“THE COOL THING ABOUT HIM IS THAT ANYBODY WHO HAS TREPIDATION ABOUT THE SUBJECT, HE IS INSTANTLY DISARMING, SO HE GETS PEOPLE TO OPEN UP A LOT ABOUT IT, THOUGH THEY NORMALLY WOULDN’T. THERE IS AN ASSUMPTION WHEN IT’S A BLACK PERSON TALKING ABOUT RACIAL ISSUES THAT IT’S GOING TO COME DOWN TO YOU VERSUS US. BUT AS IT SAYS ON HIS MUSEUM’S WEBSITE, IT IS A ‘SHARED HERITAGE’. AND HE REMINDS PEOPLE OF THAT.”
New York Times, Jan. 30, 2010.
ASH GROVE, Mo. — When he moved back home here 12 years ago, the Rev. Moses Berry wanted to settle down to small-town life with his wife and two children. He did not intend to become a one-man racial reconciliation committee.
But some residents of this nearly all-white, rural town of 1,400 people 15 miles west of Springfield say that he has done just that.
By founding a black history museum here, cleaning up his family’s cemetery and telling his family’s sometimes controversial story, beginning with its roots in slavery, Father Moses, as everyone calls him — an African-American, Orthodox Christian priest in a flowing black cassock — has tried to remind people of a part of the region’s often-forgotten past, and to open up hearts and minds along the way.
“He brings peace to people. I’ve seen it,” said Gail Emrie, 56, a local history buff who helped get the Berry family’s 135-year-old cemetery — one of the region’s few black cemeteries not located on a plantation — listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2004. “It is reconciliation, and it is his mission, reconciliation of our history between the races.”
And Ms. Emrie went on, “Every little town down here could use” an Ozarks Afro-American Heritage Museum, which Father Moses opened in 2002.
Dakota Russell, the lead historical interpreter at the state-run Nathan Boone Historic Site, the homestead of a son of Daniel Boone just outside Ash Grove, has attended talks by Father Moses at the site several times since 2001.
“The cool thing about him is that anybody who has trepidation about the subject, he’s instantly disarming, so he gets people to open up a lot about it, though they normally wouldn’t,” Mr. Russell said. “There’s an assumption when it’s a black person talking about racial issues that it’s going to come down to you versus us. But as it says on his museum’s Web site, it’s a ‘shared heritage.’ He reminds people of that.”
Father Moses, 59, said he had spent much of his life on a spiritual quest that began in San Francisco in the late 1960s, included nearly a year in jail in Missouri on a drug charge that was later thrown out, and took a positive turn with his conversion to Orthodox Christianity. He was ordained, first in 1988 by an Orthodox church that he now considers “unauthentic” and in 2000 by the Orthodox Church in America.
When he returned here in 1998, after the death of an uncle who had willed him a 40-acre family farm, he had no intention of starting an Orthodox church in a town already served by 10 Christian churches of various denominations, let alone opening a black history museum.
“We thought my wife would teach, I’d paint appliances and go to school and become an emergency medical technician,” Father Moses said. “I should have known I could never leave the priesthood or forget my history.”
After he told a few friends that he wanted to have a prayer service in a shed at the cemetery, and a dozen people showed up, he decided to start the Theotokos “Unexpected Joy” Orthodox Christian Church. It has grown into a congregation with about 50 members that holds services in a new cypress building on three acres of his farm.
The historical work came about just as unexpectedly, he said, when he started showing the memorabilia his family had collected over the years, and people responded positively.
For Father Moses, his church and his historical work are inextricably linked.
“It’s all bound up in my faith,” he said. “That is, that we are all children of God and that we do have a shared heritage and not just a national heritage.”
The work has not been easy.
When he first broached the idea of the museum, some family members and friends said it might be a dangerous undertaking for a black man in a nearly all-white town — even if it was his hometown and he was a priest.
Some locals were not happy, said Larry Cox, the town barber, who is white and grew up with Father Moses, but the fears have not been realized.
“I’m going to be honest with you, I did hear about it from people,” said Mr. Cox, 60. “They would say, ‘Hey, that’s in the past. Why does he have to talk about it? We can’t do nothing about it.’ ”
Father Moses’ original idea was to put the museum inside the town’s former black school, which was standing in the way of a developer’s plans. Father Moses acquired the school and had it dismantled into five large wooden pieces, but has not been able to raise the $15,000 needed to reconstruct it on his land. The five pieces, each numbered, now sit in a field by his home.
The school itself was an emblem of the town’s racial history.
It closed in 1935 because the town’s black population had dwindled to just a few families, the Berrys among them. In 1900, blacks made up 12 percent of Ash Grove, but a notorious 1906 lynching of three black men in the Springfield town square drove some away, followed in the 1930s by the closing of a local quarry and lime kilns that had employed many black residents.
When the museum did open in 2002, in an 875-square-foot storefront downtown, “a lot of people didn’t even know there were any black residents in the area,” Mr. Cox said.
Father Moses personally escorts visitors through the museum, showing his family’s photos on the walls and explaining the history behind each, including his account of how his great-grandmother Marie Boone, who was of mixed race, was born a slave, even though her father was Nathan Boone, an account that is disputed by some white Boone relatives.
There are quilts Marie Boone made to help those traveling north on the Underground Railroad and a slave neck iron that Father Moses’ great-grandfather kept after he was freed during the Civil War. Father Moses always puts the eight-pound iron around his own neck first, then offers to put it around the visitor’s.
“I don’t want other people to run this museum because it’s too delicate, this issue of slavery,” he said. “I’ve tried having other people run this, but they get stuck on, ‘Oh, this is a horrible thing the white man did,’ which causes resentment. I want to explain it and bring them from suffering to freedom.”
Posted By: Richard Kigel
Saturday, January 30th 2010 at 10:28AM
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