Glover Kids Learn Importance Of Mlk Day From Speakers

The average student today can probably tell you more about the assassination of rap star Tupac Shakur than they can about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s death.

That’s why it’s important to celebrate King’s birthday. He did more for them than Shakur ever did.

Rev. Happy Watkins and storyteller V. Ted Hutchinson of Federal Way, Wash., spoke at Glover Middle School on Tuesday as part of the school’s commemoration to Dr. King.

Watkins quoted Dr. King from his “I Have a Dream” speech. Hutchinson, a former Deer Park and Spokane resident, told the students tragic stories about slavery in America.

Hutchinson, who looks like Bill Cosby and sounds like Darth Vader, told the students that of an estimated 60 million African slaves captured by European traders, 40 million died in the hulls of slave ships crossing the Atlantic Ocean.

“That sucks,” said a kid sitting about three rows behind me in the bleachers.

Dorothy Edwards, a seventh grader, said she was interested to learn that slaves used songs and music as ways to not only express their pain and suffering, but to plan escapes from the South to the North.

Hutchinson has a deep bass voice that filled the gym even when he didn’t have the microphone raised to his mouth. But even he wonders whether or not the students pick up on what it is he is trying to say.

“My hope is that there is something in the voice that captures them,” he said. “I’m a new authority figure to them, but I come in here respecting them.

“I think the evidence is how quiet they get when I start singing.”

Even so, some of the seventh-graders confessed to being bored.

When the seventh graders left, the eighth graders came in.

Sean Bunch sat next to me on the bleachers. He was face-deep in a book titled “Lord Foul’s Bane.” I figured he’d be better off reading a book through the whole presentation than falling asleep.

I asked him if he knew anything about Dr. King and he said no. But after classmate Keanu DeSanto impressed the audience by singing the national anthem and Watkins began quoting King, “Lord Foul’s Bane” was resting comfortably by Bunch’s feet.

Hutchinson hadn’t gotten five minutes into his presentation when Bunch, like a lot of his other classmates, laughed at a funny moment during the presentation.

Close to 800 seventh and eighth graders heard these two charismatic African-American men speak, but I wondered just how many minds and hearts were penetrated.

I thought back to a story my father told me a few year’s ago. He’s been a school teacher for 34 years. Most of those years were spent in the Denver Public School system.

In this particular story, it was the mid-70s and a kid named James Lyle was, as Dad put it, giving him hell.

James’ big brother was former heavyweight champion Ron Lyle, so of course all the Lyles thought they were just as bad. In class, the younger Lyle told my father he was “nothing but an Uncle Tom doing white man’s work.”

Pretty heavy stuff from an eighth grader.

A lot of teachers figured James’ mouth would get him killed because he certainly wasn’t tough like Ron. But one day, some 20 years later, James called my father and asked him if he could come speak to his class.

James straightened out his act and now works with at-risk youth in the Denver school system.

I told that story to Hutchinson and he just smiled.

“All you can do is keep on bringing them to the good water,” he said. “Most eventually drink from it. But they won’t if you don’t bring it to them.”

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Kevin Blocker The Spokesman-Review