RIVERSIDE-BROOKFIELD $1.00
Vol. 40, No. 8
February 26, 2025
Also serving North Riverside
2025 Answer Book INSIDE!
Miss Myrtle carries on MLK’s legacy
Meeting Martin Luther King Jr. inspired her 25-year career in homeless services By TRENT BROWN Staff Reporter
Danger Zone? STORY BY TRENT BROWN, PAGE 4
PROVIDED BY DUSTIN CARPER
Is Prairie Avenue the most dangerous block in Brookfield? See story, page 4.
If you learned about the Civil Rights Movement in history class, or maybe your children learned about it recently as part of Black History Month, it may be easy to consider it as, well, history: something that happened years or decades before you were born, a response to a world filled with anti-Black segregation and disenfranchisement built up since the Civil War. That’s especially true if your civil rights were not the ones being fought for at that time. But for people like Myrtle Ward, a case manager at BEDS Plus, a nonprofit suburban homeless services provider based in LaGrange, the Civil Rights Movement is not history. It’s memory. Ward, 70, told the Landmark she was just 13 years old when she volunteered at the Chicago branch of Operation Breadbasket, a 1960s program that sought to uplift Black Americans’ economic and employment status by boycotting racist businesses that refused to hire them. “I was working for the youth employment program that started back then. It was for underprivileged youth to work, and I worked right around the corner from Operation Breadbasket,” she said in an interview Monday. “I would see the crowds there, and I went there to see what they were talking about, and I thought, ‘Damn, this is a good idea.’” It was at Operation Breadbasket that Ward, who grew up in the Englewood neighborhood and now lives in Auburn Gresham, met Martin Luther King Jr. for the first time. “I was star-struck. All of us were,” she said. “I had followed his career. See MYRTLE on page 8
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