Timothy Berry, creator of Overcoming by Word of Our Testimonies: Black Male Wounded Healers
Blown Away
Timothy Berry didn’t know what he had on his hands. What he thought he had was a colorful research project: An hour-long music and spoken-word performance piece to support the idea of how black male bodies physically carry the effects of racism. To criminally summarize his thesis: From slavery on, the trauma of the Black experience in the U.S. has physical, neurological effects that range from anxiety to diabetes to shorter life spans. The coping mechanism, he posits, has historically been creativity—and music a large part of it.
A work by alum and former instructor Tim Berry, ’92, ’13, fills some gaps in Black history
So Berry’s 2019 faculty-grant-funded stage project covered Black history through monologues and original music befitting certain time periods, from spirituals to Kendrick Lamar. Its title: “Overcoming by Word of Our Testimonies: Black Male Wounded Healers.”
By Joe Tougas ’86
None of which sounds like a stage program that would be devastating. Or exhausting. Or infuriating. Or leave audiences stunned, as it does. “It just moves you to tears at times, moves you to anger,” said Bukata Hayes, executive director of the Greater Mankato Diversity Council, one of its first audiences. “Most of all, it moves you to kind of understand why things are the way they are.” Similarly, members of a University audience of education majors in December 2019 wondered aloud as to why they’d never heard of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, or 20th century lynchings. By this point the piece had already traveled to New Orleans and Wisconsin. At each stop, Berry said, he was told the performance had to travel further. “These are not my friends, these are people I don’t know,” Berry laughed. “They’re coming up to me, people from several universities wanting to see what it would
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