For Black History Month, Kent State Today is spotlighting students, alumni, faculty and staff in our university community who are taking an active role in making history and creating positive change in the world.
Bertice Berry, MA ’86, Ph.D. ’88, has earned a long list of descriptors, including sociologist, educator, lecturer, author, television host, podcaster, humorist and storyteller. She also is a alumna who has been awarded the university’s Oscar Ritchie Distinguished Alumni Award.
In addition to the Ph.D. she earned at Kent State, Berry has been awarded more than 10 honorary doctorates and Savannah Technical College named their Change and Transformation classrooms in her honor.
She has won numerous awards for her presentations and her best-selling books, both fiction and non-fiction. But she doesn’t consider herself a celebrity.
“I’m not a celebrity; I’m just hardworking,” Berry said.
Berry spoke with Kent State Today about one of her books that has a connection to the university, “BlackWorld,” which captures her memories of her time in Kent and Kent State’s place in history.
The Historical – and Feverish – Origins of ‘BlackWorld’
Berry lives just outside of Savannah, Georgia, in an area that’s rich in history and inspiration for her imagination and her writing. Henry Ford lived here, and Berry shares the local tales of how Ford and George Washington Carver worked together on growing plants to make paint. “Just down the road from me, there’s the old house where Ford built a clinic for colored children because they weren’t allowed to go to a hospital,” she said.
Berry’s friend purchased the house and turned it into an art shop. When she passes the house now, Berry says she imagines Carver saying, “Here are the herbs and the things that you can use to heal others.”
“I live on land that was the original ‘40 acres and a mule’ allotment … [I imagine] Harriet Tubman just yonder over the river,” Berry said.
“BlackWorld” was born from these inspirations in combination with a bad bout with the flu. “It was before the pandemic and it was one of those flus that probably kills most people,” Berry said. “I knew I was dying; I was on my way out. I couldn’t get myself together, I couldn’t move, I couldn’t do anything.”
“I felt like: if this is it, I want to say something,” she said. So, she wrote a short book, in a handwritten draft and said, “I didn’t die.”
“My literary agent asked, ‘Oh, could you make it longer?’ And I was like, ‘yeah, but in all fairness to me, I thought I was going to die,’” Berry said.
‘BlackWorld’ and Its Connection to Kent State
“BlackWorld,” as described by Berry is a corner of heaven where the living and the dead can converse, for counsel and advice and ask for help. People can visit BlackWorld to spend time with people who have passed on. It’s a way for the living to know people they didn’t know personally and use what they knew then, today, to be hopeful about the future.
“This is an aspect of wanting to share Black history in a way that is hopeful,” she said.
VIDEO: Berry’s fictional characters in the story encounter the same real Kent State faculty members who were admired by Berry when she attended Kent State, including Betsy Justice, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus Edward Crosby and Elizabeth Mullins.
Rose, the main character in “BlackWorld” is working on her doctoral dissertation at Kent State. Berry said that she didn’t realize how much the experiences of other characters in the story paralleled her own experiences while she studied at the university, until people who know her read the book and told her. “All of them have some aspects,” she said. “It’s like Jung said: ‘Everybody in your dream is you.’ And I’m pretty sure I was delirious when I came up with this corner of heaven.”
She added, “But people who don’t know me so well say that her experiences feel like theirs. And that’s the goal to make the reader feel that this story is your story.”
Berry said that you don’t have to be Black to visit BlackWorld, “but it helps.” She said that she called it BlackWorld to create a positive association, “Because then you have to say ‘Black’ to go to a good place.”
She said that people can get to BlackWorld through meditation, by listening to certain music or whatever works for them. “Somebody told me they put on Nina Simone and the next thing they knew, they were in BlackWorld,” Berry said. “In the book, the way you get to BlackWorld is through [W.E.B.] Du Bois’ double consciousness. The way the world sees you, the way you see yourself. And then the third portal is the way God sees you, which is the truth about who we are, that we’re all beautiful and amazing and marvelous. And once you recognize that about yourself, going in and out of BlackWorld is a nonstop, daily occurrence – except time is only a construct there.”
‘We’re In It Together’
When Berry attended Kent State, she said that May 4 seemed like “Kent’s dirty little secret.” She thought it was something that the university “should brag about” because “in places like Berkeley and other institutions where children were going to school, meaning NOT middle America, they were holding deans hostage, they were shutting down operations,” she said. “The National Guard, Nixon, the rest of ‘em decided we need to stop this. We need to stop this rioting.”
Berry said that the students at Kent were not doing the same kinds of things. “And yet they became the target because they were working-class middle America folks that those in power felt that they could make an example for the rest of the nation, using Kent State, which makes us the marginalized people,” she said.
“Sadly,” she said, “people on the margins don’t recognize enough what they can do. Folks who are owning and controlling the means of production can make the rest of us feel like we’re separate and apart from each other; not the same. In the eyes of the 1%. We’re all the same – and until we recognize that we are, you’re my brother, we’re not going to move the needle. We’re in it together.”
‘All Roads Lead to Kent’
“I don’t think people think of a few things when they think of Kent State,” Berry said. “They don’t think of the brilliance and the kind of rigorous study in academic endeavors and liquid crystal. They don’t tend to think of those things; but it’s all right there.”
Berry encourages students at Kent State to embrace their experiences. “You can either be here on the ‘I’m just getting my degree thing.’ Or you can be here on the “Kent: this is a pivotal point in my life. And everything from this point on will be determined by who I am here and how I live and how I walk through life and what I do.’ It’s amazing.”
When Berry attended graduate school at Kent State, she and her housemate were the 36th and 37th Black women in the world to earn Ph.D.s in sociology. She has fond memories of her time in Kent, except for the cold winters (“I don’t play in the cold anymore,” she said.) and the retail clothing options (Berry is a talented designer and makes most of her own clothing). “It wasn’t the place to look for stores with the best clothes,” she said. “It’s the best place to look for the best education for the rest of your life.”
Berry also taught sociology at Kent State.
About a year ago, when Berry was in New York she was returning to her hotel and heard someone call her name. “I turn and it’s one of the kids whose hair I used to braid from Kent, and I’m like ‘What are you doing here?’ She’s like ‘I just got back from Paris.’ I said, ‘Of course you did – all roads lead to Kent!’”
Special thanks to Jody Kovolyan, senior project and traffic manager, Communications and Marketing, and Kris Palcho, who are Kent State alumni and friends of Bertice Berry, for their assistance in creating this story.