By Patrick Whitehurst
The school offered a spectacular view of Monterey Bay, just a bike ride away, though it might as well have been washing the shoreline of another world. As a kid on the coast I rarely made it to the sandy shoreline. I knew the alleys and back streets of Seaside. And I knew which streets to avoid. Broadway stretched from Martin Luther King Middle School down to that expanse of shining sea and I’d run toward it after leaving the safety of the school, stopping near Fremont to catch my breath, before going home and not to the beach. Such was the life of a latchkey kid in the 1980s.
Martin Luther King Middle School, home of The Panthers, and under the tutelage of Principal Mae Johnson, to this day reminds me of the reason I miss my hometown. There we were taught to be careful on the streets, but to be careful in our thoughts as well. In Seaside no one was better than anyone else. Mrs. Johnson made sure we were all treated as equals and, bad grades or not, offered dignified guidance no matter who we were. Get in trouble at school, however, and that trip to her office was something to fear.
Every January on Martin Luther King Jr. Day I’m humbly reminded of that far-flung past and the words of Martin Luther King Jr. himself. Students of the school named for him learned his legacy well. “Intelligence plus character-that is the goal of true education,” King Jr. wrote in the late 1940s and those words were delivered into the minds of us kids decades later.
More than a decade before I attended King Middle, in 1963, he’d deliver the speech, “I Have a Dream.” And it’s one that holds a special place in my heart. King spoke to a throng of supporters, estimated to number around 250,000 in all, on August 28, 1963, in Washington D.C. There he called for an end to racism and improved civil and economic rights to all Americans from the steps of the historic Lincoln Memorial. The speech is often thought to be one of the best ever delivered, by anyone, in American history. And it is certainly one I remember learning about in middle school.
Observed on the third Monday of every January, Martin Luther King Jr. Day is also known King Day, MLK Day, and the longer Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Though President Ronald Reagan signed the holiday into law in 1983, an act I remember celebrating in school, it wouldn’t be celebrated in all fifty states until 2000. King, a Baptist minister and civil rights icon, might have been assassinated years before many of us were born but his legacy, his message, is immortal.
I learned from Martin Luther King Jr., and the other civil rights leaders that followed, a message of hope and unity – just as I learned that we are all equal from Mrs. Johnson those many years ago at King Middle School.
Journalist Patrick Whitehurst is the author of the books, “Williams,” Grand Canyon’s Tusayan Village,” “The Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History,” “Haunted Monterey County,” and the forthcoming book, “Murder and Mayhem in Tucson.”
