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. I listened to his speeches and read about the marches, and I had wanted to join those marches, but my parents said, ‘No way.’”
Ward recalled that the meeting was brief.
“Seeing him and how humble he was when he came in, unless you — well, I don’t know who wouldn’t have recognized him then, but he didn’t come in with this pomp and circumstance. He came in very quietly, and we called out, ‘Dr. King! Dr. King!’ That’s why he turned around and told us to stay in school,” she said. “Being a part, that little part there, made me want to do more.”
The meeting inspired her to continue fighting for Black civil rights, as did her other experiences growing up, which included living in then-majority-white Englewood.
“When we first moved into Englewood, we were the second Black family there. We got attacked. We were forcibly bussed to Gage Park when they were integrating the schools,” she said. “We had to have a police escort to and from school. We all had the same schedule, Blacks, because we had to go with the police escorts. It wasn’t the kids who were in school that were so bad; it was their parents, the neighborhood.”
She said she and many Black students in her cohort left school to participate in the 1966 Marquette Park March with King, who made his fellow marchers sign non-violence agreements.
“I really did not want to, trust me. When somebody strikes me, I want to strike them back,” she said. “But then, I had been following Gandhi, reading [about] that non-violent resistance.”
Ward said the violent, vitriolic response from racist protestors frightened her. She said they threw bottles and bricks at the marchers while calling them “all kinds of names.”
“It was terrible. I’ve never seen people so hateful in my life, and for no reason. It’s like, we haven’t done anything.”
‘It’s like a calling’
Ward said her teenage experiences fighting for equal rights and being exposed to the hatred of racism helped her realize her path as an adult.
“Why was it so hard to accept people who are different? That actually sparked my desire to help people who were struggling,” she said. “I was watching a lot of the people, the Poor People’s March and all of this stuff. They needed help. And people who hate like that, they’re hateful. They’re not happy. They need help as well.”
While she carried the spark of that calling for decades, Ward didn’t start working in homeless services until she was living in Florida in the ’90s — when she experienced the other side of the coin that is her current job.
“God has blessed me to do a lot of things, and it was like I couldn’t decide what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I was in my 40s at that time. But I became homeless,” she said. “I went to a shelter, and I started volunteering there to help them because they were helping me. I wanted to give back. Well, they hired me on after my shelter stay was over.
“I’ve been doing case management since 1999,” she said. “I don’t call it a career. It’s like a calling. Because you don’t do this to get rich. Not financially rich, OK. But it’s rich, and spiritually, it’s made me rich. Seeing people succeed, helping those who have challenges, whatever those challenges are … that has been so worthwhile to me.”
After moving back to Chicago in 2019, Ward found her current job as a case manager at BEDS Plus. She said the organization drew her in because it provides multiple kinds of resources to its clients; in Florida, she often had to go to different agencies for assistance with different needs.
“I’m very transparent with my caseload. I’ll tell them, ‘I’m not playing with you, OK. I know how hard it is out there, so you have got to stay focused.’” Some of her clients call her “Miss Myrtle.”
‘Just care for each other’
The current political moment, she said, with the Trump administration targeting non-discrimination policies and vulnerable groups like undocumented immigrants and transgender people, reminded her of what she was fighting against as a teenager.
“We fought for all of these freedoms. We want to keep them,” she said. “If we start marching again, I’ll be right with them. For real, because this is something that everybody deserves, OK? This is not for those few rich people. Everybody deserves to be respected, and to be heard, and to have equal opportunity for housing and jobs. I mean, what’s so hard about doing that?”
She said she worries that people today don’t care about the efforts to roll back human rights unless it affects them directly.
“Just treat people like you would like to be treated. That’s so simple to say but difficult to do. When you see someone else being stomped on or hurt, and you’re able to help, you should help. You would want someone to help you,” she said. “Today, people just ignore stuff, and that’s sad.
“Just care for each other. We’re all in this together, so helping someone, it should be something you’re willing to do,” she added. “We get those who don’t want to accept help, who are too proud, and then I share my story with them, and they say, ‘Oh, OK, then I’ll take the help.’ We all have moments where we need help, so don’t be ashamed.”
