Art, Essay Winners City King’s Teachings

Before they entered the art and essay contest. Martin Luther King Jr. was just a person who died before they were born and had streets named after him. Martin Luther King Jr. Day, celebrated Monday, meant a day off from school and maybe a parade.

But through the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s annual King Week Art and Essay contest, in which about 400 Westside students participated, many now have a greater appreciation of King’s humanitarian contributions.

Summer Scott, a fifth-grader at Baldwin Hills Elementary who won a first-place award, wrote that being a caretaker of King’s dream “means you cannot judge people by the color of the skin. He did not fight for only black people, but for love between all people.”

Determined to keep children aware of the work of the civil rights leader and Nobel laureate who was assassinated April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tenn., the Southern Christian Leadership Conference has sponsored the contest for 17 years.

Out of 2,000 entries from nine elementary and high school districts in Los Angeles County, 36 were selected first-and second-place winners, including 12 from Los Angeles Unified School District schools on the Westside. The artwork will be on display at Wells Fargo’s corporate headquarters in Los Angeles until the end of the month. The student essays were to be read during an awards ceremony Saturday.

The essays and artwork were based on the theme: “How will you become a caretaker of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy?”

Local artists judged the artwork and a panel of volunteers, including educators and civil rights activists, read the essays.

For the essays, all the students were asked to write from a personal perspective, and contest coordinator Genethia Hayes said the elementary-school student essays were among the most sincere.

Eton Tsuno, a fourth-grader at Baldwin Hills Elementary who won a first-place award, wrote about the nation’s hunger crisis, illiteracy and violence. And he came up with a solution.

“I must do something because if I don’t Dr. King says “To ignore evil is to become an accomplice to it,”’ Tsuno wrote. “If I give some food to the canned food drive, I would be a true neighbor to the hungry. If I taught someone to read I would be a true neighbor to him. If there was a fight on the yard and I told the yard teacher, I would be a true neighbor because I helped stop the kids from fighting and getting hurt.”

Baldwin Hills Elementary had six first-and second-place winners, and two of them came from Roslyn Dorn’s fourth-grade class. Living up to King’s ideals, said Dorn, is a year-round exercise.

“King’s legacy is one of service to mankind, and that’s what I tell my students,” she said. Her students work with autistic children each week, have held fund-raisers for UNICEF, and write letters to the elderly in retirement homes.