Duncan Middle School was not in session Monday, in celebration and remembrance of Martin Luther King Jr.
For some students, the contributions of King are worth celebrating, making the the civil rights activist worth remember every year in January. MLK Day is celebrated the third Monday every January and is a national holiday.
LJ Coit, a DMS eighth-grader, said he knows about King and what he did for people. He said he knows King participated in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, using non-violent means.
King has been recognized for his contributions in the fight for equal rights for all races. Perhaps, students best remember him for his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, which he delivered on Aug. 28, 1963.
King was a minister by trade, but his civil rights works have made a lasting impact on the nation. He was assassinated on April 4, 1968.
One of the most popular groups that King worked with as the NAACP, a well-known civil rights group.
According the the Nobel Prize website, “In the eleven-year period between 1957 and 1968, King traveled over six million miles and spoke over 25 hundred times, appearing wherever there was injustice, protest, and action; and meanwhile he wrote five books as well as numerous articles.
“In these years, he led a massive protest in Birmingham, Alabama, that caught the attention of the entire world, providing what he called a coalition of conscience. and inspiring his ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail,’ a manifesto of the Negro revolution; he planned the drives in Alabama for the registration of Negroes as voters; he directed the peaceful march on Washington, D.C., of 250,000 people to whom he delivered his address, ‘l Have a Dream,’ he conferred with President John F. Kennedy and campaigned for President Lyndon B. Johnson; he was arrested upwards of twenty times and assaulted at least four times; he was awarded five honorary degrees; was named Man of the Year by Time magazine in 1963; and became not only the symbolic leader of American blacks but also a world figure.
“At the age of thirty-five, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize. When notified of his selection, he announced that he would turn over the prize money of $54,123 to the furtherance of the civil rights movement.”
King was born Michael Luther King Jr., on Jan. 15, 1929, later changing his name to the recognizable “Martin.”
