As I read about one of the most influential leaders of the Civil Rights Movement and of all time, my bilingual Spanish/English students translated for the rest of the class. We realized we couldn't have done that fifty or sixty years ago. I watched students look at their friends, astonished and appalled that they couldn't have learned alongside each other, much less easily forged a friendship. I watched their eyes turn to me, the realization setting in that I couldn't have been the teacher to all of them.
We spend a lot of time learning academic vocabulary at school - defining words they'll need to know throughout their school career. Segregation. I don't think it's a word they'll soon forget. It wasn't on our list of terms to learn, however the visual representation of the term from our nation's, our world's history, and sadly our present made the definition very clear.
It was one of the few moments in elementary school when everything is completely still, completely silent for a couple of seconds. Goose bumps raised on my arms as I thought about how each child in my class, in my school, in our country, in our world does not get an equal chance...far from it really. Here were 24 kids from various backgrounds starring at me, some with looks of frustration toward the power and corruption that has hurt innocent people, toward inequality, and mostly a sweet, innocent frustration that people have ever thought it acceptable to deny children from being friends based on color, nationality, gender, or faith.
Children are always the hope of the future. Always. Common's Song "I Gotta Dream" is infused with Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech. As each face of the students in my classes passes through my mind this song plays. It's like a beautiful slide show where each student is captured in their purest, most shining moment, the moment when they are exercising their full potential as a person against all odds. One picture has a voice over. The student shouts, "I'm black and white. Don't they get it? We all have the same insides."
No matter their background, these kids have an undeniably exquisite capability to love. Right around the time we were reading about Civil Rights, I shared with my class about some time I spent volunteering in Russia in an orphanage. I teach second grade. My students are only seven and eight years old. They amazed me. They connected to the plight of orphans. They recognized injustice. Many of those kids have enough to worry about with their own lives. They were not dealt a fair hand in life - yet they care about other people. Even my classrooms are only a small fragment of the population, they are encouraging me that more than my generation, they are ready to rise up out of the injustices in their own lives to find freedom for others. Oh the possibility of Heaven on Earth if the kids of today run with that fire in their bellies that screams out against injustice and demands equality and peace. They give me a dream that, "We gonna work it out out out..."
I know the world is not perfect. But, it is not doomed either.
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