Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, January 19, 1993 TAG: 9301190264
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DIANE SIMPSON and MIKE HUDSON STAFF WRITERS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
CHILDREN SAY: IT'S ABOUT FREEDOM
Regina Lee celebrated Martin Luther King's birthday by drawing a picture of two people holding hands. Lee, 9, said the drawing was about freedom."Freedom is when, like, you don't have to be scared," she said.
Lee was one of about 20 children from 8 to 12 who showed up Monday at Roanoke's Harrison Museum of African American Culture to learn about the legacy of King and the civil rights movement.
They drew posters, wrote poetry, pasted up collages and watched videotapes about King's life.
John Lewis, who just turned 9, drew a picture of the Montgomery bus boycott, the mid-1950s civil rights protest that helped first bring the young preacher to national prominence. He also drew a picture of King's assassination a dozen years later in Memphis, Tenn.
When he was in the second grade, Lewis said, a schoolmate called him a "nigger." Lewis went to his teacher and told her what happened. Then he quoted from King's 1963 "I Have A Dream" speech, telling his teacher he hoped for the day when "people will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
Also, "I told the teacher that I thought about Martin Luther King when I thought about what kind of president I would pick."
Other children at Monday's event all agreed that King was a great man, but they were generally a bit more vague about what he meant to them.
But that was the point: to learn more about King and the battle for equal rights.
Melody Stovall, the museum's executive director, helped some children at one table do a crossword puzzle. One clue for a five-letter word: "A person who holds blindly and narrowly to a certain creed." Answer: bigot.
At the poetry-writing table, Nikki Glaspie, 9, recounted how her grandfather, the Rev. E.H. Glaspie of Salem, once met King.
King came to Richmond's Virginia Union University to speak and needed a place to stay. Because accommodations for blacks were scarce in the segregated South, Glaspie, then a divinity student, gave up his bed to King.
Latarsha Wright, 10, wrote this about King: "One day there was this man named Martin Luther King and he was a man for justice and for black people's rights." Looking up from her work, she added, "He was for all colors of people to live together in peace, for nobody to go hungry, like in Ethopia, and all kinds of things like that."