The New Yorker:

At a time when Martin Luther King, Jr., Day was new, second graders in lower Manhattan tried to explain the civil-rights leader’s legacy.  

By Jonathan Schell
January 26, 1987

THE holiday celebrating the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., is settling gradually into American life. Dr. King’s meaning and message are as difficult and necessary today as they were when he lived and took the most important steps since our Civil War to right the worst wrong in American life, so it is perhaps not surprising that the meaning and the message still engender discomfort, uneasiness, and controversy. Not the least surprising aspect of it all is that King is the first pacifist in this country to be honored by a holiday. In some parts of the nation, observance is not enthusiastic, not heartfelt; in others, there is no observance. In Arizona, the recently elected governor rescinded a decision by the previous governor that the state should celebrate the occasion. Yet in most of the United States the holiday proceeded smoothly, and for millions of schoolchildren it came and went as part of the established order of things—as if it had always been there. They were hearing about King for the first time, but then they were hearing about everything in our grownup world for the first time. We went down to P.S. 234, in lower Manhattan, the other day to talk to some second graders, and to hear what they thought about Dr. King, whose life they had heard something about from their teacher, Mrs. Laura Schwartzberg. P.S. 234 started as an annex, but it will soon have a building of its own, which is under construction nearby; for now, it occupies a wing of Independence Plaza, a high-rise apartment building that looks out on the Hudson a few blocks north of Battery Park City. In our experience, second graders still have in them somewhere a two-year-old, which can break out at any moment, but they also have in them an incipient adult—say, a twenty-five-year-old. During our visit, the twenty-five-year-old clearly had the upper hand in many cases for a lot of the time.

When we entered, the children were sitting in two rows on the floor around a blackboard, being led in a word game by Mrs. Schwartzberg, a young woman with short red hair, whose manner combines warmth and authoritativeness. After the game was over, we asked the children what they thought about Dr. King. Hands shot up.

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