AP News, July 3rd, 2007
At sunrise Tuesday, hundreds of people _ most tapping the ground with white canes and a few making the trip on in-line skates _ marched from a downtown hotel to a city park more than half a mile away to make a point: Blind people can do what other people do.
The early morning event, organized by the National Federation of the Blind, was billed as a civil rights march.
Two of the main goals: access to jobs and education.
"The blind have a 70 percent unemployment rate, and we have a 10 percent rate of being taught to read and write braille in our schools in this country," said federation president Marc Maurer, a lawyer from Maryland.
Maurer said the federation, a 50,000-member organization founded in 1940, decided to incorporate a march into this year's annual convention in Atlanta because the city was the symbolic heart of the civil rights movement for racial equality in the 1960s. U.S. Rep. John Lewis, an Atlanta Democrat and a veteran of the civil rights movement, led the march.
Organizers said 1,000 or more people took part. The Atlanta police estimate was 700.
Al Elia, 33, a computer consultant from Boston, was on hand with his guide dog, Zion. A degenerative eye disease recently reduced Elia's vision to a point where he could no longer do his job without retraining, he said.
The issue most important to him is access to study materials for advanced degrees. Although educators must provide blind-accessible school books in grades K-12, Elia said, "they still haven't done that for college and advanced degree texts. I can tell you from trying to get study materials to go to law school, it's something that needs to happen."
