“My dream for the world is for everybody to be able to afford to live.”
“My dream for the world is for there to be no more littering.”
“My dream for the world is for every person in every country to be treated the same.”
A dozen elementary-aged students at our West Side Beacon After School stood on the stage at the Joan of Arc School complex on West 93rd Street, holding up drawings illustrating their visions. They read them out—some boldly, some haltingly—while their fellow students looked on, then basked in a hearty round of applause.
The Martin Luther King Jr. Social Justice Peace Day celebration has been an annual fixture at the Beacon since the late 1980s, when the civil rights icon was first honored with a federal holiday.
“There used to be a Black History celebration,” said Beacon Director Roy Baptiste, “but when Dr. King’s birthday became a national holiday, we had an official day for it.”
Baptiste has been at the Beacon since those days. He says each year the celebration focuses on a different aspect of King’s work: “One year we talked about service, one year we talked about making a community, this year we talked about how to make his dreams come true in the world. So we try and look at different aspects of his dream to show he wasn’t just about one thing.”
The youngest students present their projects first. As older students take the stage, they give more complex presentations, describing King’s life and quoting from his works.
Baptiste says he hopes all the children walk away with the core concepts of King’s dream. Until fairness and equality reign throughout our world, he explains, those concepts will always be relevant.
“His words from 1963 apply today. Injustice has happened before and it’s still happening. We have to keep digging in and saying, ‘This is what we want.’”