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.”
Father Moses is pretty incredible. He’s well known in this area and everyone loves him. If I weren’t Roman Catholic …