Update: Rain is in Monday’s forecast, so organizers have made contingency plans for the Martin Luther King Jr. march from Freedom Elementary School to Hopkinsville Community College.
The Hopkinsville Human Rights Commission will “make the call” no later than 6 a.m. Monday, the agency’s executive director, Idalia Luna, said in an email.
“If we have inclement weather the program will be held indoors at HCC with doors opening at 9 a.m. for seating,” she said.
In the event of lightning or heavy rain, the march will be canceled. But the march will go on with light rain. Marchers are asked to line up at the school by 8:40 a.m.
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Hopkinsville’s observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day will commence at 9 a.m. Monday, Jan. 16, with a march from Freedom Elementary School to the Hopkinsville Community College Auditorium.
Community members are invited to join the march, which will be roughly three-fourths of a mile long. Or they may meet the marchers at the college auditorium for a program on the slain civil rights leader. A school challenge to encourage students to march is sponsored by Tom Bell State Farm Insurance.
The program at the college will be youth-led. Members of Men2Be will deliver excerpts from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Blueprint Speech,” said Idalia Luna, executive director of the Hopkinsville Human Rights Commission.
Men2Be is a mentoring program for boys ages 8 to 18. The members will use parts of the speech that King delivered on Oct. 26, 1967, at a junior high school in Philadelphia. On that day, King was in Philadelphia for a Stars for Freedom program that included Sidney Poitier, Aretha Franklin, Nipsey Russell, Harry Belafonte and other entertainment artists. Less than six months later, King was assassinated in Memphis at age 39.
A Baptist minister, King was the leader of the Civil Rights Movement that helped end Jim Crow laws and other barriers to equality for people of color. He was a steadfast advocate for nonviolent resistance to inequality and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.
MLK Day, observed on the third Monday in January, is a federal holiday in honor of King’s birthday on Jan. 15, 1929. Legislation seeking a federal holiday for King was first introduced in 1968. It did not pass until 1983. The first federal King holiday was observed in 1986.
Jennifer P. Brown is co-founder, publisher and editor of Hoptown Chronicle. You can reach her at editor@hoptownchronicle.org. She spent 30 years as a reporter and editor at the Kentucky New Era. She is a co-chair of the national advisory board to the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, governing board president for the Kentucky Historical Society, and co-founder of the Kentucky Open Government Coalition.
