KING'S LEGACY JIM CROW LAWS SEEM INCREDIBLE TO YOUNG.

Byline: Rachel Uranga Staff Writer

Nearly four decades after civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was slain, his famous ``I have a dream'' speech has become required reading for nearly every school child.

As the country honors King in parades, memorials and celebrations today, a new generation is taking over. Teachers and leaders who grew up on multiculturalism and diversity are rethinking how children are taught about King and the struggles of the civil rights movement.

``More and more, for students of color, they are detached from their history,'' said Jennifer Harrison, a 28-year-old biracial high school English and humanities teacher. ``There's this common belief that since we had the civil rights movement, there's a colorblind society. And that's just not true.''

So instead of teaching students first about segregation and Jim Crow, she starts her lessons from the children's own experience with racism, ethnic bigotry, economic-class consciousness and other discrimination.

It's important in the Los Angeles Unified School District, where the population is 11 percent African-American, 72 percent Latino and 9 percent non-Hispanic white. It's important in the district where 74 cent of the students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches because they come from low-income households.

The lessons connect the children of immigrants to U.S. civil rights history and help others relate to the struggle for equality although their own families never experienced the ripples of segregation.

Other teachers use videos and guest speakers to make the civil rights movement relevant to a generation more familiar with Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant but not John Carlos and Tommie Smith, the two African-American sprinters who won medals at the 1968 Olympics and raised their fists as a symbol of black power.

``I can only look at it from the same perspective my students are looking at it. (The civil rights movement) is not personal to them, and it's not to me,'' Harrison said.

Trying to make King's message more relevant to students and even to young teachers like Harrison, LAUSD officials this year created a curriculum emphasizing oral histories of people who experienced the civil rights movement firsthand.

``It's something you can't get in a textbook. Words. Hearing somebody repeat a story of what they had done. The city of Los Angeles has a rich resource to tap into to get knowledge,'' said Mark Elinson, an LAUSD consultant who remembers when he was a young college student in 1965 and watched King deliver an electrifying speech to a Jewish congregation at the Temple Israel of Hollywood.

Over the next few decades, more and more contemporaries of King - born Jan. 15, 1929 - will be gone. Just last week, Elinson noted, James Forman, the leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, died of cancer at the age of 76.

Indeed, the passing years have made their mark in the classroom. Many children of immigrants don't know anybody who lived in the United States in 1968 when King was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn.

Katrina Landeta, a 16-year-old junior at Cleveland Groves High School in Reseda, said she had often heard King's name, but knew little about the Baptist minister whose nonviolent doctrine shaped the civil rights era.

Yet, a conversation about race in Harrison's humanities class piqued her interest in King and his legacy.

``Talking about all this has made me more open to hearing about Martin Luther King. It has become more personal to me now that we are talking about race,'' said the child of Filipino immigrants.

African-American Corhorris Atkins, 16, said he learned about King more from watching television than from his grandmother who grew up in North Carolina.

``It's so far from the imagination,'' said the high school junior. ``A lot of us really don't know about that era. It's hard to relate to it to now.''

Making it closer to imagination has long been a key education mission in California. State education code requires every student, at every grade level, to have some reference to the civil rights leader.

In kindergarten, children are required to learn the reason the country celebrates Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday as a holiday. In fifth grade, teachers guide students through King's principles of equality in relation to democracy. By 11th grade, teenagers are reading King's famous letter from a Birmingham, Ala., jail and learning about the civil rights era.

State law even calls for instructors to develop lessons or exercises around the holiday, although few do.

It's in part because instructors are moving away from the short lessons about King planned for a holiday or Black History Month. Instead, teachers are trying to make King and the 1960s civil rights era integral parts of all their lessons, said Sherie Stephens, who teaches world history at Taft High School.

``I think that the holiday approach deadens kids to the topic,'' she said, noting she emphasizes King's international influences. ``They just lump him into the past. That's just old people, and that doesn't matter.''

In some ways, it's how Tootie Sims, 16, a Taft High School junior felt. Sitting through years of classroom lectures about the ``I have a dream'' speech, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, he thought teachers could never really convey the oppression African-Americans felt in the same way his grandmother could.

Then he met Edwin Tucker, an instructor of African-American history at Taft High School who grew up in Texas under Jim Crow laws.

``Some teachers get their facts from books. They rush through and explain things. But he tells it the way it is,'' Sims said.

Photos of King, Sidney Poitier, Booker T. Washington and The Temptations line Tucker's classroom. It's a relaxed atmosphere and one that completely engages his students.

``I don't think one of you could have survived the South,'' Tucker tells his students. He chuckles.

Even at 8 a.m. on the Friday before a three-day weekend, none of the students yawns or whispers about personal matters. The students' attention is riveted on Tucker as the slim, 6-foot-2-inch former stock broker explains Jim Crow through his own experience.

``I couldn't try on shoes at a store,'' he said. ``My mother used to outline my feet.''

Teresa Coulson, a 17-year-old senior, said she never would have guessed that a simple task, buying shoes, could have been so difficult.

``When he tells it, I get it,'' she said.

That's Tucker's goal.

``In most history books, the civil rights movement is just a chapter. I remind kids that we are talking about modern American history. They get that.''

Rachel Uranga, [phone]

rachel.uranga(at)dailynews.com

CAPTION(S):

3 photos, map

Photo:

(1 -- color) Severo Rodriguez, 11, promotes justice as his class at Sylmar Elementary celebrates Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy.

(2 -- color) Sylmar Elementary School kids hold signs identifying goals of the 1960s civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr.

Andy Holzman/Staff Photographer

(3) KING

Map:

THE ANNUAL KINGDOM DAY PARADE

Gregg Miller/Staff Artist