Mary Frances Berry

Every Generation Must Make a Dent in Injustice, Mary Frances Berry Tells Founders' Day Convocation

Feb. 12, 2004

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. — Mary Frances Berry, who chairs the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and teaches history and law at the University of Pennsylvania, asked the audience at Illinois Wesleyan's Founders' Day Convocation Wednesday (2/11) to do something every day in the cause of social justice.

• Listen to Founders' Day

It doesn't have to be a big thing, Berry said. Little things will do. "I've learned to be satisfied with small measures so long as there is change," she said. "But the most important thing is to do something every day and don't tell anybody what you did. You're not doing it to tell people, but you're doing it for the sake of your own soul and for the sake of the country."

Berry’s Founders’ Day address was part of a semester-long observance of the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education decision, which is the subject of a course being taught at the University this spring.

Born and raised in the segregated South, Berry graduated from Howard University and then earned both a Ph.D. in history and a law degree from the University of Michigan. She was assistant secretary for education in the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare during the Carter Administration and has also been a leader in higher education, including chancellorship of the University of Colorado.

Mary Frances Berry receives an honorary degree from Acting President Janet McNew, right, and Acting Provost Roger Schnaitter.

Berry said that she sometimes despairs over the progress of civil rights in the United States. "When I am most despairing, I say to myself, 'If Rosa Parks had taken a poll before she sat down on the bus, she'd still be standing,'" Berry said. "I tell my students at the University of Pennsylvania that somebody has to go through the fire this time. Every time there is major social change, somebody has to go through the fire. Each generation must make its own dent in the wall of injustice."

The Supreme Court's decision in the Brown case was a milestone, Berry said, and it remains significant even if the promises have never been fully realized.

"The most important point to be made about the Brown decision is how it transformed what African Americans and white people in the South thought that African Americans could do," she said. "Until Brown, my mother and other African Americans thought things would never change and that there was nothing that they could do."

When the Brown decision was rendered, there was the sense that times had changed. Then when the change was neither as swift nor as sweeping as many had hoped, the response was anger.

"When in a few years the change didn't come in the way that you thought it should, when the promise had not been made real, you were ready to move on to the sit-ins of the Civil Rights Movement," Berry said.

The University presented Berry with an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree for her "untiring advocacy for civil and human rights in the United States and abroad."

Funding for Berry's visit was provided by a Humanities Series Grant, the President's Office, the Office of Multicultural Affairs, and the Educational Studies Department.