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Away down South in Dixie
In accent and manner, George W. knows how to play the part when he sweeps through Mississippi, including taking a swipe at Hillary.
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[10/11/99]

Put the victim on trial?
Lawyers spar over autopsy photos, angels clash with the Rev. Fred Phelps and both sides prepare for a "sex panic" defense as jury selection begins in the Matthew Shepard trial.
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[10/11/99]

Down in the trenches
Donna Brazile, the new manager of Al Gore's presidential campaign, has a reputation as a tenacious political attack dog.
By Keith Moore
[10/11/99]

No light in his attic
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By David Horowitz
[10/11/99]

America's first gay president
President Clinton mixes with drag queens and Matthew Shepard's mom at a big New York gay pride bash.
By Sara Douglas Hart
[10/09/99]

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But the radio network that survived McCarthyism, and more recently attempts by Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., to cut its public funding, is facing the greatest threat to its existence yet, at the hands of its own leadership. And its primary antagonist is not a right winger, but Mary Frances Berry, the black scholar and civil rights activist who chairs both the Civil Rights Commission and the Pacifica Foundation.

In the last six months, the management changes pursued by Berry have ignited a civil war within the network. Attempts by the central foundation to reduce local control of the five stations triggered outrage at KPFA, but Berry defended her attempts as an effort to bring diversity to the station, whose programmers and listeners she derided as "white male hippies over 50."

When a rainbow of KPFA staff and supporters protested the moves, as well as Berry's racial rationale, months of chaos ensued. Berry and Executive Director Lynn Chadwick fired the station manager, censored its public affairs programmers to keep them from talking about the controversy, had a broadcaster arrested -- while he was on the air -- for defying the ban, shut down the station and locked KPFA staffers out, had peaceful demonstrators arrested, and paid anti-union lawyers, armed security guards and a tony public relations firm over a half-million dollars to prevail.

Here in the home of the free speech movement, Berry's moves outraged even people who don't listen to the station. The result is that in the last two months, she has been socked with complaints before her own Civil Rights Commission, accused of unfair labor practices before the National Labor Relations Board and investigated by a committee of the California Legislature; she has been attacked by a wide political spectrum of local Berkeley politicians, including the police chief, and sued by listeners and staffers challenging her actions in the KPFA struggle.

What's striking is the fact that the Civil Rights Commission she chairs has also been mired in controversy and management woes in the last decade -- but few liberals have bothered to raise their voices about her management practices there. A reluctance to criticize Berry is understandable, because she is revered by civil rights activists.

They cite her heroic fight to defend the Civil Rights Commission against conservatives appointed by President Reagan (and against Reagan himself, who tried to fire her), who were trying to abolish both affirmative action and the commission itself. She took part in the infamous celebrity arrests at the South African Embassy in 1983 along with Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton, D-D.C., and others.

She was gutsy in opposing Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March, calling the Nation of Islam leader guilty of "the most despicable, anti-Semitic, racist, sexist and homophobic attitudes imaginable." About the only time she's ducked a controversial national issue was when she kept silent on President Clinton's welfare reform, which many civil rights activists abhor.

Berry's struggle from a childhood of desperate poverty to a life of accomplishment as an activist, scholar and high government official is a noble one. Besides chairing the boards of the Civil Rights Commission and Pacifica, she has served as an assistant secretary of education and holds an endowed chair in American social thought at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of seven books, most focusing on civil rights, feminism and the law.

But Berry's achievements have come at a cost. Off the record, people who know her well describe her as a vitriolic brawler who doesn't know when to stop fighting, and who turns on anyone who disagrees with her -- even African-Americans with civil rights records equal to or more impressive than her own. More than one African-American politician and journalist have suffered a tongue lashing from Berry and been called an "Uncle Tom" just because they didn't share her agenda.

Pat Scott, the former Pacifica manager who herself drew furious complaints about her attempts to "professionalize" the grass-rootsy stations, rues the day she recommended Berry for the top Pacifica job. The civil rights leader's tenure "could be the end not only of KPFA but of the whole Pacifica network," says Scott, who is also African-American.

But Berry's use of the race card to silence her critics is especially unfortunate, because the management chaos she has presided over at Pacifica is paralleled by disarray at the Civil Rights Commission she heads.

Next page | Civil Rights Commission: "An agency in disarray"