SPORTS f“
Vering devoted
Brad Vering waits for another shot at the nation
al title, which eluded him during his freshman
season. PAGE 14
A & E
Ethnic arts
Nebraska’s culture no longer centers on prairie cul
ture and polka.Today, we begin a semestprlong
senes devoted to the diversity of the arts. PAGE 9
THURS »AY
January 14? 1999
Snow Doubt
Flurries, high 30. Cloudy tonight, low 12.
REMEMBERING
REFLECTING
11_mm
Lane Hickenbottom/DN
LEOLA BULLOCK was a key figure in the civil rights movement in Lincoln
in the 1960s. Bullock, who was born in Mississippi, came to Nebraska in
1950 to escape segregation and racism.
Lane Hickenbottom/DN
LEOLA BULLOCK of Lincoln hangs this painted resem
blance of Mount Rushmore in her living room. The
faces in the paining are, from left, Martin Luther King
Jr., Malcolm X, Harriet Tubman and Thurgood
Marshall.
King’s legacy continues
in segregation survivors
-Editor s note: This is the first in a series of three stories
that will examine Martin Luther King Jr.’s life and legacy.
By Jessica Fargen
Senior staff writer
Behind the curtain on a bus in southwestern
Mississippi sat a young black girl riding to school in the
1940s.
She rode 30 miles across county lines because the high
school in her county didn’t let black folks in.
Racism. Mockery. Colored-only rest rooms. Name
calling.
By 1950 Leola Bullock was fed up.
At 21 years old, she left the South and all its dirty prej
udice behind. But what she found in Lincoln was not the
promised land that Martin Luther King Jr. would later talk
about Americans someday finding.
* * *
Rosa Parks, a 43-year-old black seamstress, is arrest
ed in Montgomery, Ala., for refusing to give up her seat on
a bus to a white man. The Montgomery Bus Boycott ensues
with the help of a 26-year-old Baptist minister and advo
cate of nonviolence named Martin Luther King Jr.
It was 1955.
Bullock had a dream to escape the deep-rooted racism
of the South.
She doesn't regret leaving the South, but her northern
refuge was not much better.
Please see REMEMBERING on 6
Suit alleges
Pardons
Board shut
out victims
)
■ The attorney for Gus and Audrey
Lamm charges the Pardons Board with
denying their rights by not allowing
them to tell their side of the story in
Reeves’ execution hearing.
By Josh Funk
Senior staff writer
On Wednesday, a Lancaster County District Court
judge heard arguments on one of the claims that may save
Randy Reeves’ life.
One day after the Nebraska Supreme Court stayed
Reeves’ execution, Judge Jeffre Cheuvront said he would
consider the suit, which alleges Board of Pardons mem
bers denied the
rights of victims at //
their Monday
meetin§ There is no
The matter was
originally sched- legislation tO
uled for an emer- 0
gency heanng, but enforce the victims ’
because today’s
scheduled execu- bill of rights. So
tion was stayed,
there will be time this COUrt laCKS
for both sides to yy
submit written jurisdiction.
arguments.
“We are asking K.URT BROWN
the court to make assistant attorney general
the Pardons Board
obey the law," said
Paula Hutchinson,
attorney for both Reeves and Gus and Audrey Lamm.
At Monday’s Pardons Board meeting, where the
Board voted to deny Reeves clemency, the Board would
not allow Gus and Audrey Lamm, family members of
one of the women Reeves killed to address the Board
Hutchinson said.
Please see HEARING on 8
Politics plays role in state executions
By Brian Carlson
Staff writer
A stay of execution for Randy Reeves pre
vented Nebraska from sending its fourth person
to the electric chair in the last five years, after 35
years without executions.
The return to regular use of capital punish
ment in Nebraska came because of continuing
public support for the death penalty and the
exhausting of appeals by some long-standing
death-row inmates, according to those who fol
low death penalty issues in Nebraska.
Lancaster County Attorney Gary Lacey
noted that those who have been executed in the
1990s, and those who have moved closer to exe
cution, committed their capital offenses in the
first few years after the U.S. Supreme Court
reinstated the death penalty.
That 1976 decision overturned a 1972
Supreme Court ruling banning capital punish
ment because of what the court called unfair
sentencing practices.
Nebraska fine-tuned its capital punishment
law to meet the court’s new requirements, and it
took until this decade for death-row inmates to
run out of appeals, Lacey said.
The state executed Harold Lamont Otey in
1994. John Joubert in 1996 and Robert Williams
in 1997. Before Otey's execution, no one had
been put to death in Nebraska since serial killer
Read the Dady Nebraskan on the
Charles Starkweather in 1959.
Reeves was granted a stay of execution
Tuesday so the Nebraska Supreme Court could
hear arguments that his rights under the state’s
new equal rights amendment were violated.
In addition to the end of some inmates’
appeals options, politics and public support for
capital punishment have allowed the executions
to go forward, said Jim Mowbray, chief counsel
for the Nebraska Commission on Public
Advocacy.
“Politics certainly plays a very strong role,”
he said. “Politicians believe it's good for their
careers to be staunch supporters of the death
Please see DEATH on 8
World Wide Web at dailyneb.com
States of execution
Nebraska is among 38 states that have the
death penalty and one of 10 to Duse
elentrooution as a means of caDital
m States that have the death penalty
im States that have no death penalty
f- jl States that have the death penalty, but
have no one on death row
Jon Frank/DN