Last modified: Thursday, January 17, 2008 1:26 AM EST FLANAGAN: MLK Day march takes a new turn Did you read the essays in Tuesday's paper submitted by area students in a contest sponsored by the Martin Luther King Day Celebration Committee of Attleboro? If you didn't, you missed a treat. Check them out at www.thesunchronicle.com (click on Global Concerns Essays), where the letters appear in full, before they had to be pared down to fit the available space. You'll find the thoughts of roughly 50 students from schools in Attleboro, North Attleboro, Mansfield, Norton and Seekonk on global warming, poverty, hunger, war, equality, same-sex marriages, AIDS, destruction of rainforests, and Rwandan genocide. You'll find some interesting answers to these problems - the recommendation that we add a nickel or a dime to sporting events tickets as a fundraiser against world hunger stands out in my memory, as does the heartfelt sentiment of a fourth-grade girl who wishes she could travel the globe over to help out. You'll find the writings of kids who care about their world in a very personal way. What you won't find is a single letter directly about racial relations. And that's not an oversight on the part of the contestants or the contest sponsors. The MLK Day Celebration committee clearly asked for students' thoughts on Global Concerns. And, when the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day interfaith service is held at 2 p.m. Monday at John Wesley A.M.E. Zion Church, North Attleboro, the theme will be "Remember, Celebrate, Act: King's Hope for Global Peace." The guest speakers, rather than the veterans of civil rights marches led by King who we've come to expect at such events, will be anthropology professor Mark Auslander, accompanied by Panther Alier, a former "lost boy" of the Sudan. The ceremonies, which will be preceded by a 1 p.m. program at Attleboro City Hall, mark the 21st annual public celebration of MLK Day in the Attleboros. When a number like that is at play, it's inviting to say that the MLK celebration has grown up, but that would be inaccurate. This celebration has never been immature - not even from the very start when a handful of citizens led by late Mayor Kai Shang and the late Town Crier Larry Fitton held the area's first MLK Day ceremonies outside city hall. In the intervening years, there was a tendency to commemorate King's dream of racial justice and pledge to keep working to make it real. Immature? Not when the area was grappling, as it had to from time to time, with such incidents as the circulation of neo-Nazi pamphlets or the racially-motivated murder of a local man. But MLK Day has surely entered a new phase. The candidacy of Barack Obama is evidence of the same phenomenon. Other black men have made largely symbolic runs for the office of president, but now a black man stands as a serious contender to hold the highest office in the land, while another, Deval Patrick, governs Massachusetts. The time has come not to continue picking at the imperfections of race relations in America - though they remain many - and not merely to acknowledge that goals of the civil rights movement have been met, but to keep moving on to King's broader dream of global peace. The topic moves from Selma to the Sudan; the march goes on. And the new problems are, to speak in the language of our third- and fourth-graders, "scary." But the words of the kids who responded to the Global Concerns essay contest speak well of the next generation's readiness to rise to the challenges. MARK FLANAGAN is Opinion Page editor of The Sun Chronicle. He can be reached at 508-236-0335 or by e-mail to mflanagan@thesunchronicle.com.