Career lawyer, educator Dr. Lee Roy Berry Jr. ‘66 selected for Distinguished Service Award
By Josette Keelor for Eastern Mennonite University
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 white people he encountered in the South.
“They treated us as human beings,” he said. “Their actions seemed to coincide with the beliefs they professed.” […]
