Dr. Roy DeBerry This is Me

Education

 View all 15 references Web References

1. 1. Home - Black Mississippi

   www.blackmississippi.com/index - [Cached]

   Published on: 11/1/2007   Last Visited: 11/1/2007

   Dr. Roy DeBerry, VP, Economic Development & Local Governmental Affairs, Jackson State University

2. 2. Tougaloo holding Founders' Week - The Clarion-Ledger

   www.clarionledger.com/news/021 - [Cached]

   Published on: 10/15/2002   Last Visited: 10/15/2002

   Mike Espy, who later served as U.S. agriculture secretary, and Roy DeBerry, vice president for economic development and governmental affairs at Jackson State University.

3. 3. The American Spectator

   www.spectator.org/dsp_article. - [Cached]

   Published on: 5/12/2006   Last Visited: 5/12/2006

   Across the polished desk from me in a converted church building in Jackson, Mississippi, sits Roy DeBerry, vice-president for economic development and local government affairs at Jackson State University.
   
   The last time we saw each other, he was a bright young teenager in Holly Springs, about an hour south of Memphis.
   ...
   Even among this energetic group, Roy stood out. A junior at the segregated high school, he was so bright and curious and affable that everyone knew he was going places. I remember being sprawled on a couch in the Freedom House one afternoon, talking about this and that, when all at once he exclaimed, "I just love a good book.
   ...
   Roy played Darryl, Evers's oldest son. "I'm gonna kill me a white man, mama! I'm gonna to kill one!" his lines went at one point. Elderly black women in the audience tittered nervously. They had never heard such thoughts expressed aloud. Yet Mama counseled Darryl to be patient and love one another, and somehow the way Roy said the lines you knew he didn't mean it anyway. He was too young and optimistic for rancor.
   
   Aviva Futorian, a young Brandeis graduate, took Roy under her wing and got him admitted a year later.
   ...
   Roy became a student leader. Somewhere along the line he encountered Anthony Lukas, a New York Times reporter doing a Neiman Fellowship at Harvard, who wanted to chronicle his experience. "At first I wasn't interested, but he was very persuasive," he recalls. Roy ended up on the cover of Lukas's 1970 book, Don't Shoot, We Are Your Children.
   ...
   In those pages, Roy sounded alienated from Northern culture and anxious to get back home. When he returned to Mississippi, he found the state much more receptive to his talents. He got a job as an assistant to Governor William Allain, serving first as director for public policy, then head of job development, and finally as the state's deputy secretary of education. In 1992, he became County Administrator for Hinds County, home of Jackson and the largest county in the state.
   
   Although the racial roadblocks had been lifted there were still a few institutional barriers. When Roy was nominated for Jackson Superintendent of Schools in the mid-1990s, the teachers' union objected vociferously because he didn't have an education degree. At that point he had a Ph.D. from Brandeis and honorary degrees from several institutions, but the NEA opposed him because he hadn't taken his Mickey-Mouse education courses. After several weeks of turmoil, Roy finally withdrew his nomination. In 1999, he became a professor of public policy at Jackson State.
   
   His younger brother, Andre, is now the mayor of Holly Springs.
   ...
   "We have these blues festivals down in the Delta in honor of Robert Johnson," says Roy.
   ...
   Roy DeBerry doesn't just make conversation. His restless mind is always probing. He wants to know my life story, how I got to be a writer, how many kids I have, what they're doing. A few years ago, when my oldest son was in high school, I arranged to have him interview Roy over the phone for a paper he was doing on the Civil Rights era. Afterwards, Roy had one complaint -- my son hadn't asked enough questions.
   
   And so over an hour's time, we try to span the years, back to that dilapidated little Freedom House across from Rust College, where 40 of us gathered each day with the sense that -- despite the fears, despite the hatred that surrounded us -- we were making history. "The thing that was so important to us at the time was to realize that somebody else in the country cared about what was happening to us down here," he says. "We'd been fighting for civil rights for ten years, but that was the first time we realized someone else was on our side."
   
   Then, as it comes time to say good-bye, he stops me again. "You know, it brings such joy to see people from the old days."
   
   It's been a joyful trip for Roy DeBerry -- and for America.