The Martin Luther King Jr. Freedom March will take place at 1 p.m. on Jan. 16, beginning and ending at the Central Bank Center. The community is encouraged to join in support of Dr. King’s vision. Photo by Mark Cornelison | UKphoto Mark Cornelison
After pausing the in-person event for the past two years, downtown Lexington will resume its tradition this month of hosting a march and commemorative program honoring the legacy and vision of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
It’s an event organizers believe to be one of the country’s most dynamic of its kind – and as it marks 50 years since Lexington’s first commemorative event honoring Dr. King, it’s also believed to be one of the longest-running.
“We’re 13 years ahead of most communities,” said event co-chair Chester Grundy, explaining that Lexington’s first event memorializing Dr. King took place in 1973, whereas the majority of the country’s Martin Luther King Jr. celebrations didn’t start in 1986, the year that federal legislation declaring a national holiday honoring Dr. King went into effect.
Taking place on Monday, Jan. 16, this year’s program will feature the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Freedom March at 1 p.m., followed by a commemorative program at 2 p.m. featuring keynote speaker David Hall, S.J.D., a legal scholar and the president of the University of Virgin Islands who is known internationally for his social justice work. The program, which has long aimed to bring in speakers and cultural guest artists whose professional lives have been exemplary of King’s legacy, will also feature a performance from Uniting Voices Chicago, a 40-member youth choral group that originated in the height of the civil rights movement 65 years ago.
Grundy says the multiracial, multicultural ensemble is a living example of Dr. King’s vision of a community in which all people can share in the wealth of the world.
“The singers are from a range of economic backgrounds, and they are dedicated to developing global citizens,” he said. “So that is totally consistent to the King vision of the beloved community.”
According to Grundy, the event has strived not to elevate King as a personality or individual but to instead honor and elevate his vision and ideal.
“Most modern-day celebrations of King reduce him to a trope – the great orator on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial with the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech and give him no historical connection to a bigger, more complicated process,” Grundy said. “We try to resist that popular representation.
The 40-member youth choir Uniting Voices Chicago will perform at the commemorative event. Photo by Elliot Mandel
“The more you understand [the expanded story of Dr. King],” he added, “the more you appreciate how the story is really a blueprint for the country. It’s more than the story of an individual – it’s a vision, it’s a world view.”
After five decades, the event’s biggest challenge, he added, is continuing to find ways to present Dr. King in a way that’s not only relevant to the moment but engaging enough to keep people coming back year after year.
“That’s been the challenge, and we’ve had pretty good success with that,” said Grundy, who has played a prominent role on the event’s organizing committee since its early years.
The program originated out of the University of Kentucky, in conjunction with the advent of the university’s minority affairs movement in the early 1970s. The university’s minority affairs department emerged soon after Dr. King’s assassination in 1968, which spurred a lot of activity on mostly white campuses to recruit and support Black students, Grundy explained.
As the second person UK hired in that department in the early 1970s, Grundy was brought in as a program coordinator to help develop cultural educational programs with the goal of not only supporting Black students but ultimately changing the climate of the campus. With 50 years of experience as a professional “cultural affairs activist” now under his belt (he also co-founded Lexington’s Roots & Heritage Festival, as well as several jazz performance series), Grundy believes, more than ever, that cultural events have the power to make a difference in a community.
“There’s a power in what I call ‘shared cultural experience’ that can move people in ways that a diversity dialogue sometimes doesn’t – it hits deeper,” he said. “These kind of events help us define what kind of people we are.”
Lexington’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day Events:
David Hall, Ph. D. Photo furnished
Lexington’s 50th Annual Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday Celebration will take place Monday, Jan. 16, with the theme “A Half Century of Lighting Candles of Hope Against the Threat of Darkness.” Participants are encouraged to gather in the lobby of the Central Bank Center for the annual Freedom March, which begins at 1 p.m. The march will begin and end at the Central Bank Center and the commemorative program featuring David Hall, S.J.D., and Uniting Voices Chicago will start at 2 p.m. in Exhibit Hall A. Both events are free and open to the public.
The annual Unity Breakfast, a separate ticketed event hosted by the Alpha Beta Lambda chapter of the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, will take place that morning at the Central Bank Center Exhibit Hall A, from 6:30-9 a.m.
The Carnegie Center for Literacy & Learning will host its annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Community Celebration event, featuring speaker Yvonne Giles, from 12:30-2:30 p.m. The event, which is free and open to the public, includes a meal and an opportunity to participate in a special service learning project.
At 4 p.m., The Kentucky Theatre will host a free screening of the movie “Till,” a biographical drama based on the true story of educator and activist Mamie Till-Bradley and her pursuit of justice after the 1955 murder of her son Emmett Till.