Remember to question advertising, authority
Soon a new school year will begin for millions of children across America. They will ride along roads dedicated to Martin Luther King Jr. and go to schools named for him. Forty years ago in rural Louisiana, my school bus drove past a large billboard with his picture on it. However, it was not a tribute.
The billboard showed King sitting in a school classroom. At the top of the billboard, blazed in large red letters was “Martin Luther King in a Communist Training School.” Our school bus passed that billboard every morning and afternoon for two years. Lots of my classmates and some of our teachers agreed with it.
Each day I studied the picture of King in that school. That billboard became my first lesson in political advertising and my first memory of questioning authority. I was about twelve years old, and I realized that there was nothing in the classroom that showed it was run by communists. There were no pictures of Marx or Lenin or Chairman Mao. The photo could have been taken in any schoolroom in the world.
Today, American students study the life of Martin Luther King. But forty years ago it was much different. The billboard of King taught me something valuable that I did not learn in the classroom: to question authority, especially its advertising. Many things have changed for the better over the last forty years, but we still need to question authority and political advertising. I think Dr. King would want us to do that.

Steve Williamson

assistant researcher

Center for Advanced Technology

in Education

College of Education