Students Meet Son of Civil Rights Legend

Elementary school students who had studied the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and his civil rights legacy had a chance Monday to meet his son, who was in the San Fernando Valley to celebrate his father’s upcoming birthday.

When his father was assassinated in 1968, Martin Luther King III was 10, about the same age as many in his audience at Laurence 2000 School, a K-6 private school in Valley Glen. Monday began a week of tributes at the school leading up to Jan. 15, which would have been the elder King’s 72nd birthday.

“You must be resilient,” King’s second-oldest child told about 70 students. “The odds were stacked against [my father], but he and his team were resilient and as a result our nation moved forward.”

The afternoon assembly in Laurence’s auditorium featured a simple production by Los Angeles actors about King’s life, tracing his boyhood in Atlanta to the beginnings of the civil rights movement, the Montgomery bus boycott of 1956, King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington and his slaying at age 39 in Memphis.

Laurence students were incredulous that the son of the man they had been reading about in school was in their auditorium, where King is memorialized with a portrait on a bulletin board.

King’s lesson for students today is “that even though people show us that sometimes violence is the answer for stuff, that nonviolence is better,” said sixth-grader Aaron Hassel.

Martin Luther King III now leads the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Atlanta-based civil rights group co-founded by his father, and lectures around the country on issues of community activism and human rights. He is currently filming a television series which will highlight the achievements of ordinary people.