University of Rhode Island students in the Peace Psychology course listen to a speech by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The university offers an interdisciplinary minor in nonviolence. The Providence Journal / John Freidah

PROVIDENCE — Dominik Darosa could compare his fifth-grade class to a box of crayons.

“Or a brown egg and a white egg,” said Dominik, 11. “When you open it, they both have the same stuff in it.”

The 22 students in Sandra Riojas’ class represent many of the hues in a crayon box, from the deepest chocolate to rosy peach and rich olive.

Forty years after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the students in the classroom of the Providence school bearing his name are the manifestation of King’s dream.

And they know it.

Amid concerns that the younger generation is apathetic and unaware, these students, and many more like them in elementary classrooms and college campuses across this state, know King’s legacy.

They realize how far society has come from Jim Crow laws, which barred black and white students from learning in the same classrooms they share today.

But, more importantly, they realize how much further there is to go.

“Discrimination and racism isn’t completely out of the nation,” said 10-year-old Aleksa Bzenic. “There may still be groups remaining like the Ku Klux Klan that still say slurs or burn crosses and many other things.”

April 4 marks the 40th anniversary of the day King was felled by a sniper’s bullet as he stood on the balcony of a Memphis, Tenn., hotel. He was there in support of hundreds of sanitation workers who were on strike, demanding better wages and safer job conditions. He was 39.

Three days after his death, nearly 1,300 miles away, Lippitt Hill Elementary School in Providence was renamed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School in honor of the civil-rights leader.

King’s memory buoys the school bearing his name.

Photographs in a hallway show King playing with his children, sitting in a Birmingham jail and throngs of people in Detroit and Chicago listening to his speeches.

A large mosaic in the main hallway greets visitors with an image of King and his words “Darkness cannot drive away darkness. Only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate. Only love can do that.”

The sentiment is more than just writing on the wall, said Michael Lazzaeschi, the school principal. That attitude of awareness spreads to the classrooms — and ultimately the students — at King Elementary.

“It’s kind of inherent around here,” Lazzaeschi said. “I think it definitely encourages us to be a more tolerant bunch.”

Nearly every classroom displays some reference to King. Students in all grade levels learn about King and his legacy in age-appropriate ways. In Riojas’ class, that means exploring King’s assassination and talking about what they would say to him if he were alive today. A small poster detailing important events in King’s life is tacked to the door of one room. Books on King’s life sit on a shelf in another.

In Joan Abrames’ kindergarten class, there’s a peace tree; construction paper branches climb the walls, paper peace doves rest among the leaves.

Even the youngest students learn about the man after whom their school is named. A song helps them remember. The children sit cross-legged on a large blue foam mat as Abrames sings along with them:

Dr. King once dreamed of peace,

Dreamed of peace, dreamed of peace.

Dr. King once dreamed of peace, sweet peace for you and me.

Living free in harmony, harmony, harmony,

Living free in harmony, we thank you, Dr. King.

As they sing, they raise their hands in the air as they sing the word “free.”

ON THE OTHER side of the state, King’s voice spills into the corridor of White Hall at the University of Rhode Island in Kingston.

His words hang in the air outside a small conference room, while inside a group of students scribbles notes as King’s words blare from a small speaker. The gentle clank of the heating system hangs in the air as a photograph of King, taken in Anaheim, Calif., in 1968, is projected onto a large screen at the front of the class.

The speech is a rare recording of King’s address at the California Democratic Council Convention in March 1968, a month before he died. Toward the end of his life, King launched the Poor People’s campaign, which sought to bring fair wages, safe jobs and education to all. It is the same campaign that brought him to Memphis on behalf of the striking sanitation workers.

The class is Peace Psychology, an honors course taught as part of the interdisciplinary nonviolence minor offered by the school. Students study the principles of nonviolence as taught by King, Indian leader Mohandas Gandhi and others.

“A lot of interesting things have happened over the last 40 years since the assassination, and in education it looks like we dropped the ball,” said Charles Collyer, faculty adviser for the nonviolence minor. “King wrote a number of books … published a lot of speeches and sermons, and we’ve never used that stuff in schools. We’ve shied away from it. Maybe King has been too controversial for some school systems.”

The minor, affiliated with the university’s Center for Nonviolence and Peace Studies, aims to develop leaders who encourage peaceful problem-solving.

During a recent class, the students went around the room talking about assigned readings and how they intersected with events from their own lives. Cortney Sheehan, a sophomore from Boxborough, Mass., tells the class about her volunteer work over spring break in Birmingham, Ala. Her group stayed for a week and made repairs to houses in the area. While there, she visited the Civil Rights Institute, where she heard recordings of racial epithets. In one of the recordings, she said, a little girl cried out against integration and used a slur for African-Americans.

“It was eerie, especially to hear people say such harsh statements and to hear them come from the mouth of a little girl,” Sheehan said.

The exhibit got her thinking about inequality and how it still exists today.

“In 50 years, I think our generation will still be remembered as a time of segregation, economically and socially,” she said. “There’s still a lot to be done. I don’t think it’s perfect. Perhaps things aren’t spoken outright, but the ideas still exist.”

The other students chime in with their own stories and observations. At some point, the conversation moves to Iraq and its parallels with the Vietnam War. They talk about the 4,000th American soldier killed in the Iraq war.

Kristen Whealan, asks her classmates whether they know of anyone, anywhere, advocating for peace and nonviolence.

“I don’t want to think that everything died with Martin Luther King,” said Whealan. “It makes me so upset that he’s dead. I’m actively seeking out other people who are dedicated to peace and nonviolence. I want to know it isn’t just me sitting in one little classroom thinking, OK, amongst the 15 of us, ‘Go Peace. Yeah, this is great.’ I want to believe there are other people who actively dedicate their lives and are working toward it.”

BACK AT THE elementary school in Providence, even the young students realize things aren’t perfect. A large piece of newsprint bears some of the major social ills the students believe still plague America.

Abuse. Violence. War. Discrimination. Crime.

“What’s interesting,” Riojas said, “is they say ‘from the mouths of babes.’ It’s interesting to see the things that concern children; what problems are on children’s minds that we as adults don’t [think about].”

Marking the anniversary and having this conversation was important, Riojas said, not only because the school bears King’s name, but because that knowledge is something the students need to take with them as they grow older.

“We talk about things and they learn about him, but at some point [the kids say] ‘I’m getting older, this is something I need to know about. My school is named after him. I know when he was born and I need to remember the sad day when he died.’ ”

King would have turned 79 in January.

The hallways at the elementary school soon empty.

On a wall near the main entrance, two multicolored mosaic hands reach toward a globe. Letters spell out the message: “It’s in our hands.”

Two children — one black, one white — clamor down the stairwell and into the hallway. Their book bags bob up and down and their coats sway as they run down the hall together.

tbuford@projo.com