Emmett Till. Medgar Evers. Harry and Harriette Moore. The civil rights movement had lost more than its fair share of heroes by 1968. But when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was gunned down on the balcony of a Memphis hotel on April 4 of that year, it seemed like the death knell for one of the United States’ most effective—and divisive—social movements. As word of the assassination spread, public and private mourning for King, including multiple funerals and a nationwide period of grief began. So did riots, which broke out in nearly 100 American cities, sparked by King’s death but fueled by longstanding social inequity and discrimination. President Lyndon B. Johnson announced a day of mourning in King’s honor. In the immediate aftermath of King’s murder, Robert F. Kennedy, then the presumed Democratic nominee for president, quickly addressed King’s death, urging calm and asking people to choose love over lawlessness and work toward justice. 11 Gallery 11 Images Three days after his death, Nina Simone performed a brand-new song written by her bass player, Gene Taylor, in response to the assassination. “Why? (The King of Love Is Dead)" was a 15-minute-long cry of pain that asked what would happen now that King was gone. “Why was he killed?” she said later. “It was bigotry that sealed his fate.” King’s death was marked by a memorial service at the funeral home where King was laid out and two funerals in Atlanta, Georgia. The first was held for a group of family and friends in King’s spiritual home: Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King and his father had both served as pastor. During the ceremony, Coretta Scott King, his wife, appeared “a dry-eyed frieze of heartbreak” to one reporter. She requested that the church play a recording of “The Drum Major Instinct,” a sermon her husband had delivered earlier that year. In it, he said he didn’t want a long funeral or eulogy, and that he hoped people would mention that he had given his life to serving others. After the private funeral, the mourners walked three miles to Morehouse College with a simple farm cart that contained King’s casket. A hundred thousand mourners lined the streets of Atlanta. Then, at the college, King was eulogized by his friend Benjamin Mays, who had promised him he’d do so if he died before King. (King promised the same to Mays.) "Martin Luther King, Jr. challenged the interracial wrongs of his country without a gun,” said Mays. “And he had the faith to believe that he would win the battle for social justice.” King hadn’t used a gun. But the one wielded by assassin James Earl Ray had silenced the voice of one of the nation’s greatest figures. He was just 39 years old. READ MORE: Why People Rioted After Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Assassination<doc-sep>Care and Feeding is Slate’s parenting advice column. In addition to our traditional advice, every Thursday we feature an assortment of teachers from around the country answering your education questions. Have a question for our teachers? Email askateacher@slate.com or post it in the Slate Parenting Facebook group. This week’s Ask a Teacher panel: Brandon Hersey, second grade, Washington Matthew Dicks, fifth grade, Connecticut Amy Scott, eighth grade, North Carolina Cassy Sarnell, preschool special education, New York Do you have a recommendation for a way my 6-year-old can honor Martin Luther King Jr. on Martin Luther King Jr. Day? Last year, my child had school, and the school had a Parade of Nations. Twenty-seven nations were represented by the student body. Excellent! This year, my child has the day off. I believe it should be a day of service or a day to reflect on Dr. King’s teachings. What are some things (minus books—we have several) that we can do without getting too deep so early? Or would that be OK? Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement —Let’s Honor Dr. King Hey LHDK! What a wonderful question. Thanks for taking the time to honor King’s legacy with your family. There are many thoughtful ways you can reflect on what this day means with your son. In our classroom this week, we are writing letters to our state legislators about how King’s teachings are even more important today. In the letters my students have mentioned how treating each other with kindness and respect should be an expectation, not a goal. Writing a letter with your son to someone important in our government or your community is a great way for you to reflect on King’s contributions together. If you’re looking for something more service oriented, I’d check out your local NAACP chapter’s website to see if they have any events planned. These events are great opportunities to meet new people and show kids the impact that King and other civil rights leaders have had on our communities. Advertisement I know you mentioned you have many books, but here are some of my favorites. I love the picture book Martin’s Big Words: The Life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I read this book every year to my scholars, and they rave about it. If you’re looking for something the whole family can enjoy, I’d suggest the movie Our Friend Martin. It’s an oldie but a goodie, which I highly recommend. Thanks again for celebrating King with your family, and I hope you all have a wonderful MLK Day! —Mr. Hersey What are your views on assigning 30 minutes of reading as homework for early elementary school students? I feel like it makes reading into a chore, versus something fun. I feel nervous that my child will go from enjoying reading to viewing it as one more thing they “have” to do. Advertisement —Reading Should Be Fun Dear Reading, I am not a fan of homework for early elementary students. I’d much prefer that young children have time to play, rest, and spend time with their families. My first-grade son is not assigned homework, and I couldn’t be more pleased. When we arrived home from school yesterday, we played a board game together, wrestled on the couch, and I taught him how to load silverware into a dishwasher, all of which I find more valuable than completing a worksheet on addition. That said, I support reading every single day as a means of helping children learn this complex skill. I also believe that reading at home on a regular basis teaches kids to love books and see them as part of your everyday life. Advertisement Advertisement I do think that teachers can sometimes interfere with students learning to foster this love. For example, I don’t believe in nightly reading logs, for the reason you state. Reading should not be a chore, and any teacher who thinks a reading log will ensure that a child is reading every night has never forged a parent’s signature or completed their homework on the bus ride to school. Choosing an arbitrary amount of time to read is silly to me. I teach kids to read to the end of the page. Read to the end of the chapter. Read until we get to the dentist’s office. Don’t read until some arbitrary timer goes off. Just read. At-home reading should also be flexible in order to meet your family’s needs. This means that parents can read to children, or children can read to parents, or parents and children can sit side by side, reading independently. It doesn’t matter how reading happens as long as it happens. Advertisement I’m also a believer in allowing children to choose whatever they want to read at home. While teachers are always introducing students to new genres and constantly assessing students’ reading levels to ensure that the material they are reading is challenging, reading at home should be a sanctuary from these demands. Picture books, chapter books, magazines, American Girl catalogs, graphic novels, recipes, poetry … as long as they are engaging with written material that they respond to, all is well. Advertisement Thirty minutes is a good amount of time to read, but I always tell parents to view that as an average. There may be busy nights when reading a picture book for 10 minutes is more than enough. On other nights, you might spend 45 minutes or an hour plowing through five picture books or three chapters of a novel. Advertisement Choosing an arbitrary amount of time to read is silly to me. I teach kids to read to the end of the page. Read to the end of the chapter. Finish the book. Read until we get to the dentist’s office. Don’t read until some arbitrary timer goes off. Just read. Do my kids read for 30 minutes? I have no idea. We read until the kids are tired. Or until they seem to be losing interest. Sometimes it’s much more, sometimes it’s much less. Then I write “30 minutes” on their stupid reading logs, because when I was a kid, I forged my parents’ signatures all the time. —Mr. Dicks I would love to hear your thoughts on parents’ participation in big school projects. How involved should parents be in middle school and high school with things like physics projects, science fair projects, reports, presentations, etc.? How does it affect your impression of a project when it’s obvious a parent has been very involved? What do you view as an appropriate level of involvement from parents? Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement —A 14-Year-Old Did That? Dear A14YODT, When I was a kid, projects were, for the most part, assigned and then completed outside of school. Wildly, they were only sometimes related to the curriculum we were doing in class. They required poster board we asked our moms to buy the night before the project was due. Or costumes we requested that she make, also the night before the project was due. Now, it’s not like that. Or I guess I should say, that’s not how I approach projects, and I hope other teachers don’t either. I teach eighth-grade English, and in my class, projects are not just linked to but part of the same curriculum I’m teaching at school. I give students oral and written instructions about what to do and tell them exactly when it’s due. I hand them a rubric so they know how the project will be graded. I offer them resources and materials. And, maybe most importantly, I give them time in class to work on it so I can help and monitor progress. Any time I assign a project, the students have five to 20 minutes every class period to work on it. Yes, some of them will squander their class time and have to hustle the weekend before the due date, but many of them will not have to take any work home with them at all. Advertisement Advertisement In other words, most of my projects don’t require any input from Mom or Dad, and I prefer it that way. While I appreciate parental support, it can cause frustration for me and for them. First of all, the project is an opportunity for me to see if the kids understood the content and can implement the concepts and skills I taught them in class. If parents jump in, those waters get muddied. Second, parents will often spend a lot of time and effort touching up things that aren’t even graded on the rubric. If I haven’t taught it, it’s not fair for me to grade on it. Mom, for instance, may spend an hour fixing lapses in parallelism that aren’t going to change the kid’s grade. Of course, it’s great if the kid learns parallel structure in the process, but a parent simply tinkering with grammar on her own helps no one. Advertisement Also, I’m a parent. I know what it feels like to look at a project assignment with dread. Parents are tired. Parents have stuff to do. Asking parents to supervise or oversee or do a project with or—sometimes—for their kids is cruel. By the time dinner is cooked and eaten, the kitchen is tidied up, PJs are on, and teeth are brushed, I find it hard enough to read to my kids, and I’m an English teacher! Advertisement In an ideal world, communication between parents and teachers would be so streamlined and expectations so clear that parents could reinforce the content and concepts without overstepping any boundaries or overexerting themselves. But that day is not today. I say let kids do the projects. Advertisement (Obviously, extracurriculars like science fairs, Science Olympiad, Odyssey of the Mind, pinewood derby, etc., are different. Check with the coach or coordinator to see how much parental input they expect.) —Ms. Scott My bright, kind, creative 4-year-old is in his second year at a private school specifically geared for children with a rare neuro-motor disorder. Last year we had a wonderful experience and watched him grow and develop at a rate that stunned and delighted his doctors and therapists. This year, because of his amazing progress, I returned to work for the first time since his birth. This means that instead of the half-day program he attended last year, he now attends a full day of school plus an afterschool program. While he previously loved school, he now proclaims to hate it. Most of his anxieties seem to revolve around the legally required rest time. Advertisement I’ve spoken with his teachers (who are wonderful and care about him), and I’ve tried a few different techniques for making rest time less stressful (bringing a special pillow from his bed, role-playing rest time at home, discussing quiet activities he can do if he can’t sleep). But he can’t seem to adjust. His high tuition necessitates that I work (our local public school is terrible, otherwise he’d be in our public pre-K program), and I don’t know what to do to help him deal with the one portion of the day that is ruining school for him. Is it overdramatic to worry that I’m going to quash his love of learning by forcing him to stay in the program? He’s continuing to make such tremendous strides that I can’t bear the thought of pulling him from this amazing school. Advertisement Advertisement —Rest Time = Stress Time Dear Rest Time, It’s a little overdramatic—I’m not gonna lie. It sounds like you’ve found an incredible school for your son, and it sounds like everyone involved is doing their best to take care of his needs—and that includes you. It’s hard to tell you how to help him without a little more information, but I’ll try. The preschool I work in has five hours of program, and we’re not allowed to provide rest time during those hours (because of individualize education programs and compliance), so if our kiddos nap, it’s during our after-school program. If his rest time is during the after-school program, he might already be tired of school by the time rest time rolls around.<doc-sep>
Had he lived, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would be 90 today. For many, his work remains a true and enduring symbol of uplift, particularly African-Americans. He is considered one of the most admired men in the world. In essence or ironically, whichever way you want to see it, he became the manifestation of his dream that men be judged by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin. We are light years away from his dream of a colorblind society. But I believe that we can still climb that mountaintop. I don’t want to say progress has not been made, just not nearly enough to fulfill his dream. Dr. King’s legacy is about much more than electoral politics, as important as greater representation of African-Americans, people of color and women would be to him. His signature fight, of course, was for the right to vote through nonviolent action. He would be somewhat gratified by the results of his work but not so happy that the power of the vote has subsequently been diluted and discarded through gerrymandering. As a result, we have only had two blacks elected to Congress in Massachusetts. Boston is also the only city in Massachusetts without an elected school board. Recent voting improprieties, shenanigans and court rulings in Florida, Georgia and Texas would have certainly been challenged by Dr. King in order to preserve the sanctity of the vote he fought so hard to attain. Through all of the challenges, Dr. King’s life, work and values continue to motivate and inspire, as they did Paul English, who has championed the construction of a memorial to the civil rights leader and his wife, Coretta. The memorial is a source of great excitement for Boston, the city Dr. King called his second home. Equally exciting is the creative programming under the guidance of director Marie St. Fleur, co-chair Liz Walker and the city of Boston as well as the Boston Foundation. The goal is to broaden and make permanent the principles that Dr. King espoused using interactive ways for people to understand and continue his work. One such discussion happens today at 3 p.m. at the Boston Foundation, presented by MLK Boston. It will be hosted by professors Brandon Terry and Tommie Shelby. It explores Dr. King’s positions on the importance of economic parity and inequities. Some may not readily connect Dr. King to economics. But it should go without saying that a bedrock of the civil rights movement is economic in nature, whether it was the bus boycott or other economic sanctions against injustices. Dr. King’s last act before his assassination was the fight for fair pay for Memphis sanitation workers. Today, Dr. King would see economic disparity among our people and no doubt engage in breaking down barriers to achieving parity. A most wonderful hallmark of Dr. King’s legacy is his challenge to us, the African-American community, to work for our own empowerment. When a recent Federal Reserve report showed the worth of a white family to be $234,000 compared to $8 for an African- American family, former Sen. Dianne Wilkerson began mapping out the basics to the road to financial recovery. A result of that effort has evolved into the Black Economic Council of Massachusetts, championed by One United’s Terry Williams, Darryl Settles, Richard Taylor and other community business leaders. There is great hope for BECMA in the coming year. Tonight is Mayor Marty Walsh’s State of the City address. About two years ago, his administration produced one of the most thorough reports on racial equity along with some great recommendations, small and large. Time to get them off the drawing board with a plan of action. A great birthday gift for Dr. King. Happy Birthday, Dr. King. Joyce Ferriabough Bolling is a media and political strategist and communications specialist.