What Will You Tell Your Kids About Martin Luther King?
At one time or another, most of us have been guilty of enjoying national holidays as a day off from work without thinking about what that holiday actually means. Tomorrow is Martin Luther King Day, and I’ve bee thinking about King’s life and his message for the world. For starters, his “I Have a Dream” speech is posted on the door to my office. If you’ve never read that speech in its entirety, tomorrow is the day to do it. It is, without a doubt, one of the best speeches ever written.
So what should you tell your children about MLK Day? Here are 12 facts to help you out. I pulled them from the Nobel Prize website:
- He was born on January 15, 1929 and was killed on April 4, 1968.
- Like his grandfather and father before him, MLK was the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.
- He received a PhD in Theology from Boston University in 1953.
- Also in 1953, he married Coretta Scott. They had 4 children together.
- In 1955, King led the first peaceful negro demonstration in the USA to support a civil rights bus boycott, which lasted more than 1 year. In 1956, the USA Supreme Court declared it was unconstitutional to segregate blacks from whites on buses. King was criticized by many, and his house was even bombed by racists following the new Supreme Court ruling.
- In 1957 Martin Luther King became the President of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a civil rights organization.
- During his leadership, King travelled countless miles to speak about civil rights at more than 2,500 events.
- Over the years, MLK was arrested many times for his demonstrations.
- A peaceful March in Washington DC in 1963 attracted some 250,000 people who listened to King deliver his most famous speech.
- In 1963, King was honored as Man of the Year by Time magazine.
- In 1964, when he was 35 years old, Martin Luther King, Jr was the youngest man to have ever been awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace.
- King was assassinated by James Earl Ray on April 4, 1968 while standing on a balcony in a Memphis hotel.
If your children are old enough they may be interested in researching some of the many speeches King gave in his short life. I’m sure that Dr. King would be proud to know that Barack Obama’s Inauguration will take place on the day after his namesake national holiday. Some dreams do become reality.
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2 comments
Elva Todd on January 19, 2009 at 3:09 pm
I was living at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland during this time and I have a completely different point of view than the news media and followerd of MLK have. I could not go into Washington unless there was a military escort. I worked at the Washington Navy Yard and often my path to work was blocked by demonstators from other states who impeded my right to get to work. After work we could not move freely around the DC area.
The campers destroyed the parks and the reflection pool in
Wash at will. Park police were threatened if they tried to keep the masses from destructing the parks and the area was a disaster after they left. The taxpayers had to foot the bill for the cleanup.
Chinatown was destroyed in several nights of rioting (just for the heck of it), The shop owners had never done anything to these people. This WAS NOT ALL PEACEFUL. Like other city burnings people like me had to pay for the cleanup after it was all over. Why have newsmedia failed to tell this side of the story?
Debbie on January 19, 2009 at 7:47 pm
It is interesting to hear perspective from someone who was actually there.