My 8 year old daughter and our discussion of the life of Martin Luther King
My daughter had a class discussion of Martin Luther King's life and unfortunate end at the hands of an assassin back in 1968 at her school. They have read stories about his life and what he was trying to accomplish.
As a 2nd grader, she has a hard time understanding why people, including Martin Luther King, were mistreated just because their color of skin happened to be dark or brown. At home, she wanted to talk about it with me. She asked me if I knew who Martin Luther King was. I said I did. She said she and her class were reading about him and wanted me to tell her his story again. I started telling his story from what I knew and was going over Wikipedia to remember some details. She would interject every time I mentioned what the racists and the police did to him as he was leading protests, with "why would they do that?" She said he was marching, in her words, "for people to be nice to each other", and didn't understand why the police were putting him in prison. I went over about who he was, the struggles he led for equal rights, the non-violent protests he organized, the powerful speeches he gave, and the many times he was imprisoned, and finally how some racist guy shot and killed him. Discussing the part where his assassination occurs was not easy. As I was going over how the end came to Martin Luther King on the decks of that motel, I could see that my 8 year old daughter was listening and tearing up at the same time. I could see that she was about to cry. She made me tear up. As an African American, I put myself and my daughter in the shoes of those that were denied basic human rights just because they had a dark skin, and that stirs up all kind of emotions in me. Things are much better these days but far from perfect.
At the end she said, "Daddy, this makes me sad". I hugged her and told her this happened a log time ago and many good things have happened because of people like Martin Luther King. I told her that there were many good white Americans who also paid with their lives and livelihoods to help out their fellow Americans gain full rights. Her strong emotional reaction really made me rethink all that civil rights advocates went through in those dark years. My innocent 8 year old daughter now has an emotional attachment with Dr. Martin Luther King and his inspiring story.
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