Conversations@NPL: An Evening with Mary Frances Berry

Mary Frances Berry—longtime civil rights, gender equity, and social justice advocate—will join us on June 17 for the final Author Talk in the Conversations@NPL 2026 season on labor. Moderated by humanities scholar Tasneem Grace, Professor Berry will discuss two of her acclaimed works: My Face Is Black Is True, which reveals Callie House’s early fight for reparations, and Slavery After Slavery, which exposes the system of forced child apprenticeships that harmed Black families after Emancipation.

Since her college years at Howard University, Mary Frances Berry has been one of the most visible activists in the cause of civil rights, gender equality and social justice in our nation. Professor Berry has had a distinguished career in public service. From 1980 to 2004, she was a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and from 1993-2004 served as Chair. Between 1977 and 1980, Dr. Berry served as the Assistant Secretary for Education in the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW). She has also served as Provost of the University of Maryland and Chancellor of the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Acclaimed historian Mary Frances Berry resurrects the remarkable story of ex-slave Callie House who, seventy years before the civil-rights movement, demanded reparations for ex-slaves. A widowed Nashville washerwoman and mother of five, House (1861-1928) went on to fight for African American pensions based on those offered to Union soldiers, brilliantly targeting $68 million in taxes on seized rebel cotton and demanding it as repayment for centuries of unpaid labor

While the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, white southerners established a system of apprenticeship after the Civil War that entrapped Black children and their families, leading to undue hardships for generations to come. In Slavery After Slavery, historian Mary Frances Berry traces the stories behind individual cases from southern supreme courts to demonstrate how formerly enslaved families and their descendants were systemically injured through white supremacist practices, perpetuated by the legal system.

• 6:00pm - Doors Open + Lightly Catered Reception
• 7:00pm - PROGRAM BEGINS
• 8:00pm - Program ends

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