EGERTON: Brown was like a thunderclap, and particularly the nine-to-nothing quality of it. Do you remember May 17th or the 18th?
BERRY: Oh, absolutely. I remember May 17th and the 18th, but what I remember even more, now that you put it that way, is that leading up to Brown – I read the paper in those days, because I was in class, and Minerva would make us read. I don’t remember the papers making a big deal about all these other cases, or saying, ‘They have now done so-and-so, so-and-so, and what does it mean?’ I don’t even remember any discussion. I know in class we were told, ‘The NAACP is suing people and trying – ’ as part of the history discussion. But it wasn’t as immediate, and I didn’t really think anything was going to happen to us. And the press didn’t. I read the papers and they didn’t say anything. It was like a shock. And so the day Brown was decided, I was walking down the street here in Downtown. It was my senior class and Minerva was our class advisor. She made up a category – you know, like you have valedictorian and salutatorian and all these things – she made up a category called ‘giftorian’ for our class, actually, since there wasn’t one in the year before us – to give it to somebody who was below those, but somebody who she thought – and she made me the giftorian. (laughs)
EGERTON: It’s like the one with the most promise.
BERRY: Yeah. And so then, we had needed to buy some things to make the senior class uniforms or something for our play. So she had me come downtown with her while she shopped. And I don’t remember what store we were at, but as we were walking down the street, the paper was there, and the paper had the headline about the Brown decision.
EGERTON: That would have been May 18.
BERRY: And I said, ‘Ohhhh, Miz Johnson. This means the kids are going to school together next year.’ (laughs)
EGERTON: That’s what Thurgood Marshall said.
BERRY: And that’s what she said. I never will forget it. She said, ‘Not so fast, Mary Frances. Not so fast.’ (laughs ‘til the room echoes) ‘But I was just so – ” And the other part that’s interesting about it is, my mother, the day that it happened, and then the newspaper went around asking people on the street what they thought, so they could put in the paper what they all said. Now, my mother, who at that time – let’s see, where was she working then? Oh, she was working over on Elliston Place, at the Elliston Place Beauty Shop. She would wash people’s hair there. They wouldn’t let her fix people’s hair because she was black. But she made more money doing the washing and so on, than she did at the house, and we were big enough. So she was working over there. We’d go to the Elliston Place Café. There was a black woman who cooked there for years, until she died, who made wonderful chess pie. But in any case, my mother happened to be walking down the street to catch the bus to come home, and the reporter stopped her, and said, ‘What do you think? The Supreme Court says that the Negroes and Whites have to go to school together now. What do you think about that?’ And my mother said, something like – and this was in the paper, ‘Ooh, I don’t think Negroes will want to go where they’re not wanted.’ Like that. And they put it in the paper. My mother, to this day says that she was – later on, of course, she’s embarrassed – but the guy took her by surprise, and she was always scared to say anything, in those days, to white people. You don’t know what they’re going to do to you. So she said it didn’t make any sense for her to say that, but that she didn’t really expect anything to happen. She didn’t know anything about all this. And so she said what she naturally would have said, and it’s in the paper. But, in any case, Minerva said, ‘Not so fast.’ And I did really think, when Brown was decided, I thought she was wrong, and I said, ‘Oh, it’s – no, but they say that we’re going to – look, it’s right there in the paper. (laughs) And it said nine to nothing. Nobody’s against it.’