Herald and Review from Decatur, Illinois • Page 3

www.herald-review.com SUNDAY, AUGUST 25, 2013 DECATUR, ILLINOIS NATION A3 RETURN ''tis iiJFS-ii TP 'He had four little children like us. It was like he was talking about Marilyn, me and my baby sister and brother, and it moved Joanne Slaw Belue Belue Continued from A1 bus in Springfield on Friday to participate in an action Saturday in Washington led by Martin Luther King III and the Rev. Al Sharpton. "I'm a big fan of history, and I just wanted to be a part of it," Cobb said. Jeanelle Norman, in 1963 a junior attending a segregated high school in Chattanooga, and in 2013 a retired college professor and president of the Decatur NAACP branch, said there is no doubt progress has been made toward racial equality.

But the sad fact remains that 150 years after Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and 50 years after King's "I have a Dream" speech, Norman said blacks have not fully arrived. "Unemployment remains outrageously high," she said. "Police profiling is an issue as well." Norman added that some states deny voting rights to older blacks by requiring a birth certificate. "If you're 80-something and were born at home, that might not be available," she said. Unfortunately, she didn't get to hear the entire "sermon." With temperatures topping 100 degrees on Aug.

28, 1963, Belue passed out, had to be revived by her father and listen to the remainder of King's speech in the shade of a nearby tree. The line that struck her most was this one: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." "He had four little children like us," Belue said. "It was like he was talking about Marilyn, me and my baby sister (Elizabeth) and brother (Joseph Jr. and it moved me" (217)421-7978 Norman herself took a group of students to Washington for the 30th anniversary in 1993 when she was still teaching English at Richland Community College Belue, on the other hand, has never been back. "It was my only time going there," she said.

She'll never forget the experience, even though she believes most of the 28 other people on the trip have either died such as Logan, her father and her older sister, Marilyn Slaw Carter or moved away. Belue remembers getting a better look at Charlton Heston and Coretta Scott King from her group's vantage point near the Reflecting Pool than she did Martin Luther King yet she knew the instant he began speaking that he was a preacher. file photo Fifty years later, local civil rights leaders say Martin Luther King dream outlined in his famous March on Washington on Aug. 28, 1963 has yet to be realized in full. Joanne Slaw Belue, second from left, who was 15 at the time, also describes what it was like to be there and witness history.

ton for the 20th and 25th anniversary marches. "Dr. King's march changed the country," he said. "Continuing to march is a way for us to show the country we still have a ways to go." Keeping King's dream alive is the purpose of commemorative marches, and Decatur has been represented. Herald Review archives show Harvey Williams, 62, went to Washing the day, but usually don't mingle after 5 p.m.

Racial slurs are rare, but suspicions and tensions remain. "I don't think any of us would deny that there have been significant changes in Birmingham," Shores Lee says. King would be proud, she adds, but "he would say there's a lot more work to be done. I think he would tell us our task is not finished." STOCK Continued from A1 revolution a half century ago. This week, as the nation marks the 50th anniversary of the Rev.

Martin Luther King "I Have A Dream" speech, there may be no better place than Birmingham to measure the progress that followed the civil rights leader's historic call for racial and economic equality. This city, after all, is hallowed ground in civil rights history. It was here where children marching for equal rights were jailed, where protesters were attacked by snarling police dogs and battered by high-pressure fire hoses. And it was here where four little girls in their Sunday finest were killed when dynamite planted by Ku Klux Klan members ripped through their church in an unspeakable act of evil. That was the Birmingham of the past.

The city that Amid the flowers and soothing fountain in Kelly Ingram Park, there are stark reminders of the ugly clashes. It was in this area, now known as the Civil Rights District, where the scenes of police brutality were captured in photos and TV footage that helped galvanize public opinion around the nation on behalf of demonstrators. Today, the park has statues commemorating King and SO I i 1 ftrtM, ft 1 1 1 1 ift- kali. lAi -iS-lL Jjtj.aa4Mhat-i.JjiM I TTTHml Associated Press photos Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

addresses marchers during his 'I Have a Dream' speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. King announced his vision of a color-blind society before hundreds of thousands of people gathered on the Washington Mall. Not long afterward, Threatt was one of three black gifted students enrolled in a white elementary school. He was spat on, beaten, called the N-word. The experience is etched in his memory.

Now 57, Threatt occasionally runs into a sixth-grade classmate a bank vice president who had been among his tor-menters. They always have a pleasant chat. But he never forgets. "I like him," he says. "I don't think he's a racist.

He was a kid caught up in a social situation like I was. You've got to get over that in order to survive in the South. Otherwise you just wallow in self-pity and hatred and you don't move forward." Threatt graduated from Princeton, then Howard University Law School, worked in Denver and Washington, D.C., but returned to Birmingham in 1997. Both he and the city had changed, he says, with Birmingham becoming more progressive. He joined an established law firm something that would have been unimaginable 50 years earlier.

Shores Lee left Birmingham for 13 years, returned in 1971, later switched careers and in 2003 became a judge, only to confront lingering remnants of racism. In her early years on the bench, she recalls, a few lawyers pointedly refused to stand as is custom when a judge enters a courtroom. And, she says, she occasionally sees lawyers who are disrespectful of their minority clients. "Racism is still very much alive and well in the South," Shores Lee says. "The actions of men here can be legislated but not their minds and their hearts in terms of how they think and feel about blacks and Hispanics." The judge says the same goals her father fought for remain at the center of court battles today.

She points to the Supreme Court's decision in June to throw out the most powerful part of the landmark Voting Rights Act that had provided federal oversight of elections in several Southern states. It was based on a challenge by Shelby County in suburban Birmingham. The judge also says when she gives speeches about voting rights, she sometimes cites her father. "How far have we come if he talked about this 60 plus years ago and I'm still talking about it today?" she asks. Fifty years ago, the strug- gle to end racism had white supporters.

It still does. James Rotch, a white lawyer, began addressing the issue in 1998 when he launched the Birmingham Pledge a program to eliminate racism and prejudice. The "pledge" has evolved into a foundation with conferences and a special week of events held around the September anniversary of the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church that killed four girls in 1963. The program's educational materials are used in every state and 21 countries. The pledge itself a mission statement has popped up in places ranging from a public bulletin board outside the Taj Mahal in India to a job training center in Connecticut.

Rotch says the intent is to inspire beyond the city. "We knew that Birmingham was known all over the world and not necessarily in a particularly good way," he says. "We thought we could show that by Birmingham getting its act in order with regard to race, people might say, 'If they can do it given their history, surely we 1 May 4, 1963: Police lead a group of black school children to jail after their arrest for protesting against racial discrimination near city hall in Birmingham, Ala. 'I have a dream that one day down in Alabama. little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers Dt Martin Luther King Jt, Aug.

28, 1963 May 9, 1963: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. attends a news conference in Birmingham, Ala. other leaders. There's a sculpture of a young protester, his arms stretched back, as a policeman grabs him with one hand and holds a lunging German shepherd in the other.

There are other sculptures of water cannons, more dogs, and a boy and a girl standing impassively with the words "I Ain't Afraid of your Jail" at the base To those who grew up here, these works are not just artistic renderings but reminders of the bravery of friends and neighbors. Threatt was just 7 when wondered about the need to erect monuments of a painful chapter of America's past. "Why would they have this as a reminder?" she asked. "It's sad." "Yes, baby, those were terrible days," he replied, "but through the years we've put those things behind us. This is a part of history.

It's good to revisit these times to show how far we've come." understand the sculptures of vicious dogs and water hoses. As they drove home, Sills, a computer teacher at a middle school, explained the racial hostilities of that era. He noticed a tear forming in his daughter's eye. "She couldn't relate," he says. "Her best friends are white.

She couldn't imagine it being that way." Makiyah, he says, then One recent summer night, Steve Sills, a member of Green's church, took his two daughters to a rally to motivate young people about the value of respect. The setting was Kelly Ingram Park, ground zero for the turbulence 50 years ago. Sill's older daughter, Makiyah, 12, had studied King in school but she didn't King condemned for its "ugly record of brutality." The city where he wrote his impassioned "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," declaring the "moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws." The city where the movement came together, found its voice and set the stage for landmark civil rights legislation. The Birmingham of the present is a far different place. The airport is named after a fearless civil rights champion, the late Rev.

Fred Shuttlesworth. The city's website features a 'Fifty Years Forward' campaign, forthrightly displaying photos of shameful events in 1963. There are black judges and professors in places where segregation once reigned. And black mayors have occupied city hall since 1979, in part because many white residents migrated to the suburbs, a familiar pattern in urban America. So has King's dream of equality been realized here and has Birmingham moved beyond its troubled past? For many, the answer is yes, the city has changed in ways that once seemed unthinkable and yet, there's also a sense Birmingham still has a long way to go- The legal and social barriers that barred black people from schools and jobs fell long ago, but economic disparity persists.

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