Best Events Celebrating Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day is Monday, Jan 18th, with many FREE, cheap and virtual events celebrating his life and goals of racial equality and justice, including concerts, art exhibits, films, and more.

35th Annual Brooklyn Tribute to Martin Luther King Jr.

This event is New York City’s largest public celebration of Dr. King’s legacy, and is both FREE and virtual in 2021

Audience members from around the world are invited to join us for New York City’s largest public celebration of Dr. King’s legacy, a free virtual program featuring world-renowned activists, public figures, and civic leaders alongside musicians and other performers.

After a painful year, we take this moment to reflect and to move towards the future. We draw inspiration from Dr. King’s words, his life, and the actions of those around us who continue the fight for equality and justice. With a keynote address by Alicia Garza—author of The Purpose of Power, principal at Black Futures Lab, and co-founder of the Black Lives Matter Global Network—and performances by Grammy winner PJ Morton, Tarriona “Tank” Ball, Sing Harlem!, poets Timothy DuWhite and Ashley August, and other changemakers, this tribute to Dr. King grounds us in a message of hard-earned hope.

RSVP to this event for the most up-to-date information and new details about the event.

Reservations are strongly encouraged, although they are not required in order to attend.

Presented by BAM and the Office of the Brooklyn Borough President Eric L. Adams, in association with BRIC
Monday, Jan. 18, 11am.

Let Freedom Ring

This art exhibit is part of the BAM celebration, featuring Brooklyn artists, and also FREE.

Art by Derrick Adams, Alvin Armstrong, Laylah Amatullah Barrayn, Lizania Cruz, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Hank Willis Thomas, and Jasmine Wahi explores how much has changed in America since Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s fight for civil rights and how much has stayed the same.

This new art installation transforms the BAM sign at the corner of Lafayette and Flattbush Aves. into a provocative exploration of the notion of freedom, the legacy of Dr. King, and the role of artists, arts, social justice, equity, and inclusion. Their work invites us to join in this necessary reflection on what freedom truly means in 2021.

Let Freedom Ring includes new and existing work by Derrick Adams, Alvin Armstrong, Laylah Amatullah Barrayn, Lizania Cruz, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Hank Willis Thomas, and Jasmine Wahi. The installation will be presented on the BAM sign at the corner of Lafayette and Flatbush Avenues.

Curated by Larry Ossei-Mensah.

Shared Legacies

This special event on Martin Luther King Day, Monday, Jan 18, is a documentary about the shared legacy of Jewish and African-American experiences and cooperation, one of several dozen films and shorts that are part of the annual New York Jewish Film Festival, featuring works about the Jewish experience around the world.

The crucial historical lessons of Black-Jewish cooperation are revisited and revived in this utterly fascinating and urgent call to action. Common cause was found in the turbulent ‘60s Civil Rights era, as Jewish leaders backed Dr. King’s efforts at racial equality and harmony.

Yet, the relationship has frayed in recent years, as a once mighty bond of support and respect has seemingly faded, been forgotten or ignored.

This special event includes a Q&A and is priced at $13.

The Fierce Urgency of Now

The Apollo Theater and WNYC radio celebrate the legacy of MLK with a program of speakers.

Host Brian Lehrer, Jami Floyd and Tanzina Vega will speak with civil rights leaders, elected officials, activists, journalists, and artists to engage with Dr. King’s teachings and philosophies, and incorporate them into present-day social justice movements.

Featured guests include:

Congressman James E. Clyburn,
Reverend Dr. William Barber II,
Dr. Bernard Lafayette Jr.,
Civil Rights activist and Co-Founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee,
Nikole Hannah-Jones, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and creator of The New York Times’ “1619 Project,”
Letitia James, Attorney General for the State of New York,
Dr. Uche Blackstock, Yahoo! News Medical Contributor and Founder & CEO of Advancing Health Equity,
Dr. Jeff Gardere, Associate Professor of Behavioral Medicine at Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine,
Queen Afua, Five-time best-selling author and CEO of the Queen Afua Wellness Center, and Leslé Honoré, an artist and activist, who will read from her book of poems “Fist & Fire.”

Live at 3pm on the Apollo Theater Facebook page and on the WNYC Radio Facebook page.

Museum Exhibits

photo courtesy Schomburg Center NYPL

Subversion & the Art of Slavery Abolition

This in-person exhibit at the Schomburg Center branch of the NYPL is now available online, FREE. While it isn’t specifically an MLK event, we are including it in the spirit of his message of freedom and equality.

This review of the exhibit is from the exhibit website:

Transatlantic slavery was devastatingly brutal in its utter disregard for human life. Across the Atlantic World, avaricious traders and enslavers ripped apart families and communities, callously murdering millions of people of African descent and legalizing the extraction of labor from the unwitting survivors.

The United States was founded on the inalienable principles of equality, liberty, and democracy on the one hand, while the nation’s rise was enormously dependent on slavery speculation on the other. This inherent contradiction set the stage for centuries of political and philosophical conversations and unrest.

While slaveholders and vigilantes threatened and attempted to control Black bodily autonomy, enslaved people and their allies artfully countered this malevolence via everyday and more formally coordinated types of resistance.

Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration

Through April 4, this major exhibition at MoMA PS1 in Queens explores the work of artists within US prisons and the centrality of incarceration to contemporary art and culture.

Featuring art made by people in prisons and work by nonincarcerated artists concerned with state repression, erasure, and imprisonment, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration highlights more than 35 artists, including American Artist, Tameca Cole, Russell Craig, James “Yaya” Hough, Jesse Krimes, Mark Loughney, Gilberto Rivera, and Sable Elyse Smith.

The exhibition has been updated to reflect the growing COVID-19 crisis in US prisons, featuring new works by exhibition artists made in response to this ongoing emergency.

On view across PS1’s first floor galleries, Marking Time features works that bear witness to artists’ reimagining of the fundamentals of living—time, space, and physical matter—pushing the possibilities of these basic features of daily experience to create new aesthetic visions achieved through material and formal invention.