Brookline will host its annual celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr. with the theme, “Confronting Bias in Brookline” this Monday, January 16 at the Coolidge Corner Theatre at 3 pm.
Attendees can register to attend this free event up until Sunday at 11 p.m. online to guarantee themselves a seat. Any remaining tickets can be purchased at Coolidge Corner Theater’s box office on Monday.
“We want to make sure that our events provide good, useful and meaningful ways in which people can act in accordance with what we think is a moral principal of Martin Luther King,” said Brookline Board of Selectmen member Bernard Greene, who will be moderating the event program. “Get people to really think about these issues in all of its complexity.”
Brookline’s annual MLK celebration has been going on since 2011. Greene moderated the MLK celebration last year, which was attended by more than 300 people, and he said he expects the same number for this year.
The event will be a platform for people to listen to and understand how town institutions confront bias in Brookline. Greene said that the audience could participate by listening and making a judgment on whether the Town of Brookline is doing an adequate job at confronting bias. There will be three panelists: Rahsaan Hall, director of the racial justice program for the Massachusetts ACLU, Daniel O’Leary, chief of the Brookline Police Department, and Andrew Bott, superintendent of the Public Schools of Brookline.
“It’s easy to yell and scream, but’s it’s a little more difficult to get people to understand how these issues can be addressed effectively,” Greene said, stressing how important it is to appropriately confront bias. The goal is for people to walk out of the event having defined what implicit bias is, know how it affects individuals and institutions, learn what has been done to fight bias, and what steps people should take to confront it.
The town also encourages people to join the MLK celebration by participating in Brookline Day of Service Projects by donating to the Brookline Food Pantry and giving books to More Than Words, a nonprofit that serves at-risk youth. Between the hours of 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. on January 16, people can drop off foods and goods for the Brookline Food Pantry at the Arcade Building on 318 Harvard Street, and books for More Than Words at the Brookline Booksmith. The project is co-sponsored by the League of Women Voters of Brookline and Brookline PAX.
At the event, the keynote speaker will be Rick Pinderhughes, director of programs at Visions, Inc. The event will also include poetry readings to inspire the audience by local poet Regie Gibson, who will recite his poem, “An Open Letter to Dr. King.” Brookline’s Poet Laureate Jan Schreiber will also recite poems such as one by Maya Angelou called “When Great Trees Fall.” There will also be a poetry performance of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” a poem written by James Weldon Johnson, and was later turned into a song by his brother, John Rosamond Johnson, who was a music student at the New England Conservatory in Boston.
Tickets for the MLK program at Coolidge Corner Theater can be reserved on Eventbrite’s website.
