Andrew Bowen won first place in the middle school category for this entry into the Snohomish County Black Heritage Committee’s ‘Prodigies for Peace’ essay contest. It is our pleasure to present this essay in CPM’s online school newspaper. 

MLK, Jr.’s Hopes for a Better Future

by Andrew Bowen

Have you ever heard of MLK?  There was racial inequality and MLK, Jr. tried to fix it. There are the sad issues Black people along with people of color had to go through. Law enforcement was brutal to Black people, what laws were, and what salary other people got compared to others. Black people went through a lot of sadness, and discrimination, along with segregation. 

  For a long time, there was segregation in America, where Black people had to go to different schools than white people, Black people has to use different water fountains, then white people, Black people also had to sit at the back of the bus, and white people got to sit at the front, and Black people even had to live in a completely different neighborhood than white people.  If you do not think that last issue is a problem, riddle me this:  you most likely have a mix of skin tones and cultures in your neighborhood, and you would also most likely/ hopefully also find it peaceful no matter what skin tone you are.

 Now, even if there are different skins tones in your neighborhood, and if you do find it peaceful, just please think that people couldn’t live in the same neighborhood, all because white people think of people with darker skins tones to be criminals just because of their skin tone, and white people didn’t find people with darker skin tones to be peaceful because of the color of their skin, so laws decided to separate people just because of the color of their skins, by neighborhoods, bus sections, schools, water fountains.

 When the U.S. government thought of any way to segregate people with darker skin tones whenever they had another idea of how to do so, they did it. This all made it unfair for people with darker skin tones to want a peaceful and equal life because they were and still are peaceful people, and yet white people didn’t think so, just because of their skin tone. This was an unfair justice system. This was also a problem because Black people didn’t have as high a salary, but white people had a higher salary, along with white neighborhoods were expensive on purpose, so Black people couldn’t afford it. Black people weren’t even allowed to vote, just because of their skin tone.   Think about it like this, you are seeing a thunderstorm rain upon you is what Black people felt seeing racist signs and racist people hurting their feelings. 

 I think very positively that now that we now know what happened it’s fair to say that this was an unfair time period for people of different races. We learned that people were segregated by bus sections, water foundations, schools, and even neighborhoods just because white people didn’t want Black people in their neighborhood, along with salary problems and high prices for different neighborhoods. We also now know that Black people couldn’t vote because of the color of their skin. We all now know all these factors that lead America into a very sad time period, that was so unfair. This is why I say that Dr. King hoped for a better future because he saw that Black people were living life like no one thinks they exist. He saw that happening all over America, he also saw that it was white people were the ones getting treated better. All of this Dr. King wanted to fix where Black people were the same as white, Dr. King took all of his anger and placed it on America’s government to make Black people the same as white people, and to stand for citizens’ rights. Dr. King wanted a better America by protesting and hoping for a better future, and even after his assassination, he got what he wanted. This is why I say that America was in a dark time because it had to take years to fix America’s problem.