Teaching kids the importance of Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy
Martin Luther King Jr. couldn’t have dreamed his face would be on a bobblehead — commercialized like Christmas.
He also wouldn’t have known that his famous “I Have a Dream” speech — delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., in 1963 — would be so commonly referenced that his life’s work would be defined by that one moment.
King was so much more. He fought for so much more.
A plethora of children’s books teach history lessons about King. Still, many children and teens know only the basics: He fought for civil rights, he was killed for what he believed in and we have a national holiday with parades in his honor.
While parades and celebrations are much deserved, we can teach our children volumes more about his story.
“We often put children in a box and minimalize their contributions to conversations about civil rights and Dr.
King,” said Lisa Williams, director of Gallery Programs at Children’s Museum Houston. “Children are very much in tune with what’s happening in the world. We have to be ready to respond and tell the truth.”
Children’s Museum Houston’s 27th annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration on Saturday was organized by the kids’ committee, headed up by its 11-year-old co-presidents, Carly Hathorn and Sofía Salinas.
“We are honoring the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who fought so that people of all races and religions can go to the same schools and use the same bathrooms,” Hathorn said.
The museum’s program included a peace march, in which the children walked together through the hallways in a mock civil-rights march.
“Dr. King is a person I look up to for all he did to make the world a better place,” Salinas said.
Rarely mentioned is that King and the civil rights movement of the 1960s brought together both adults and children. Children walked out of their schools to protest injustice and led peaceful marches in Birmingham, Ala. They were met with attack dogs and water hoses.
For today’s children, it’s not just the experience of MLK
Day but the conversations that follow that help expand the lessons of King’s legacy beyond the holiday, Williams said.
“We ask them, ‘If you had to march in Third Ward, what would you march about? What street would you march on? What would you wear? How would Dr. King feel about the world today?’ These are all questions that engage children and allow them to comprehend history and relate it to their world.”
Interfaith Ministries is expanding its MLK Day of Service to a four-month-long program for 19 eighth-grade students and their parents. The program, led by Gayla Wilson, the organization’s communityengagement program manager, pairs students with their parents to work on leadership skills, allyship and ways in which they can help build the “beloved community,” a term coined by King about an ideal community absent of poverty, hunger and hate.
“Children today have such a level of access and privilege that they don’t often understand what it’s like to go to a segregated school or face the brutality of racial discrimination that was prevalent during King’s time,” Wilson said. “Teaching children about the work of King can’t be done in one day. It’s an everyday lesson.”
Though he died at age 39, King gave hundreds of speeches during his lifetime. He spoke out not only for civil rights but also for pay and economic equality and religious freedom.
“King gave his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech in 1963, but he wasn’t killed until ’68, and he had so much growing during that period,” said Dr. James Thomas Jones III, associate professor of history and African American studies at Prairie View A&M University and creator of the Manhood, Race and Culture YouTube channel. “That’s when we get to see the multifaceted nature of who King was ideologically. I don’t believe that many college professors, let alone K-12 teachers, are dealing with King in a way that allows for him to escape the ‘I Have a Dream’ moment.”
Even King’s nonviolent civil disobedience stance is lost on the younger generation, Jones said.
“Many of my students seem to believe that King just wanted to go out there and get beaten. And it’s not until I explain to them that what he was doing was, in many ways, creating an acute moral dilemma for non-Southern whites. Because that footage of Black men, women and children, and even whites and Jews as well, being abused throughout the South was being beamed to the world via ABC, NBC or CBS,” he said.
The Rothko Chapel, in partnership with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Gordon Parks Foundation, celebrates King Jan. 15 with a conversation on the media’s influence in civil rights. The chapel will broadcast King’s speeches and sermons on Jan. 16, MLK Day, which is the last day to see the exhibit “Gordon Parks: Stokely Carmichael and Black Power” at the museum.
“A lot of people forget King was a minister, a Christian pastor,” said David Leslie, the chapel’s executive director. “That helps us to remember the wholeness of the man. He was formed and shaped of those who came before him. He was such an ecumenical man and interested in other religions and cultures, and he was able to utilize a variety of media to help sustain people’s spirits.”
Statues of King can be tools to educate children for generations. A 22-foot-tall bronze sculpture, “The Embrace,” memorializing King and his wife, Coretta Scott King, was unveiled recently in Boston. It shows a loving embrace between a husband and wife. Locally, a full-body bronze statue of King is mounted near one of Mahatma Gandhi in the gardens of Hermann Park.
That bobblehead of King is part of the National Bobblehead Hall of Fame and Museum in Milwaukee, which features audio clips of his “I Have a Dream” speech.
Let’s remember King was more than that.