[NukeNet] Unplug's own Frieda Berryhill profiled in News Journal article

[Norm Cohen]

Click on the URL below for pictures, including one of Frieda.

Norm

 

Coalition for Peace and Justice; UNPLUG Salem Campaign, 321 Barr Ave,
Linwood; NJ08221; 609-601-8583; Cell Phone - 609-335-8176

  _____  

 

 <http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/1203-05.htm>
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/1203-05.htm 

 




Published on Sunday, December 3, 2006 b the Delaware News-Journal
<http://www.delawareonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061203/LIFE/6120
30318/-1/NEWS01>  


Delaware Underdogs Find Strength
America's Tradition of Dissent Unites Disparate Voices Into Powerful Force
for Change 


by Victor Greto 


 


The face of dissent knows no particular gender, color or class.

Nor is dissent expressed in any one form.

In Delaware, a woman raised by a Methodist minister and who runs an
organization working for peace stands alongside an intellectual raised by a
blacklisted union organizer who argues for inclusion and neighborhood
revitalization for Wilmington's African-American community. Joining them is
an elderly Wilmington woman whose Nazi-oppressed Austrian adolescence and
early adulthood blossomed into an activist American citizenship and a fight
against nuclear power.

"Many people are born with a drive for justice," says Sally Milbury-Steen,
head of Pacem in Terris, an interfaith peace group and justice education
organization that she has led for more than two decades.

"If you look at little kids, they cry out when you split a cookie unfairly,"
she says. "It gets squelched out of us by authoritarian experiences, in home
or in school. Until we can get back in touch with that, there comes a point
where you just have to stand up, and not just stand up for yourself, but for
those behind and right next to you."

"How can you not speak up?" asks 84-year-old Frieda Berryhill, who helped
stymie a nuclear power reactor from being built in Delaware 30 years ago. "I
love this land. I know the system can work."

But it continually needs to be critiqued, dissenters say.

"If the nature of organizing is breaking through to people to believe in
themselves so that they can be part of the process," says Wilmington
neighborhood activist Mark Brunswick, "then I'm a dissenter. Dissenters
stand in the face of danger because change is the point."

Dissent is a universal idea, but its American version is unique, says Temple
University professor Ralph F. Young, who recently published an anthology, "
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0321442970?tag=commondreams-20&camp=0&creative=0&l
inkCode=as1&creativeASIN=0321442970&adid=1TJGBVS1QP59PHQX3JYM&> Dissent in
America: The Voices that Shaped a Nation".

The book shows examples of American dissent, from Colonial religious figures
such as Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams to the 19th-century's seminal "On
Resistance to Civil Government," by Henry David Thoreau, which inspired
Martin Luther King Jr.'s own civil disobedience. The selections end with the
contemporary anti-Iraq War movement, represented here by speeches from
Michael Berg, the anti-war protester whose son was decapitated in Iraq, and
Cindy Sheehan, the woman who camped outside of President Bush's Texas ranch
to protest the war after her soldier son was killed in Iraq.

"If dissent is not central to American history," Young says, "it's at least
a pattern. What makes it unique here is that the founding documents
[including the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution] are the
promise, the ideal. Dissenters say, 'There is a contract that we are equal.
Now, hold up your side of the bargain.' "

Dissent became a pattern in America early on, says Charles Zelden, a
professor of American history at South Florida's Nova Southeastern
University who teaches classes on oppression in American history.

"There is a tyranny of the majority in America that Tocqueville recognized,"
Zelden says, referring to the 19th-century French political theorist Alexis
de Tocqueville, who wrote an early and influential survey of life in
America. "This tends to give the American personality an implicit
conformity. What he didn't understand is there's room for dissent, and if it
hits a tenor with people, it will become a majority view."

The most important dissenting movements began as small minorities, including
movements for the abolition of slavery in the early 19th century and the
civil rights movement of the mid-20th century.

At its height, the abolitionist movement was actively supported by only a
quarter-million people. But that minority helped spark the Civil War, which
freed the slaves and laid the foundations for the 14th and 15th amendments,
all of which revolutionized the country as much, if not more, than the
founding American Revolution.

"Dissent takes time," Zelden says. "For it to become something more than a
person crying in the dark, it has to resonate with the public, and have a
leader to support it."

The obvious example today is the anti-Iraq War movement, Young says.

"Cindy Sheehan and Mike Berg are part of the latest chapter in a long series
of ups and downs for dissenters," he says. "Americans are pretty tolerant up
to a point. But then they speak out."

Mark Brunswick

"This is a big-dog neighborhood," Mark Brunswick says.

That's why he's owned a loud and mean-looking German shepherd mix named
Caesar for three years now.

"There are drug dealers next door," he explains about his street nestled
above the Hilltop neighborhood. "There were two, three shootings within a
six-block radius of this house just in the last few weeks."

Brunswick, 52, however, has doggedly remained in the West Side Wilmington
home in which he grew up, and shares now with his 82-year-old mother, his
brother James and his brother's daughter, Bailey.

His neighborhood is an example of everything that is wrong with Wilmington
politics and its approach to community redevelopment, he says.

While reactivating his own 10-year-old consulting firm that works on
"asset-building and community development," Brunswick's latest work has been
under the auspices of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, a coalition of labor
and community leaders who work for civil rights.

Born in a "politically progressive, post-Vatican II household," Brunswick's
father, James, was a union organizer blacklisted from the mainstream union
in part because he had been labeled a communist.

In fact, Brunswick spent the first five years of his life with his mother's
relatives in New Haven, Conn., because of the turmoil caused by his father's
union activities.

The great hero of their household was A. Philip Randolph, "the strategist of
the civil rights movement," he says. Randolph literally stood behind Martin
Luther King Jr. while King delivered his seminal "I Have a Dream" speech.

Like his father, Brunswick says, Randolph was a great organizer, the person
who gets things done behind the scenes.

While attending Catholic school and Concord High School, Brunswick developed
a taste for the Great Books, the traditional Western canon of literature
that includes such heavyweights as Aristotle, Shakespeare, David Hume and
John Locke.

He spent his college years at schools that taught the Great Books program,
including the University of Chicago and nearby Shimer College.

He veered from a career as a school administrator setting curricula when
Harold Washington became Chicago's mayor in 1983.

"I was there at the Navy pier when Washington said, 'Business as usual will
not be tolerated,' " referring to the rampant corruption and the exclusion
of minorities in Chicago city government. Later that same year Brunswick
returned to Wilmington, believing that his role here was working toward the
same goal.

Brunswick sees Wilmington's government as "insular and incestuous," and
divided racially.

The condition of his neighborhood is a symptom of the alienation of
African-American youth, he says, the paucity of jobs and hope. Inevitable
growth along the riverfront will bring in more whites whose votes will
further dilute Wilmington's African-American political base.

Brunswick says he has reams of documentation concerning the course of
Wilmington politics over the last several decades. He plans to write a book.

But he will have a hard time finding the time. There's a lot to do.

"We have a weak black business sector because no one sees the relationship
between economic development and the crime rate," he says. "They are only
fixated on crime and punishment. Politics and political money dictates what
you get in Wilmington."

Sally Milbury-Steen

Pacem in Terris director Sally Milbury-Steen was born with a priceless
advantage.

The daughter of a Methodist minister who traveled to different towns in
Delaware during her childhood, she observed two parents who "believed in
service to others and lived their faith. There was no discrepancy between
Sunday and the rest of the week."

The family moved from Wilmington to Laurel, Newport, Dover and, finally, to
Milford, from where she graduated high school. All that moving,
Milbury-Steen, 63, says, "gave me a sense that it was important to build
your roots with people more so than places."

When her family moved to Milford in 1956, she further experienced the
oppressive power of racism. After her father made his church available for a
state-run health clinic that served both white and black, the family
received hate mail.

"It was such hateful stuff," she says, "and I thought, 'How could people do
this?' "

Even so, she was aware her parents ran a segregated church and school.

"And I would observe as a child that you would be in a shop and someone of
color wasn't being served or respected," she says. "I found all those things
troubling, but didn't know what to do."

She did, however, soon after she graduated from Milford High School in 1961,
the year before the town integrated the schools. As a student at the
University of Delaware, she participated in the burgeoning civil rights
movement, walking in marches and sitting-in at lunch counters.

She joined the young Peace Corps after earning a degree in comparative
literature from the University of Wisconsin and went to French-speaking
Cameroon in central Africa for two years to teach English.

It was there, she says, that "I discovered universals that transcend
cultures, recognizing that if you go to other places, and you're patient and
open and approach people in love rather than judgment, amazing things
happen."

This, from the small kindnesses of local villagers who wanted to share their
lives with her.

She taught high school for two years in the Georgetown section of
Washington, D.C., and finished her doctorate in 1975, a couple of years
after she began dating her future husband, John Steen. She married him in
1974.

After she earned her degree, she applied and got a Fulbright lectureship at
the University of Gabon, just south of Cameroon, to teach others how to
teach English as a foreign language, as well as classes on basic comparative
literature.

"Bouncing in and out of academia, I couldn't decide whether to be a literary
scholar with social interests, or the other way around," she says,
reflecting a trend of many future literary theorists and social activists.

After Gabon, while her husband pursued a doctorate in England, they had
their only child, Blythe, and became involved in a British campaign to end
nuclear weapons.

They moved to Delaware in 1981 and lived with her parents in Dover while
they looked for a job.

While her husband pursued a degree in computer science, Milbury-Steen became
a stay-at-home mom and began volunteering with Pacem in 1982. In 1985, they
hired her as director.

Besides running several conflict resolution programs, always hunting for
volunteers and protesting the Iraq War, she also is a peace consultant to
several groups.

Like Brunswick, Milbury-Steen believes that change is slow, but inevitable.

"I think there are potential dissenters and silent dissenters," she says
about the attitude of Americans toward the Iraq War.

"We're out there dissenting against the war, and people honk their horns,"
she says. "That's how things change. As more people come to agree, the
ripple effect gets wider and, in the end, if enough of us agree, it
legitimizes what we do."

Frieda Berryhill

She has angry and funny bumper stickers all over her old white Cutlass
Ciera.

"Stop the War/ Stop the Lies," The Emperor Has No Brains," "I Support The
Separation of Church and Hate!" "These Colors Don't Run ... The World."

Inside her cozy home hangs a large painting of 18th-century Enlightenment
figures, including the Frenchman Voltaire, grinning like a Cheshire cat at
how reasonable the world can be if only people were, well, reasonable.

Nearby, her shelves are lined with the thick tomes of Will and Ariel
Durant's History of Civilization and the Harvard Classics.

"I read all those while bringing up my children," says Frieda Berryhill, 84,
who in one person fuses communal compassion and impatient electricity.

She knows her history. And not just through books.

Berryhill grew up in Austria and entered puberty when Adolf Hitler rose to
power in Germany. When Hitler's Third Reich took over her country, she was
16, and was assigned to a labor camp to work on a farm because all the men
had gone off to war. Later, she tracked Allied bombers over the skies of
northern Germany.

When she returned to Austria after the war, the devastation took her breath
away.

She immigrated to the United States after marrying William Berryhill, an
American soldier, who came to Delaware to work for DuPont as an electrical
engineer.

She became a citizen in 1949. It was the happiest day of her life.

"I studied the Constitution," she says. "I was enthralled by the history of
the Revolution and the Civil War. The marvelous concept of the separation of
the branches of government."

While she became a stay-at-home wife during the 1950s and 1960s, she read as
much as she could and made her first dissenting move when she heard the
minister of her church call Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers,
a "chicken thief." She left that particular church.

Her first great cause, however, was a late 1970s Delmarva-proposed nuclear
power plant slated for Delaware. "It would have been the biggest reactor in
the country," Berryhill says. "And it wasn't safe. I couldn't just do
nothing."

She studied another high-temperature, gas-cooled nuclear power reactor then
active in Colorado, lobbied legislators, wrote letters and gathered
anti-nuclear power supporters. She started to collect money to go to court
to stop it before Delmarva canceled the project.

"See what one woman can do?"

She helped craft an ethics policy for the National Utility Regulators in
1977. And she is continuing to push the Delaware legislature to work on a
regionwide evacuation plan if there is an accident at the Salem Nuclear
Power Plant in New Jersey, which she says is built on a mud pile.

Her energy also has been recently channeled into anti-Iraq War sentiment,
sparked especially by the passage of the Patriot Act in 2002.

"You couldn't dissent then," Berryhill says of her days in Austria and
Germany. "People asked me for 50 years how the Nazis could have happened in
Germany. I could never answer that question until now. You lose your rights
so incrementally, unnoticeably, that before you realize what's happening
it's too late. That's what the Patriot Act did to me."

She read and saw similarities between the Patriot Act and Hitler's 1933
"German Enabling Act," which gave rights-crippling powers to the central
government.

"I became frightened, and wrote an anti-Patriot Act resolution, introduced
it in Wilmington Council, and it passed 9 to 1," she says proudly.

It also passed in Newark, Arden and Odessa.

She says she won't stop for her four grandchildren's sake, and for the
ideals for which the United States has stood for more than two centuries.

"This country still works," she says. "I'm filled with enthusiasm."

EXCERPTS FROM "DISSENT IN AMERICA" 

"I think all men recognize that in time of war the citizen must surrender
some rights for the common good which he is entitled to enjoy in time of
peace. But, sir, the right to control their own Government according to
constitutional forms is not one of the rights that the citizens of this
country are called upon to surrender in time of war. 

"Rather, in time of war, the citizen must be more alert to the preservation
of his right to control his Government ... 

"More than all, the citizen and his representative in Congress in time of
war must maintain his right of free speech. More than in times of peace it
is necessary that the channels for free public discussion of governmental
policies shall be open and unclogged." 

-- Senator Robert M. LaFollette, Republican from Wisconsin, Oct. 6, 1917 

"These are the gentry who are today wrapped up in the American flag, who
shout their claim from the housetops that they are the only patriots, and
who have their magnifying glasses in hand, scanning the country for evidence
of disloyalty, eager to apply the brand of treason to the men who dare to
even whisper their opposition to [their] rule in the United Sates. No wonder
Sam Johnson declared that 'patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.'
He must have had this Wall Street gentry in mind, or at least their
prototypes, for in every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the
exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion,
or both to deceive and overawe the people." 

-- Eugene V. Debs, Socialist, June 1918 

"War is the health of the State. It automatically sets in motion throughout
society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate cooperation
with the Government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and
individuals which lack the larger herd sense. ... Loyalty -- or mystic
devotion to the State -- becomes the major imagined human value. 

"In this great herd machinery, dissent is like sand in the bearings. The
State ideal is primarily a sort of blind animal push toward military unity.
Any difference with that unity turns the whole vast impulse toward crushing
it." 

-- Randolph Bourne, journalist and critic, 1918 

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we
are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and
servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the
truth should be spoken about him or anyone else. But it is even more
important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about
anyone else." 

-- Theodore Roosevelt, former President, talking about Woodrow Wilson's
policies during World War I 

"If we [become an imperialist power], we shall transform the government of
the people, for the people, and by the people, for which Abraham Lincoln
lived, into a government of one part of the people, the strong, over another
part, the weak. Such an abandonment of a fundamental principle as a
permanent policy ... can hardly fail in its ultimate effects to disturb the
rule of the same principle in the conduct of democratic government at home
... 

"The American flag, we are told, whenever once raised, must never be hauled
down. Certainly, every patriotic citizen will always be ready, if need be,
to fight and to die under his flag wherever it may wave in justice and for
the best interests of the country. But I say to you, woe to the republic if
it should ever be without citizens patriotic and brave enough to defy the
demagogues' cry and to haul down the flag wherever it may be raised not in
justice and not for the best interests of the country. Such a republic would
not last long. ..." 

-- Carl Schurz, Republican Secretary of the Interior under the Hayes
Administration January 4, 1899, on the American occupation of the
Philippines 

Copyright C 2006 The News-Journal 

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