MLK Jr. celebrations are planned across the nation, but storm could limit some
ATLANTA– Communities across the country celebrated the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday on Monday. with events ranging from prayer services to parades, but a dangerously cold winter storm limited some planned activities.
In Philadelphia, President Joe Biden marked the holiday by volunteering at Philabundance, a nonprofit food bank. He filled donation boxes with apples and struck up an informal chat with the organization’s employees, where he volunteered for the third year in a row to mark the day of service in January.
Vice President Kamala Harris was scheduled to be in South Carolina to deliver the keynote address for the NAACP’s “King Day at the Dome.” The event began in 2000 and drew thousands of people who poured from the Capitol lawn and called for the removal of the Confederate flag from the Statehouse. The rebel banner finally disappeared for good in 2015 after a racist shooting killed nine people at a church in Charleston.
In Atlanta, the King Center’s annual memorial service was held at the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King was pastor.
King’s daughter Bernice King told the crowd gathered for the 56th memorial service that “our humanity is literally under attack.” But her father “left us with Kingian nonviolence as a blueprint to make this old world a new world.”
“It is a philosophy and methodology that gives us the courage, the strategy and the discipline to control our impulsiveness, our need for revenge and vengeance, a philosophy to resist injustice in a love-oriented way,” she said.
“Kingian nonviolence frees humanity from our most basic selves and calls us to a higher purpose to destroy injustice without destroying each other with our words and our weapons,” she added.
King was and is a “beacon of hope,” Bishop Craig Oliver Sr. of Elizabeth Baptist Church said during the invocation during Monday’s service.
“He told us through his words and actions that injustice everywhere threatens justice everywhere,” Oliver said. “We seek to walk the path he illuminated: a path of justice, equality and unwavering courage.”
At the annual Martin Luther King Pancake Breakfast in New Hampshire, Democratic Senator Maggie Hassan told the crowd that “one of the most lasting lessons from Martin Luther King’s life is that each of us has the ability to make a difference. ”
“Our job is to evoke what Dr. King would call ‘the fierce urgency of now,’ and each – in our own way – do our part to help our democracy,” she said. get closer to justice and ensure the dream lives on.”
Meanwhile, the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis announced it would be closed Monday due to icy roads but would still hold a virtual celebration in honor of King’s birthday.
Federally observed since 1986, the holiday falls on the third Monday in January, which this year is King’s actual birthday. The slain civil rights leader, born in 1929, would have been 95 years old. This year also marks the 60th anniversary of the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the King’s Nobel Peace Prize.
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Reporter Jeff Martin contributed from Atlanta. Reporter Seung Min Kim contributed from Philadelphia. Reporter Michael Casey contributed from Boston.