UI black alumni mark Project 500's 40th anniversary

CHAMPAIGN – How time flies.

Forty years ago, Letti Burt-Butler scrambled down the halls of the University of Illinois, a girl of 17 from Chicago, a black student in the UI's pioneering Project 500, which brought minorities to campus in an effort to give all Illinois students access to equal educational opportunities.

When Burt-Butler left campus, she said, she was a woman. In her years at the UI, she had grown up. Those years weren't always easy, but they were so valuable, she said. They gave her the education to become a teacher herself, and she put that education to work in Chicago's inner-city schools.

"It was wonderful," she said. "Just to have the opportunity to come here. It was wonderful, but it was traumatic, too."

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