Ruminating with MARY FRANCES BERRY
The legendary civil rights activist on thinking creatively, ignoring sexism, and why she’s against getting rid of the filibuster.
Mary Frances Berry is a new friend, so I still call her “Doctor.” She is an OG in the world of social justice, possessing unparalleled knowledge and experience, but without cant or jargon (not a single reference to “intersectionality” in a two hour conversation). Born in Nashville in 1938, she earned a law degree and a PhD from the University of Michigan and in 1976 became the first black woman to head a major research university (the University of Colorado).
After helping run education policy for President Carter, she served on the Civil Rights Commission (eventually as chair), where she clashed with President Reagan and led the anti-apartheid movement. A prolific author and revered professor at Penn, Dr. Berry is an independent politically and in the way she approaches the world.
JON:
Welcome, Dr. Berry. Thanks for taking part.
I was really struck by what you said on Trevor Noah about a lack of fresh thinking in protest politics. People always want to know what the next wrinkle is in resistance. In one of your books you describe sitting around the kitchen table and figuring out what to do about apartheid. And then you did something that was highly unusual for the former chancellor of a major university and a sitting senior government official. You chained yourself to the fence of the South African embassy.
MARY FRANCES BERRY:
One of the things you learn is that you have to be constantly strategizing and thinking creatively. What would be useful? What will be something no one ever considered or suspected? And you have to move on that. But right now we're in a period of stasis and maybe that's good. Maybe we need to sort of come up for air.
JON:
You want new thinking on climate change.
MARY FRANCES BERRY:
If you believe that part of the solution is to get everybody to either not have cars or have electric cars, that is an obvious thing that people ought to get behind doing. That is to figure out how to make it easy for people to keep their cars charged. That isn’t easy in cities, where you can’t just drop a power cord out of a window.
We need people talking about to come up with something, and the science probably is there somewhere.
JON:
It's interesting that your ideas are a little wonkier and less about street action. But you also think progressives need to be careful what they wish for.
MARY FRANCES BERRY:
It's going to surprise you to know that I'm not in favor of changing the filibuster rule. When Harry Reid changed it [in 2013, so that it no longer applied to federal judges], I was probably one of two or three people in the human rights community who said we shouldn't do it. My argument was, if we do it, when the next administration comes in, they're going to appoint a bunch of judges you won't like.
JON:
And that’s what happened. McConnell took over in 2015, and when Trump won, he suspended the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees, too. Now we got Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett.
I interviewed [former Michigan Senator] Carl Levin recently, who is very sick. And he said the same thing as you: He was one of only three Democratic senators who were against Harry Reid on that. And he made exactly the same argument.
MARY FRANCES BERRY:
Everyone said to me, ‘You’re just being obstreperous and we're all gonna vote to go and do this.’ And so they did it and what I suspected would happen— happened. And then they all came to me and said that I was right, which didn't give me any comfort. But now the same people are saying to me, you're wrong. They would have done that anyway when they got into power. So I said, ‘Well, you don't know whether they would have or not.’
“… if we had not changed the filibuster rule, we would have had a better shot at not having the Republicans do it either.”
And if we had not changed the filibuster rule, we would have had a better shot at not having the Republicans do it either.
I'm always looking down the road to what's next. The votes [to get rid of the filibuster] aren’t there. So we’ve got to figure out a way other than doing that, to get something done.
JON:
It’s pretty clear to me that if Mitch McConnell gets back in there, and it's in his interest to blow up the filibuster, he'll do it. And that trying to reason with these people and say, ‘If we don't do it, then you won't do it’ is a fool's game. That's the liberal argument—that we've just come to the end of the line of this thing. It’s too late for ‘If we don't act responsibly, they won't act responsibly’ because they apparently won’t act responsibly under any circumstances. They won't even appoint a commission to investigate an insurrection at the Capitol. We can't reason with them. So let's just get as much good stuff to protect democracy through as we can. That’s the argument.
MARY FRANCES BERRY:
I don't think that the country needs to continually swing the pendulum all the way from one direction to the other. So that when Democrats are in office, they do certain things that they know Republicans are going to get rid of when they come in. And then when the Republicans are in office, there are certain things that they know the Democrats will do. That's not any kind of stability, especially on important issues.
All I'm saying is that once I decide that something I'm about to do is dangerous politically, from my side, I try to find some way to compromise on some of the issues. Take police reform. I think that if the parties could compromise on the issue of qualified immunity, we could get the bill passed.
You could come up with something that said that police officers could, in fact, be held liable financially when they kill unarmed people, but you make it so that they only have to pay something related to how much their salary is, and that the city has to pay the rest. Or some other compromise.
JON:
Tim Scott and Cory Booker are still negotiating. So it’s possible.
MARY FRANCES BERRY:
I also think it would help if we agreed to stop exaggerating things about the voting situation. I'm on the board of organizations whose whole business seems to be getting rid of voter suppression. We are in an era of outrage. To stimulate support, stimulate donations, to stimulate everything, you’ve got to be outraged about something.
There’s room for compromise. If you try to take away the rights of the states to control their elections, which is constitutional, and put all kinds of controls over what the states can do, I don't think that's going to fly. And we don't have to do that. We really don’t.
“We are in an era of outrage. To stimulate support, stimulate donations, to stimulate everything, you’ve got to be outraged about something.”
JON
I agree that with HR1 basically dead for now, thanks to the filibuster, and with Joe Manchin’s revisions unlikely to get the necessary ten Republican votes, it’s time to—in Lincoln’s words—“think anew.” To me that means focusing on preventing Republicans from subverting democracy after elections, as they tried to do in 2020 and are continuing to do with this ridiculous “audit” in Arizona. There are creative and extremely important ways to prevent state legislatures and Congress from subverting the will of the people. It’s time to get cracking on this. A bipartisan renewal of the Voting Rights Act is possible. It won’t restore “pre-clearance”—which the Supreme Court has basically found unconstitutional. But it might offer a path to a bill with teeth that ends this heads-we-win/tails-you-lose approach that the GOP is applying to the 2020 election and, if they get their way, all future elections.
And I generally agree with those who are very concerned about voter suppression. Where does Texas get off telling you who you can drive to the polls with? That seems unconstitutional.
But that should be in a different bucket from endless audits and electors who defy the popular will in their states. Whether polls on Sunday open at 1 p.m. isn’t hugely important. It wasn’t long ago that no one anywhere in the U.S. voted on Sunday. But endless “recounts” are a true threat to democracy.
MARY FRANCES BERRY:
I'm all for opposing something that's totally irrational. But don't [oppose] things where anybody who has some experience says, ‘Wait a minute. We go to church at 11 o’clock and are out by 1, so what’s the problem?’ It just makes you look like what the hell are you grasping at? Anything you can think of?
And harvesting is a real thing. When I talked on my book [tour] about campaign workers giving out $5 and a pork chop sandwich, a guy in the audience stood up and said, ‘I shouldn't say this, but I'm going to say it in front of all these people. I'm a precinct captain. And what I do is give fried chicken boxes to people to get them to go to the polls and I was really mad at the last election because the party didn't give us any money to buy the fried chicken boxes.’
The preacher would come by in local elections and say, ‘Well, let me just take that ballot over there for you. Let me take care of it.’ So there’s got to be some safeguards.
I’m not at all concerned about distributing [absentee] ballots to everybody. The front end of that doesn't bother me a bit. What bothers me is what I found about local elections in researching my book. It’s mostly taken from affidavits and wiretaps that prosecutors use. Some old people, for example, had people filling out the ballots for them. The preacher would come by in local elections and say, ‘Well, let me just take that ballot over there for you. Let me take care of it.’ So there’s got to be some safeguards.
JON:
But today’s Republicans are not on the level. That's the problem. The people writing these bills are trying to suppress the vote. They're not genuinely interested in ballot security. They're just interested in anything they can think of that will hold down turnout in Democratic areas. That's what it's all about.
MARY FRANCES BERRY:
Even if you assume that, you still have to answer [legitimate] concerns about hanky panky. Take the provisions about not being able to hand out bottled water to people waiting in line. I went back and read that part of the Georgia bill. It doesn't say that you can't do that. It says you have to ask the election officials to hand out bottles of water, if that's what you want to do. That’s because in some places [like Louisiana] in some local elections, they were handing out the fried chicken boxes, right? And then telling people who to vote for.
JON:
You’re right about exaggeration. I can understand how this is small potatoes compared to the problems that were faced before the Voting Rights Act, when there were entire counties in the South without any registered black voters at all. But I am still frightened by it. I’m concerned about putting state power behind sore losers. That’s rigging democracy.
But I love how you bring up the inconvenient truths of history. So let's talk about some inconvenient things in the civil rights movement and the antiwar movement. They were both deeply sexist. Am I right?
MARY FRANCES BERRY:
Absolutely.
JON:
So how did you handle that—then and now?
MARY FRANCES BERRY:
Basically ignore it. Pretend that it didn't happen, but go on. Keep moving. I concocted a way to go to Vietnam as a war correspondent when I was in college and saw lots of horrific things. And I ignored people who thought that I shouldn't have a say because I was a black and a woman, as Shirley Chisholm used to put it. And I knew that black men in the civil rights movement were jealous, like white men and others who ran the country. Going all the way back to A. Phillip Randolph during the movement for a March on Washington [during World War II]. That’s part of the way people were socialized and acculturated and all the rest. I know. I have brothers and [male] cousins. So what I did was to simply speak my mind and ignore them. And took note of what they were doing and tried to learn as a young person. And I learned from Coretta King. She and I spent a lot of time together in the years after Martin was assassinated.
JON:
What are your feelings about woke culture?
MARY FRANCES BERRY:
It's okay to be woke, and if you want to call it something else, banana, I don't care. Aggressive progressives are the ones that I observe and know and I hope they don't back away from what they're doing, because the change that they talk about is needed in the country. It's jarring to say things out loud, like white supremacy, or white privilege, or white fragility, or whatever it is. But it’s a good conversation.
Aggressive progressives are the ones that I observe and know and I hope they don't back away from what they're doing, because the change that they talk about is needed in the country.
And it ought to be applied not just to race and gender issues. We need to apply it to climate change and its effects.
At the same time, anybody should be able to say what they want— no matter how ridiculous, how venomous— because sunlight is the best disinfectant. I don't think that the gatekeepers of opinion—whether it's social media or the government—should exclude people from discussing certain things on campus or in the society. Let it all hang out. One of the presidents of Penn, Sheldon Hackney, a wonderful guy who has now passed away, tried to have a hate speech code on campus [in the 1990s], which would say that people couldn't say certain things. I told him that people should be able to say whatever they want, about whatever, and you can say back whatever you want, if it doesn't rise to inciting violence.
JON:
So does that apply to Trump?
MARY FRANCES BERRY:
Twitter and Facebook are like quasi- governmental institutions. They have a quasi-monopoly on the conveyance of opinion. That's not a defense of Trump I'm making; it's a defense of somebody who calls me the N-word, or whatever it is. As long as they're not saying, ‘Let's go out and kill someone,’ people have a right to say things that don't make any sense without being cancelled. But Twitter and Facebook do not have standards that tell you clearly that what you’re saying can't be on here. And they need them.
JON:
Thanks, Dr. Berry.
Ruminating with MARY FRANCES BERRY
Thanks to Mary Frances Berry for having the chutzpah to strategize about the defeat of South African apartheid from the perspective of her kitchen table in 1984. S. African apartheid legislation was repealed on June 17, 1991, 30 years ago today.