With the echoes of Denver’s 27th annual Marade barely faded from the streets of the city, the local chapter of the Anti-Defamation League announced Wednesday that it will honor Wilma Webb, one of those most responsible for establishing the combination march/parade in the city.
“It was a natural decision for us,” ADL regional director Scott Levin said of giving Webb — as well as former senior regional associate director Bobbie Towbin — its 2012 Civil Rights Award. “Both of these women have been standouts in the field. It wasn’t a tough call to make.”
Webb, the wife of former Mayor Wellington Webb, served from 1980 to 1993 in the Colorado House. The first African-American member of the Joint Budget Committee, Wilma Webb fought for four years to establish a state holiday to honor the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Webb described the process of getting the MLK holiday legislation passed as both emotional and traumatic. “Every year, I had to start from ground zero, but every year, we gained more and more support until it was passed.”
During her term in the House, when anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela was nearing the end of his 27 years in prison in South Africa, she also developed legislation to stop the state’s retirement fund from continuing to invest in the African nation.
She said she was literally at the statehouse preparing to introduce the legislation when Mandela — who went on to become South Africa’s president — was released.
“When it comes to civil rights, I’ve always been guided by trying to do the right thing,” she said Thursday. “When you believe in something, I feel that you have to be an active participant.”
Included among Towbin’s accomplishments was fighting for state hate-crimes laws. During her time with the ADL (1987-2002), she also served on the committee that helped nominate the Civil Rights Award winners — never thinking, she said, that she would be honored herself.
“I knew a lot of those people and the work they did, so it makes me feel very good to know that I’m going to be among them,” she said.
Towbin added that while progress has been made in some of the areas she battled for, this isn’t the time to become complacent.
“In civil rights, the work never ends; it seems like when you make two steps forward, you find yourself taking one back,” she said. “Things like the voting-rights issues that are going on now — that’s something that we thought we’d solved years ago.”
Anthony Cotton: 303-954-1292 or acotton@denverpost.com
