When Ervin Williams was a young man in Cape Girardeau in the early 1970s, he saw here the racial injustice and inequality that affected the whole country at the time.

His way of working against it was confrontation and militant attitude.

"I had the Afro, the black leather jacket and shades. We walked in many city council meetings and demanded to be heard," Williams said.

But much has changed since then. In the decades since, Williams, once an adamant atheist, found his calling as a Christian minister and humanitarian activist, and saw that Martin Luther King Jr.'s nonviolent approach to solving the country's racial ills was a better way than Williams' own militancy.

"I realized the direction I was taking was a mistake," Williams said Saturday. "I need to apologize, I believe that my approach was what I need to apologize for."

Today Williams will be the keynote speaker at the 23rd annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Breakfast at the Osage Community Centre.

Since his days as a young community activist in Cape Girardeau, Williams has built an international organization called Restoration Urbana Ministries. The church, based in Champaign, Ill., works with urban populations and has set up orphanages, clinics and ministries in Nigeria and Mexico.

Williams said he had an epiphany in 1978 while living in Oklahoma City, where he was working as a firefighter. After what he calls a miraculous healing of a severe ulcer that had perforated his stomach, Williams found God and decided to spread the message of Christianity.

At first he was more of a traditional minister, but he soon found himself working with the poor and disenfranchised, a mission that still continues today.

On Friday he was honored with the Susan Freiberg Humanitarian Award in Champaign, given out as part of that city's ceremonies honoring King.

Williams, who moved away from Cape Girardeau in the mid-1970s, said he sees much progress in the area. The city has made great strides in racial equality, but Cape Girardeau and the country as a whole still deal with the legacy of slavery and racial injustice, he said.

Lingering attitudes about race are still programmed into the American psyche, Williams said, with blacks always conscious of their minority status. And in American popular culture, young black men have no positive role models to look up to, he said.

Williams said he never realized that he constantly thought of himself as a minority until he went to Nigeria, where his skin color made him part of the racial majority. In America, blacks are seen first as skin color, and second as who they are as a person, even in 2008.

"It doesn't make it other people's fault, but they're going to respond to me the way society has taught them," Williams said.

But Williams knows the progress that has been made in this country. All the more reason to keep going, he said, and not forget the efforts of leaders like King.

"It's important that we don't forget, because I believe a nation that forgets their history is doomed to repeat their failures," Williams said. "We owe the next generation not to forget."

Doors open at 7:30 a.m. today for the King breakfast.

msanders@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 182