M came home saying this poem last week. It took a while for me to figure out who she was talking about:
Mateener Keen was a mighty mighty man.
And a mighty mighty man was he.
He was a preacher and a teacher and a man of God and he loved you and me.
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Today’s version, with improved pronunciation:
A long time ago, people couldn’t sit by each other on the bus, then Martin Luther King came and he tried to make people better. And some people didn’t want to be friends with each other so they tried to kill him.
Now all the people with different skin of from a different place can all be friends.
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Even if you try not to think about race or racism or talk to your kids about it on any other day of the year, please do today. We still haven’t achieved Dr. King’s dream, there is still a lot of work to be done.
…and in the words of a child explained so perfectly.
MLK day is such a great opportunity to talk about our kids about race/racism. I’ve been able to have several really cool conversations with Simon today simply because we are observing this holiday.
[...] M brought a Martin Luther King day project from school. All the kids seemed to have used the same brown crayon to color Dr. King. M has never shown much interest in making her drawings of people look true to skin tone. Usually she draws everything with red, because that is her favorite color. The brown skinned coloring makes me wonder a little about what her teachers’ instructions were and what kind of discussions were going on in the class. She did manage to say the poem in a way that was understandable this year. [...]