(Film Projects - Photo Illustration/MetroCreativeConnection)

ATHENS, Ohio — The Mount Zion Black Cultural Center will kick off the Berry Day Week celebration with the screening of WOUB-PBS Public Media’s “The Lincoln School Story” at 5:30 p.m. Monday at the Athena Cinema.

The documentary follows a group of Hillsboro, Ohio, Black mothers in the 1950’s fighting for school desegregation after the Brown v. Board of Education decision. WOUB will air the film on June 19.

Joining the evening’s commemoration will be a presentation about Charlotte Scott, a once enslaved Marietta woman who, upon hearing of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, started a fund to erect the Emancipation Memorial monument at Lincoln Park in in Washington, D.C.

Professor Emeritus David Descutner will introduce Rebecca Asmo, executive director of the Ohio Humanities that fundeds of “The Lincoln School Story,” and Chris Boyd, owner of Zachary’s Deli on Court Street in Athens that was popular in the 1980’s and 1990’s. The deli was next to the Hotel Berry.

Boyd will discuss being one of the first Black business owners in the Uptown Athens Club Scene.

“There couldn’t be a more perfect opening celebration honoring Ed and Mattie (Berry),” Mount Zion President Ada-Woodson Adams said.

The Berrys owned the Hotel Berry, visited by President Theodore Roosevelt, Carl Sandburg and other notable guests. It was also touted as being the first hotel to put a Bible and sewing kits in their rooms.

The hotel was demolished in 1974.

On May 23, 2004, former Mayor Rick Abel issued a proclamation declaring Berry Day in Athens and a historical landmark was installed at the site of the hotel. In 2023, Mayor Steve Patterson reissued the proclamation and multiple businesses joined in by creating Berry Day specials to honor Berry’s entrepreneurial legacy.

A portion of the sales was donated to assist in rehabilitating Mount Zion to a Black Cultural Center. The Center recently received $7.3 million from the Governor’s Appalachian Downtowns and Destinations Initiative toward that effort.

It was the Berrys who gifted the land on the corner of Congress and Carpenter Streets to build the structure.