Celebrating the Dream:

A week of events
By Caroline Monday
cmonday@mountaintimes.com

Next week, Watauga County communities will be celebrating I Have a Dream Week, a week dedicated to celebrating diversity and cultivating unity within our community. Though the official week spans Jan. 12-20, I Have A Dream Week events will cover the next two weeks.

Ironically, the celebration of love and unity was initially inspired by a planned demonstration of hate. The first week was held in April and started as plans for a series of independent activities.

Members of the community learned that a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan was planning marches in Boone and Blowing Rock for April 19, 1992. They reacted by planning events of their own that were to embrace cultural differences rather than reject them. Several different groups around the community planned events for the day of the marches, without realizing they weren’t alone in their efforts to draw crowds away from Klan activities.

The local media’s coverage of these efforts served as a catalyst for the eventual formation of the first Unity Festival. That year about 1,400 people attended Unity Festival events. The tradition continued two years after 1992 but tapered off until 1998 when a group of concerned citizens decided to reinstate a community-wide celebration of diversity and formed the I Have a Dream Task Force.

The task force decided to schedule the week to correspond with Martin Luther King Jr. Day in January, a holiday most area schools and businesses did not observe at the time. The schools and some businesses do now give their students and employees that day off.

This year’s events are meant to highlight and celebrate the diversity that exists in our community, organizer Teri Wiggans said. “It’s an opportunity for people to participate in Martin Luther King’s dream of creating unity and equality,” she said.

Wiggans said that for a rural area, Watauga has a wide variety of cultures and the events of next week will serve as opportunities for residents to learn about those different cultures.

“If we know more about each other, there’s less fear and more peace,” she said.

In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., telling of his dream of equality and unity among all people and more than 40 years later I Have a Dream Week is helping bring that dream to life in Watauga County.

I Have a Dream Week
• Friday, Jan. 11: Dances of Universal Peace dedicated to the Dream to be held at 7.30 p.m. at Neighborhood Yoga, 212 N. Water St. Boone. Suggested donation of $5. For more information call (828) 264-1384.
• Saturday, Jan. 12: Sufi Poetry Slam. A Celebration of Rumi’s 800th birthday to be held at 2 p.m. at the Watauga Public County Library. Bring your favorite Sufi poems to share or poems of your own composition inspired by the Sufi poets. Akal Dev Sharonne, noted Rumi performer, will provide flute music. There will be tea served from a samovar. For more information call (828) 264-5620.
• Jan. 14-19: Open Crafts Table in celebration of I Have A Dream Week at the Watauga Public County Library (828) 264-8784.
• Sunday, Jan. 20: “Are We Free at Last?” program to be held at 11 a.m. at Boone Unitarian Universalist Fellowship. The program is a tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “We shall renew his message of social and racial equity through music, poetry, readings and dedications,” a church release stated. Coffee will be served at 10:30 a.m.
• Monday, Jan. 21: The ninth annual MLK Challenge, a day of community service projects, will be held from 8.30 a.m. to 6.30 p.m., starting Legends. Student may pre-register with the ASU ACT office at (828) 262-2045. Sponsored by ACT/ASU with support from University Highlands.
• Monday, Jan. 21: Eleventh annual Musical Unity Service starting at 7 p.m., at Mabel Methodist Church on Old Hwy. 421. The Rev. Judy Eurey will give the keynote address and there will be a rich musical program. Desserts will follow. For more information call (828) 297-3568.
• Wednesday, Jan. 23: 24th Annual Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Commemoration, starting at 7 p.m. at Farthing Auditoriumat Appalachian State University. Freeman Hrabowski, president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, will present the keynote address.
• Saturday, Jan. 26: “Discovering the Holy Behind Bars,” a discussion to help us all discover our own human story as revealed by those in our prisons will be held at 1 p.m. at the High Country United Church of Christ. The discussion will be led by ASU professor, N.C. poet laureate and author, Joseph Bathanti, and the Rev. Nancy Sehested, noted pastor, author, lecturer, currently serving as the Chaplain of the Marion Maximum Security Prison. For more information call (828) 264-7765.
• Sunday, Jan. 27: “A Tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. A Musical Celebration,” will be held at the Mennonite Brethren Church, on Church Street in Boone. The program will begin at 6 p.m. From more information call (828) 263-0502.
For more information on the I Have a Dream Task Force call (828) 264-5620.

Who was Martin Luther King Jr.?
Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. March organizers originally wanted the event to focus on the treatment of black people in the South, changed the focus, acceding to the wishes of then-president John F. Kennedy. Kennedy opposed the march because he feared it would negatively impact the drive for passages of civil rights legislation.

Besides winning the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, in 1971 King was awarded the Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Recording for his “Why I Oppose the War in Vietnam.”

According to a 1999 Gallup poll, King is the second most admired person in the 20th century. Mother Theresa is the first.

Martin Luther King Day was established in 1986 as a United States holiday. It was only the fourth Federal holiday to honor an individual (the other three honor Jesus, George Washington and Christopher Columbus).

Congress passed the bill instituting Martin Luther King Day with an overwhelming veto-proof majority (338
to 90 in the House and 78 to 22 in the Senate). Pres. Ronald Reagan signed the bill on Nov. 2. 1983.