Blind people march in Atlanta to call for better access to jobs and education

ATLANTA

Hundreds of people, most tapping the ground with white canes, marched from a downtown Atlanta hotel to a city park more than half a mile away Tuesday to make a point: Blind people can do what other people do.

The event organized by the National Federation of the Blind was called 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.

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. Representative John Lewis, 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.