As people across the nation celebrated the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the MLK Holiday DC Student Essay Competition returned to not only honor the late activist, but empower District youth by helping them cultivate literacy excellence, combat misinformation, promote civic engagement, and ensure their voices are heard.
“I don’t think we as adults have done a great job of making young people see themselves in the picture of being a part of the solution or equation to help change society,” Norman Nixon, president of Mayor’s Youth Leadership Institute Alumni Association (MYLIAA), a sponsor of the annual competition, told The Informer.
While social media is a popular outlet for youth expression, Nixon said the essays offer young people a constructive route to articulate their thoughts and learn along the way.
“The process of actually doing research, and putting together essays, which is going to follow them all the way through their work and college, is writing and structuring your work. That’s going to be very important,” he said. “But then also, we hope that it opens their minds up to want to explore when they hear a topic.”
The annual competition, which emerged in 2014 and has been hosted in partnership with MYLIAA and MLK Holiday DC since 2015, challenges students to write pieces inspired by Dr. King’s legacy.
This year, in collaboration with the 2026 MLK Holiday DC annual theme— “The Struggle is Real. The Fight is Still!” — elementary students were tasked with writing about the importance of voting and middle and high schoolers were charged with producing pieces about D.C. statehood.
Through the essays, organizers hope youth think about historic issues and compare them to modern challenges, like the fact that Washingtonians were not able to participate in the presidential election until 1961— when the 23rd amendment was adopted— and still don’t have full voting rights in Congress to this day.
“We don’t enjoy the same rights as every citizen in the United States— to be able to elect two senators, and congressional representatives, and how the United States Congress or the president can enact laws or reject laws that citizens pass,” Nixon noted. “And we still have to pay federal taxes.”
Further, the essays encouraged young people to think of action needed to achieve King’s dream of a just society in the District and nationwide.
“We said we have to start getting our young people to start thinking about D.C. statehood,” Nixon said, “and the fact that they’re going to have to carry the fight to stay here, possibly into their adult years.”
For 14-year-old Hans Spritzer, the essay competition was the perfect platform to formulate and share his thoughts with others.
“The idea that people would be able to hear the message I was spreading, if I did well, was a reason I entered,” he said, “so people could get the point I was making.”
Competition Helps Combat Misinformation
With one in three youth ages 13-17 almost constantly active on social media, according to Pew Research Center, the MLK Holiday DC Student Essay Competition works to empower students through learning how to research facts and detect misinformation.
“I’ve seen social media…determine many young people’s stances on some political situations without much bearing on how serious things are,” Hans, a freshman at BASIS Washington, D.C. in Northwest, told The Informer.
Although he is an avid social media user, Hans said he has learned to take things he sees on the Internet “with a grain of salt,” until doing further research on the topic. He recalled an instance with his little cousin as a wake-up call about the dangers of social media misinformation.
“I don’t remember what the issue was, but it was something that he didn’t really understand,” Hans said. “He [saw] a YouTube short about it and so he decided a stance on it that he really didn’t understand.”
Pamela Johnson, founder of the youth voter advocacy program Your Voice Matters, noted challenges young people face in being able to dissect facts from misinformation, particularly when it comes to conversations about politics and civic engagement.
“It’s very difficult to rely on what is on social media, and it may be that young people don’t know enough about a particular topic to make those judgments,” Johnson said. “But, it’s clearly influential and is an incredibly important way for young people to communicate with each other and for people who are trying to influence them to communicate.”
For Nixon, the essay competition is one way to help local youth further combat misinformation and improve research and writing skills.
“There’s a lot of gaslighting that happens,” he said. “People put things out there and we’ve got to teach young people to research and fact-check stuff before you jump out there with it.”
However, there’s more to learn from the annual programming than just being able to write a good essay and distinguish facts from fiction. Through creating essays for the competition the youth are learning to create arguments supported by research.
In his essay, Hans writes in favor of D.C. statehood, noting that the voices of more than 700,000 Washingtonians are practically unheard due to the lack of full voting rights in Congress.
“I learned more about the diversity of D.C., and how large the population [is], and just how deep the movement to turn D.C. to a state goes,” the ninth grader explained. “Like just how many people have fought for it and it [still has] not been successful.”
Promoting the Power Youth Civic Engagement, Continued Justice Work
In remembering King’s efforts toward voting rights and amid an election year, this year’s essay competition emphasized getting young people active in civics.
“I don’t think we’ve found a way to effectively communicate with young people to get them engaged or interested in politics, government, or community stuff,” Nixon said.
The voter registration and turnout rate among voters 18-29 was lower than 50% in the 2024 presidential elections, according to the Civics Center and Tufts Circle.
Johnson, who also serves as president of the National Women’s Foundation in D.C., underscored the power of promoting voting among high school students.
“It’s interesting that college students today, most of them are registered to vote… but high school students are registered at a much lower level. So [some high school] students turn 18 and they have the opportunity to participate in democracy, but most of them don’t actually register and don’t vote. I got interested in that problem and how you change that,” Johnson told The Informer. “The interesting thing is with high school students, if they are registered, they actually vote.”
The youth voting advocate encourages getting young people involved in the civic process through hosting school elections, emphasizing the role of elected leaders, and discussing the power of casting a ballot.
“You’re subject to things that are decided by the District of Columbia. And so the mayor may have an influence or your council person. So I think that’s sort of the awakening,” she explained.
“And then the other thing is to realize that voting is a little bit of a rite of passage. It’s a symbol that you are an adult and you are a member of adult society and can make decisions or can contribute to making decisions that affect other people.
For Nixon, this year’s essay competition offered insight about how today’s youth are civically engaged and offered them a platform to share their viewpoints.
“We’re very encouraged by the responses that the young people give us in these essays,” the MYLIAA president continued. “Sometimes you can think young people aren’t really deep thinkers about things. But when we go through these essays, it opens our eyes and says that a lot of these young people really have some great ideas and things on their mind.”
Hans said the prompt about D.C. statehood put a lot into perspective about challenges today and what it could mean for the future.
“The importance of addressing these problems is to make our society better overall by allowing for fairness for the people who live inside it,” he declared.
After participating in the essay competition for the first time this year, Hans shared why he feels it is critical for all young people to be civically engaged.
“Eventually, the youth are going to be the people contributing to our society,” the teen told The Informer, “and if they’re uneducated and don’t understand basic concepts regarding the U.S., then they’re not prepared to go into the future.”