In a Maryland school, a banner bears the words "tolerance" and "peace" in the languages spoken by the students.

Washington — Recently, millions of students in thousands of schools and universities in the United States and other countries celebrated diversity and tolerance by eating lunch at a table where they don’t usually sit with the aim of meeting — or “mixing it up” with — a different group of students. Mix It Up at Lunch Day is part of a national campaign to encourage students to question and cross social boundaries.

(See “Group Touts Mix It Up at Lunch Day as Diversity, Tolerance Tool")

Some schools use it as part of a yearlong program to explore and bridge differences among kids — ethnic, racial and religious differences, as well as those related to disabilities, gender and class.

Internationally, there are participating schools in Europe, the Middle East, Canada and Latin America.

Mix It Up at Lunch Day is part of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC’s) Teaching Tolerance program, which since 1991 has offered educators free classroom materials designed to promote appreciation of diversity. The SPLC began in 1971 as a law firm working for civil rights, trying to bring justice to unsolved crimes of intolerance and to desegregate some of the organizations and institutions resisting integration. In 1981, the SPLC expanded its activities to include monitoring hate groups. In the early 1990s, the SPLC began developing model tolerance education programs, hoping to provide teachers with the tools necessary to counter prejudice and its noxious effects before damage was done.

But those working on tolerance programs at the SPLC were not satisfied with simply teacher-led activities; they saw a need to provide youth with a voice and a way to become active in the fight for tolerance and social justice.

Samantha Elliott Briggs, the SPLC director of Mix It Up Day, described the origins of the idea: “In the life of a child, the most segregated hour of the day is during the lunch time. How can you learn if you’re afraid to walk down a hallway or if you don’t want to go in a cafeteria and eat lunch because everyone is going to look at you or laugh at you, or you’re going to be by yourself? The lunch hour can be so painful and so isolating for youth who don’t quite fit in.”

“Mix it Up starts there in the cafeteria trying to empower youth to take a stand, to move across the cafeteria,” Briggs said.

Kids Mix It Up in a school in Green Bay, Wisconsin

The seventh official Mix It Up at Lunch Day took place November 13, but schools are encouraged to organize Mix It Up days anytime.

“It gives [students] the freedom, under the guise of a special event, to actually meet people whom they may have been too shy to meet, the opportunity to re-present themselves to a group of people who may not have even given them the time of day before,” Briggs said. “It’s really a kind of day where everybody has to let their guards down.”

Briggs first became involved in Mix It Up at Lunch Day when she was teaching at the University of Alabama, “which has its own history of race issues and segregation,” she said. “To this day, the commons area [at the university] is divided: the majority of white students sit on one side, the majority of black students sit on another side.”

She allowed students to choose to Mix It Up as a service-learning project. “The students would always say afterwards: ‘This is something we need to do on a regular basis. It shouldn’t be just one Tuesday or one Thursday in the month of November. It’s something we should do every single month.’ So we have tried to make it more of a year-round program,” she said.

Briggs, who visits some of the participating schools each year, has had teachers who had been skeptical come up to her afterward and say, “We hope to be in on the ground floor for this next year because the kids got so much more out of it than we could ever have imagined.”

According to a 2008 survey of Mix It Up at Lunch Day organizers, the program leads to positive interactions among students outside their normal social circles and increased awareness of social boundaries and divisions within the school. More than four-fifths of respondents also said the event helped students make new friends, and almost as many said it heightened sensitivity toward tolerance and social justice issues.

Briggs is passionate about teaching tolerance. “The way we look at social issues in this world is kind of distorted in the first place,” she said. “Adults don’t think it’s an issue. It’s a nonissue; it’s something that will work itself out. Just toughen up; deal with it. It’s just a part of life.

“That’s not true; it doesn’t have to be part of life. How many kids have eating disorders because of it, how many kids have committed suicide, how many kids have turned to drugs, how many kids go on mass killing sprees because they are misunderstood or ignored?”

“Building self-esteem is one of the most challenging things to do with a kid,” she said, pointing out that children spend the majority of their time at school during the week. “Teachers, adult allies, have to have the means to support these kids and to help them to grow into healthy and happy beings.”

More information on Mix It Up at Lunch Day is available on the SPLC Teaching Tolerance Web site.