On the day the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birth is celebrated, Cape Girardeau African Americans say more black role models are needed in positions of authority to knock down the remaining fences of discrimination.

Especially needed are more black teachers, some assert.

Costella Patterson, who taught in the Cape Girardeau Public Schools for 19 years before retiring in 1985, was the only black teacher in the school system for a number of years.

"We not only need black teachers for black kids, we need black teachers for white kids," Patterson said.

"They need to see blacks in administrative positions. Then they will have more respect for black people."

A lack of respect is an attitude that African Americans confront daily, said Debra Mitchell-Braxton, assistant director of the Campus Assistance Center at Southeast Missouri State University.

"The basic message I still feel I hear is that a lot of people think African Americans are inferior," Mitchell-Braxton said.

Recalling incidents of discrimination in her life, she nearly forgot the cross set ablaze in her family's yard when she was a Cape Girardeau teenager.

You'd rather not remember some things, said Mitchell-Braxton, assistant director of the Campus Assistance Center at Southeast Missouri State University.

The burning cross was a mistake, meant for the house next door, a family whose son was dating a white girl. But Mitchell-Braxton and her family got the message all the same.

"Your life is threatened," Mitchell-Braxton said. "We know the symbolism of a burned cross."

"...You start wondering if they will burn your house next week."

On Wednesday, Mitchell-Braxton received the Dr. Edward M. Spicer Excellence in Diversity Award for her work with minority groups at the university. Juanita Spicer, widow of the former university administrator the award was named for, made the presentation at the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Scholarship Fund Banquet.

Spicer is a member of the Labor and Industry Committee of the Cape Girardeau branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Out in the field talking to employers, she says, she appeals to them to look at job applicants as objectively as possible.

"Often people who hire employers, personnel directors do not realize themselves they are practicing bias," she said.

"It may be a normal thing to want to hire somebody who's just like you."

Though business is another area where more role models are needed, Spicer also called for more blacks in the school system. "We need more teachers, more role models," she said. "For some reason, (school) is not working well with a lot of little black children."

She is trying to do something about that. Last fall, Spicer organized an after-school tutorial program for children at May Greene and Washington schools. Some of the children attend the program at St. James AME Church.

About 20 volunteer tutors work one-on-one with the children. Some are university students. Among them are a businessman and a retired university professor.

Neyland Clark, superintendent of the Cape Girardeau Public Schools, concurs with at least two of the black leaders' assertions: that Cape Girardeau needs more minority teachers, and that white students benefit greatly from being taught by minority teachers.

"It's probably more important for the Caucasian student than for the black student," he said.

"They learn that education helps all people."

Currently, the schools employ eight teachers who are persons of color, which represents 4 percent of the total number of teachers. The schools' minority enrollment is 13-14 percent, Clark said.

The school system recruits at black colleges throughout the nation and is attempting to bring in student teachers from Kentucky State University in Frankfort. But it's competing against districts that can offer more money.

Young, single graduates are very interested in cities that have an active social life. "Every community is vying for the attention of the outstanding minority educator," Clark said. "... We're competing against every metropolitan area."

He said the schools lost an outstanding black teacher to Atlanta this year when Virginia Johnson left because her husband couldn't find work here.

Clark and a number of other administrators from the district attended the Martin Luther King Jr. banquet. He said he has a concern for how sensitive society in general is to issues of diversity.

"The school district tends to be a little better than the general society," Clark said.

"... That doesn't mean we don't have some work to do."

As the former director of the Civic Center, Mike Heston has been involved in Cape Girardeau's black community since 1980. He currently works for an organization that provides job training for dropouts, and says more than 80 percent of his clients are black.

He said whites often say the passage of the Public Accommodations Act and the Voting Rights Act in the 1960s meant "the door has been opened."

But neither of those laws cost the country anything, and not much has changed economically for most blacks, Heston said.

"I think there's a sense from people in the white community that more has been done than has.

"... There's still a lot to be done, and it's not going to be painlessly achieved."

Paraphrasing Malcolm X, Heston said white people who want to help blacks can do the most good by talking to people in their own community. "White people aren't going to solve black people's problems," he said.'

He said black people know what they need and need to be listened to. And that the attitude that it's only a black problem must be discarded.

"That's like asking women doctors what they're going to do about breast cancer rates," Heston said. "We're all involved."

City Manager Ronald Fischer and former Mayor Howard Tooke are two long-time politicians who have seen the arc of black civil rights in the city. Fischer recalls seeing blacks riding in the back of buses during World War II.

The days in Cape Girardeau when black people were allowed to sit only in the balconies of movie theaters, and when there were black-only and white-only days at the municipal swimming pool, are only a few generations back.

One of Fischer's best friends when he was younger was a black man. They went to ball games together, but Fischer sensed that his friend felt more uncomfortable than he did.

"There's still a long way to go," he said.

He thinks the discrimination that exists in the city today is "more in people's minds. It probably could be both in black people's minds and white people's."

Tooke was elected to the city council in 1968 and became mayor in 1970 at the height of the civil unrest that existed in the city. In August of that year, arsonists burned the M.E. Leming Lumber Co. and set fire to five garbage trucks and a dump in south Cape Girardeau.

Tooke was president of the lumber company and has no doubt that "activists" targeted him because of his government position.

"But I was on their side," he said. "I was supporting public housing at the time."

The arson case was never solved.

Tooke said the conflagration marked the end of racial strife in the city because both blacks and whites were so upset.

He said civil rights are not really a municipal problem, or for that matter a problem government can do much about.

"There is no question there is racial discrimination here and everywhere else," Tooke said. "But there's nothing government can do to change people's opinions."

Mitchell-Braxton says opinions can be changed, that diversity and change can be understood to be healthy rather than threatening.

"I've made my commitment in life to challenge systems that are closed," she said.

"... People don't want to be tolerated. They want to be respected."