ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, February 2, 1997 TAG: 9701310010
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KEVIN KITTREDGE STAFF WRITER
They have been to City Hall. They have been to Valley View Mall.
If it's activism you want, you can't get much more active than the Roanoke chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, founded a year ago by retired health care worker Perneller Chubb-Wilson.
"I don't think of myself as a radical," Chubb-Wilson said. "I believe in solving problems."
Others might disagree. But surely none would argue that the Roanoke chapter of the SCLC - the seminal civil rights group once headed by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. - has done nothing since it was chartered on Jan. 22, 1996.
Chubb-Wilson, who is in her 60s, said she founded the organization at the urging of the Rev. William Keen, president of the SCLC chapter in Danville. Also, "I saw how many problems we have with discrimination here," she said.
In order to win a charter from the Atlanta-based organization, she said, a new chapter must have at least 50 members. Chubb-Wilson declined to reveal how many people belong to the Roanoke chapter, though she said it is "over 200."
Chubb-Wilson and the SCLC have been involved in picketing at several locations, including City Hall, where they demonstrated Oct. 21.
The group wanted City Council to return the Hotel Dumas, a once black-owned property bought by the city under threat of condemnation, to its previous owners.
The city declined.
In other action, however, the SCLC may have been more effective. "We've had some success," said Jeff Artis, 40, an SCLC vice president. "We were instrumental in bringing about a more positive shopping atmosphere at Valley View Mall."
The SCLC organized a two-month boycott of the mall last summer, after an altercation between the son of an SCLC member and the mall's security chief.
Management eventually hired another black security officer, raising the total to four out of 10, and a white female officer, and toned down its list of regulations at the entrances, said mall manager Louise Dudley.
"They were willing to talk, we were willing to talk," Dudley said. "They listened, we listened. I think we all learned from the good and the bad.... They're a Christian organization, and they wanted to resolve things amiably."
The SCLC was founded in 1957 by Martin Luther King and his followers to work for equal rights for blacks, particularly in the South.
It conducted leadership and citizen education projects, led voter registration drives and played a major part in the civil rights march on Washington in 1963, when King delivered his famous "I have a dream" speech.
The organization dwindled in the decades after King's death, but survived. It made headlines again in 1990 when, as part of a court settlement growing out of a clash between the SCLC and the Ku Klux Klan in 1979, an SCLC member gave a race-relations course to Klansmen.
National SCLC President Joseph Lowery was in the news again last year when he testified before the House Judiciary Committee on the "climate of hostility" he said contributed to the burning of dozens of black churches in the South.
Chubb-Wilson is credited with finally bringing the group to Roanoke.
"She was the one who went all out to get the chapter here," said Al Holland, a scoutmaster, long-time friend of Chubb-Wilson and her family, and charter member of the local SCLC chapter. "She's quite a dynamic person. ... My thinking is she did a remarkable job."
The SCLC has other projects under way that will bear fruit over time, members say.
"We're involved in negotiations with the city, the national government and the [U.S.] Justice Department," said Artis, who would not go into details. "A number of things that the SCLC does, you're going to see the results of it in the long run."
Chubb-Wilson stressed that the group will remain true to its Christian principles, which stress nonviolent solutions to all problems.
"Dr. King did everything in a nonviolent, a peaceful movement," Chubb-Wilson said. "And we continue to do just that."
As for the other activist groups in the valley, Chubb-Wilson said the SCLC would gladly work with them on worthy causes.
"I feel that all civil rights organizations ought to work together," the local SCLC president said.
Artis said he saw no conflict between the groups.
"The bottom line is the NAACP has a way of doing things, the SCLC has a way of doing things, Rebuilding Black Communities has a way of doing things," said Artis, who belongs to both the SCLC and RBC. "When we can work together we will work together, and we have worked together."
LENGTH: Medium: 89 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. Perneller Chubb-Wilson (right) is founder of theby CNBRoanoke chapter of the SCLC. Joyce Boulware (left) is the third vice
president of the organization. 2. File/1996. Last October, members
of the SCLC picketed outside Roanoke City Hall, in an effort to
persuade City Council to return the Hotel Dumas to the black
community. color.