leg.

So basically if she said it was illegal. And so I've been on the commission since then and Clinton then made me chair of it. President Clinton did. Do you see any good coming out of the commission? I see now that we have a majority of the years we didn't. I was in a minority starting this January 1999 with some of the Reagan people going off with people. We now have a majority for the first time. And therefore we will be able to do things like the New York police issues. We have a big report on disabled Americans and what's happening to them and with some recommendations. And that's important because the blacks are disproportionately on the disabled list and on the disabilities list, especially black men who die of circular toward disease or who have strokes and all that increasingly passed 19. These are very important issues.

So yes, I think we can do a lot and we have 50 state advisory committees too. One of the people to keep that in mind is one in every state in the District of Columbia and they do a lot of good work in their states. Who are those that make up the commission? The commission has by law eight members. It has a former state Supreme Court justice in California, a Latino man named Cruz Renoso in my vice-year. I have an Asian American woman from California from San Francisco Bay who is very active on issues having to do with older Chinese Americans and older Americans is on the commission with me. I had Judge A. Haleon Higginbottom Jr., a very good friend of mine for years who I persuaded to come on with me, but he of course passed. And so there's vacancy there for his seat. Then I have two Republican appointee colleagues who are left over there and one is the vice president of the Knights of Columbus and works with the Catholic Church and the other one is a senior partner in a major accounting firm in this country. They both white males from Philadelphia.

We just got our first American Indian appointee to the Civil Rights Commission and the history of the commission who was just appointed a woman named Elsie Meeks from South Dakota. She's a Lakota Sue Indian who in fact ran for Lieutenant Governor on the Democratic ticket in South Dakota during the last election. You're also a professor of American social thought at the University of Pennsylvania where you teach Lauren history there. How do you fit all that in? Well, the Civil Rights Commission is supposed to be part time and my job at Penn is a full time endowed chair and I teach a couple days a week there also advised students. And the way I fit it all in is I just fit it all in. That's how I fit it all in. How do you find today's students that you teach? I think they're very bright. I think they're very much oriented toward jobs. You know, they see education as practically, you know, can I get out of here and what kind of grades can I get so I can go and get myself a job and make some money. They are becoming more activists in their notions for a while. They will rather subdued, but they becoming very, very interested in social issues and problems and very activist oriented now.

You were a founder of the free South African movement. Now that South Africa is a democratic society. Have we put that particular country on the back burner? It's on the front burner in terms of symbolism because everybody wants to hang out with Nelson Mandela and they have their picture taken. That's going to pass as soon as Nelson goes out of office this year. But South Africa has many, many, many problems. Freedom and political freedom was only the first step. They still have discrimination against blacks who are the majority. They still have the wealth and power is still in the hands of white folk. And they haven't figured out how to redistribute all that. There are some middle class blacks who are benefiting from the changes. But the millions of blacks out Africans still have not benefited in the way they should. There's a lot of crime. There's a lot of disorientation in the society. And there's still a lot of work to do.

Your new book, The Pig Farmers Daughting with You Aren't A Pig Farmers Daughting, and Other Tales of American Justice, Episodes of Racism and Sexism in the Courts from 1865 to the present. Why at this time did you believe that this particular book need to be written, Dr. Bear? First of all, I've been researching this dog on thing for at least 10 years, and I was finding nuggets of cases that I turned into stories. They're real cases. And it's written in a way that anybody can read it. Because of our concern about the justice system, you know, we have jury notification with people refusing to convict people. And we had all those issues around the two OJ cases and other cases in which people do not perceive justice being done by the courts. And so we wanted to examine that. And basically what I find in the book is that the pole star, the guidance there, is if you think white male supremacy, I don't mean any particular white person, but white male supremacy as a system, and not letting the experiences and stories of people who were not in that category. Into the system, whether it's the judges that make the decisions, and most of them have been white males throughout our history.

And that system, and that the stories of people who are poor, who are black, who are sometimes even gender, but poor and black, especially, don't get taken into account in the same way that they should. And that sometimes you can get off in the system for the dishes reasons. The pickfarmist dog is one of those. It's a case where a black man is accused of raping a white woman in the 1880s in Texas, right in the middle of the lynching industry, where a lot of black men were lynched for supposedly getting out of line. And this guy was not lynched. That's what attracted my attention, that he wasn't lynched. Then he got a lawyer that attracted my attention, most of them didn't. And he had a jury trial, and even though they convicted them, they still didn't lynching. And he appealed, and the Supreme Court overturned his appeal. I looked to see why, whether that they love black folks in Texas, even the middle of the lynching industry. What I found out was that the judges said some of the most prominent white men in that community stood up for him, testified for him, and he worked for one of the richest white men in that community who stood up for him. And these white men are respected by us, the judges said. And who is this white woman? She's nothing but old pulp pickfarmist dog. What do we care about her?

Now some people would say that means the courts weren't racist. I said means that they were imbued with white male supremacy because the reason why that black man got off was because he was the white man's boy. And you shouldn't have to be the white man's boy in order to be able to get justice in the courts, and otherwise you cannot. In their cases, like that now, languishing in jail down in Louisiana today, a two young black men who in the late 1990s were accused of raping some white woman who went voluntarily with them off to drink some beer somewhere. And she says they raped her, even though she didn't even know them, and got in the car with them voluntarily. And she says she did that much, and off to drink some beer and go somewhere in party. And they said that it was violent here, and she says they didn't rape me. And those guys got convicted, and they had a jury that excluded black folks from the jury, black women.

And the argument of the court was that that was okay because these black women, one of them was related to somebody who had been in jail, had a cousin that had been in jail, so she didn't need to be on the jury. Another one of the judges said he thought she looked at the guy like she liked him. How to cook her eyes at him is if she might like him. All kinds of silly reasons like that, and they're still languishing in jail today. So what this book is about is stories that anybody can read to explain to us that the way you change the judicial system is to get everybody stories in it. Pull folks, black folks, outweigh of seeing the world and people like us, and I keep in mind, let's not just look at the faces, because when you can get some black folks, I mean look at Clarence Thomas, who get into the system and start behaving like the folks who are already there. We know, for example, that black police officers, when they go to work on a police force, some of the studies show that if they hang around with whites who are bad apples or abusive, they start acting just like them.

The show that they can do it, you know, just as well. So what we need to do is to get some different non-white supremacist stories in the system, and we also need to look carefully at whatever happens, to be able to analyze it perfectly well, rather than looking at things superficially, like looking at the pig vomits of daughter's story. You said it took you 10 years to conduct a research, whether any particular angles or outcomes you were looking at, because I would assume there's a multitude of similar cases all around the country. Well, I looked at every case with my students who helped me. We looked at every case where a black person was involved in the South from 1865 to 1900 and did a random sample from 1900 to the present, so that we know what's out there. Most of the cases in the South were black men were accused of rape and white women in the 1880s and 90s and so on. They were lynched. But what I'm saying is in this exceptional case, what it teaches us is that if you've got a powerful white man on your side, and you've got some polatratian white woman who's the one that you claim, and if the powerful white man is the key, that's what the key is, your relationship to him, you see.

And that shows that there's even more bias because the bias is that in those exceptional cases, they are the white men's boy. I was particularly intrigued and you said when one in his court, particularly a person of color or of a low socioeconomic status, one has to overcome the evidence which is present to the juror or judge and also the stereotypes in which the juror or judges are bringing to that particular case. You have to bring in as one black man. So it's a double whammy. Yeah, thousands of years history. You stand there, not just you standing up there. But it's like somebody said to me the other day that when a judge looks at a white youth who has committed some kind of, you know, minor crimes and he's in court for the first time, he sees a troubled youth when he looks at a black youth standing up there in the same situation. He sees a super predator or black man is being, you see what I mean. So that what you carry with you is the baggage of thousands of years of history when you are on the Jersey highway driving and you're a black man, the state police officer who sees you, sees all the history, all the present reality of some other black man and everything else when he sees you.

When he sees somebody else, he doesn't see any of that. So you're carrying with you in the courtroom, all of that baggage. Now if you had some people sitting up there as judge and jury who came from your experience and who were sensitive to it and weren't co-opted by the system, they would see you as you and the various experiences we might have as a people rather than making all these conclusions and stereotypes about you before you even have a chance to do anything. And then he ended up convicting you. We hear a lot about the notions that black people do not convict black people, but if like yourself, limiting Washington, DC was the majority population, lived in Detroit, Michigan was the majority population. They sent black people to prison every day. There are black people going to prison all the time and sent there by other black people because you don't like criminal criminals who feast on us and they're more than anybody else. The point is though, if you get a case in which it is clear that part of the reason why they're prosecuting somebody or part of the reason why they're doing what they're doing is just because they happen to be black.

Then no sane black person is going to sit there and agree that they ought to convict them like they said they'd like Mac Espion. They shouldn't let Mike Espion in that case away here with the special prosecutor after him and that if we hadn't had this kind of jury, it might not have happened. But when the jury could see that all they were doing was abusing the process, you know, the jury wasn't crazy. They said, no, we're not going to do this. And that's what causes jury notification when you have people with different experiences who can see the person as a person and can see what is happening to them. On a local level, one has an opportunity to elect county and municipal judges. On the federal level is basically left up to those that are sitting in the White House. Is that a good system in which we have? If you've got the right White House and you elect the people, which is why it's so important for people to vote, like with our current Supreme Court, for example, all the decisions that go against the interests of black people are five to four.

Fact for all you need to change. If Mr. Clinton or Gore somebody is there who can not build Bradley or somebody who will nominate good people and then if you vote and get the Senate, some more senators up there, you can get them confirmed and you can change all of that law. And if you don't do it, then you cannot change them. So it is important who you vote for, even for state and local offices. Dr. Mary Francis Berry, Professor of Law and History, Chairperson, U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and author of the new book, The Pick Farmer's Daughter and Other Tales of American Justice, published by Alfred A. Kanoff, Incorporated. If you have questions, comments or suggestions asked your future in black America programs, write us. Also let us know what radio station you heard us over. The views and opinions expressed on this program are not necessarily those of this station or of the University of Texas at Austin.

Until we have the opportunity again for I.B.A. Technical Producer, David Alvarez, I'm John L. Hanson, Jr. Thank you for joining us today and please join us again next week. Cassette copies of this program are available and may be purchased by writing in black America cassettes, Communication Building B, U.T. Austin, Austin, Texas, 78712. That's in black America cassettes, Communication Building B, U.T. Austin, Austin, Texas, 78712. From the University of Texas at Austin, this is the Longhorn Radio Network. I'm John L. Hanson, Jr. Join us this week on in black America.

We still have white males, supremacy and certain attitudes and stereotypes about people. But a kid you will get judges who have been educated differently and who feel differently who will try to meet our justice. Dr. Mary Francis Berry, Chairperson US Commission on Civil Rights, this week on in black America.