Mary Frances Berry: A Portrait

Thirty-plus years ago, when photo-journalist Brian Lanker approached Mary Frances Berry about being part of what would become his book, I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America, she says she initially rejected the idea. “How could I be in the group of distinguished Black women I had long admired?” recalls Berry, Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought Emerita. Pause on any single moment in her illustrious career—when she was first female head of a major U.S. research institution or chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights or honored with the Nelson Mandela Award by the South African government for her social justice activism—and there’s no question she belonged. But Berry needed convincing, and luckily, Lanker eventually succeeded. “I trudged with him up to a park near my house much too early in the morning for me so, as he explained, he could catch just the right light,” she says. For seven months in 2023, 34 years after the original book published, the resulting image hung at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery along with Lanker’s renderings of tennis star Althea Gibson, activist-scholar Angela Davis, and many others.