Times Of Change Today’s Generation Finds It Hard To Believe That Martin Luther King’s Message Was So Necessary

In accordance with Martin Luther King Day, we talked with our kids about who Dr. King was and what his holiday is meant to commemorate.

We told them that King was a civil rights leader who promoted nonviolent, civil disobedience as a way to help black people receive decent, fair and equal treatment. Treatment based on individual ability as opposed to the indecent, unfair and unequal treatment based on their collective color of skin.

That, and the fact that King was murdered for his efforts.

We started by telling our children the story of Rosa Parks, the young black woman who simply refused to give up her seat on an Alabama bus - and the complex social consequences that came of it: non-violent protest of the Montgomery bus boycott, violent beatings and unjust jail time so many blacks received because of it.

Actually, we got into the whole story through a library book about two modern-day black kids who found themselves in trouble for fighting about the very same issue Rosa Parks raised. Except, these two boys were fighting because they WANTED to sit in the back of their school bus.

This was something our young twin sons could understand. They, too, ride a bus to school and love to sit in the back.

To explain why being made to sit in the back of the bus would be a bad thing, we told them many white Americans thought there was inherent virtue in having white skin, and being white made them feel they were better than Americans with dark skin. We told our sons that white people not only made black people sit in the backs of buses, but made them use different water fountains and bathrooms. We told them blacks were treated like dirt and were hated simply because of the color of their skin.

We explained this several times and in several ways because, thankfully, it was a difficult concept for them to grasp. But once they grasped it, they became angry and disgusted.

They invented scenarios in which, if THEY had been at that place and time, and any white people had been brazen enough to think and act that way around them, that they would just tell those people they were crazy.

After going back and forth about how and why people might be crazy enough or ignorant enough to think such things, we continued to emphasize that there are still large numbers of whites who continue to believe such ridiculously unproductive things.

It has been my experience that the less people know about a subject, the more apt they are to disparage it. It is ignorance that creates fear and hatred - and ignorance, fear and hatred do nothing to solve a problem.

We are glad our kids, who happen to be white, go to an inner-city school that is racially split 60-40, with whites in the minority. It lets them learn first-hand about the effect of color.

What our sons have learned so far is exemplified with this example: On several occasions, we have heard one trying to describe a certain classmate to the other. After saying so-and-so has long or short hair and sits next to so-and-so and yesterday wore a red shirt, they might mention skin color as an identifying feature. Sitting so close, they see that skin color has no more to do with who a person is than what that person is wearing.

Seeing that belief is what Martin Luther King Day is meant to commemorate.

MEMO: Michael Ashcraft is a free-lance writer based in Kansas City, Mo.