BRIEFLY : Arts: 9 Students Win King Contest

Nine Westside students were selected as winners in an art and essay contest honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The contest was co-sponsored by the local chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Martin Luther King Jr. Legacy Assn.

The contest winners, part of the King Festival ’95 celebration, wrote an essay or created an art project answering the question: “Nonviolent Social Change: Myth or Reality?”

One of the first-place essay winners, Hisham D. Dahkhil of Baldwin Hills Elementary and Magnet School, wrote on his experiences as a third-grader.

“I used to get in trouble at school for fighting,” he wrote. “I would get angry when the older kids (would) pick me up and drop me, kick me or push me down. They made me mad because they called me His-Ham even though they knew (that) as a Muslim, I don’t eat pork. . . . I also know that violence only makes things worse and we must solve our problems by talking them over.” The winners were selected from among 3,000 public- and private-school students in the Los Angeles area.