King’s Dream Lost On New Generation Many Black Teens Don’t See Relevance To Today’s World

Nikki Thomas thinks hard, trying to sum up what Martin Luther King Jr. means to her. She remembers being taught years earlier that King made a great speech and had a dream. But for the most part, Thomas hasn’t a clear idea of what the civil rights movement was about and why it is relevant to her. It all seems so long ago and vague to the African American 11th-grader from Prince George’s County, Md.

“All I can think of is he helped black people,” said Thomas, 16. “He made things better. We aren’t slaves anymore.”

Christopher Smith, 15, a ninth-grader at the District of Columbia’s Central High School, appreciates the King holiday and its significance. He has studied King in depth, read his life’s story and can rattle off facts about King’s accomplishments. But Smith admits there was a time when he was completely bored by it all.

“I remember I just quit reading about it,” said Smith, who is black. “It was the constant badgering every year. Teachers have you do the same report. And they don’t try to give different assignments. How many reports can you do on Martin Luther King?”

Almost 30 years after the leader of the U.S. civil rights movement was assassinated and 12 years after Congress made his birthday a federal holiday, much of the relevance of his life and times is lost on a new, young generation.

Schools, churches, parents and community groups try mightily to instill in young people the historic importance of King, a powerful orator who has been called one of the greatest civil rights leaders of all time. But many who are the beneficiaries of his legacy are indifferent to that fact and know little about him.

King led a movement that eventually broke the patterns of racial segregation in this country and led to equal rights legislation for blacks. He led marches - dodging police dogs, water hoses and bullets - to demand fair employment, the end of housing discrimination and the desegregation of public facilities. Amid constant threats on his life, King preached nonviolence while demanding basic human rights. On April 4, 1968, King was shot on a motel balcony in Memphis, where he had gone to support a garbage workers’ strike.

On the night before he was shot, King said in a final sermon: “If any of you are around when I have to meet my day, I don’t want a long funeral. Tell them not to mention that I have a Nobel Peace Prize - that isn’t important. … I’d like somebody to mention that Martin Luther King tried to give his life serving others.”

Teachers, school board members and parents say they are saddened that those words, and the accomplishments and sacrifices of those who led the civil rights movement, don’t move many young people today. But they are not surprised.

“Someone who is 18 today was born in 1980, which is 26 years after Brown versus the Board of Education. It is 16 years after the Civil Rights Act was passed. It is 15 years after the Voting Rights Act was passed. Martin Luther King was dead 12 years before they were born,” said David Bositis, a senior political analyst for the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. “When something recedes far enough into the past, it becomes really distant. I suspect that after 40 years, it is as far distant as the Revolutionary War.”

Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., who walked with King and was bloodied as a freedom rider trying to integrate the South, is saddened that the struggles of his generation are not always appreciated by today’s youth.

“It is somewhat distressing to know that young people today don’t understand the significance of the movement and understand the significance of the contribution that Martin Luther King made,” said Lewis, who travels throughout the country speaking to classes and showing them the “White Only” signs and photographs of him being arrested and beaten. “Some of the young people at the grade school level say, ‘Did you live back during the days of slavery? What was it like?’ They just don’t understand.”

Many students across the Washington area seem to confuse the anti-segregation movement of the 1950s and 1960s, which ended legally enforced whites-only schools and other public facilities, with the abolitionist movement to end slavery 100 years earlier.

Even some of the brightest college students are unmoved by the tumultuous civil rights era. Russell L. Adams, chairman of the department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University, said when he describes his life before the civil rights movement, “they are curious but not energized.”

Charlotte Stokes, supervisor of social studies in Prince George’s County schools, said most students learn formally about the civil rights movement in 11th-grade history. But, Stokes said, teachers also often lecture about King around the holiday, and students may read a biography or watch a video on King.

Stokes said it is important for teachers to find ways to make the lessons about the civil rights movement relevant to students and present them in interesting, dynamic ways.

“Imagine if you are this kid and if the video presentation is one way for kids to learn about King. But you see that same video every year in January. How do you feel when you are a junior? I can understand when kids say, ‘I’m tired.’ Because we haven’t created enough different ways for them to learn about King,” Stokes said.