Career lawyer, educator Dr. Lee Roy Berry Jr. ‘66 selected for Distinguished Service Award

When Dr. Lee Roy Berry Jr. ’66 graduated from Eastern Mennonite College (now Eastern Mennonite University), several members of his Sarasota, Florida, church were there to celebrate his achievement.

“They were extraordinary people,” Berry recalled. “They played such an important role in helping to shape the course of my life.”

Because of his church family at Newtown Gospel Chapel, Berry joined the Mennonite community and chose to attend EMU. He became an educator and later a lawyer, inspiring and defending countless others over a 53-year career.

Berry has been selected by EMU’s Alumni Association and its Awards and Nominations Committee as the winner of the 2024 Distinguished Service Award, which honors EMU alumni who have significantly impacted the lives of others.

Berry’s first experience with Mennonites began near Hartville, Ohio, during the 1950s. A child of migrant farm workers, Berry, now 80, would travel each summer with his parents and siblings from Sarasota to work on the mucklands harvesting vegetables. 

Members of local Mennonite churches would come to the migrant camps and invite children his age to vacation Bible school after the workday ended. It was a welcome diversion from working all day in the Ohio fields. It was also his first experience as a Black child attending a church with white people, and he came away with a sense that the Mennonites were different from whites he encountered in the South.

“They treated us as human beings,” he said. “Their actions seemed to coincide with the beliefs they professed.”

Berry later met more Mennonites in Florida after a white man came to the migrant camp and invited him and others to church in Newtown, the predominantly Black section of Sarasota. Though he resisted numerous invitations, he had great respect for the Newtown Gospel Chapel congregation.

After graduating from high school in 1961 and taking months to search his soul, Berry decided to become a Christian. That winter, he was baptized and became a member at Newtown Gospel Chapel. He was still a migrant farm worker, but was thinking seriously about college. 

In the early 1960s, colleges and universities in the South remained highly segregated, so Berry had his eye on either Morehouse College, a liberal arts college that taught Black men, or Gibbs Junior College, an all-Black school in nearby St. Petersburg. He shared his plans with his pastor, who encouraged him to apply to EMU.

Berry was accepted to EMU and went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in history and secondary education. “EMU helped me prepare [for future career and educational endeavors],” he said. “You never stop learning.”

Following graduation, he applied for admission to the Mennonite Voluntary Service program in Elkhart, Indiana. In September 1966, he received a two-year assignment to the Voluntary Service Unit in Cleveland, Ohio, and became a public-school teacher. In June 1968, he returned to Elkhart and finished his Voluntary Service commitment by writing articles about the work of Mennonite volunteers in urban areas.

That fall, Berry enrolled as a graduate student at the University of Notre Dame where he received a master’s and PhD. In 1969, he became the first African American faculty member at Goshen College, teaching politics, Latin American studies and Black history part-time until his retirement in 2010.

While at Goshen, Berry took a sabbatical to pursue law school at Indiana University. In 1985, he was admitted to the Indiana bar and started his full-time law practice.

Many of Berry’s law clients were migrants from Central America and Mexico who encountered legal problems in Indiana but were not fluent in English and sought legal assistance from lawyers who could communicate with them in Spanish. 

Eventually more Hispanic lawyers came to the area, but in the 1980s, Berry was one of the few who could serve that community.

“My objective was to be effective by doing the best that I could for them,” he said.

Now retired and living in Goshen, Indiana, Berry has himself a family of educators.

His wife, Elizabeth A. Hostetler Berry, a graduate of Goshen College with two master’s degrees, was a member of the Goshen College faculty and served as a teacher and the head librarian at Bethany Christian Schools in Goshen. Their three children—Dr. Joseph Berry, Dr. Malinda Berry, and Anne Berry (MFA)—are also in higher education.