CHARLESTON, W.Va. — A Charleston event is highlighting and honoring the work of a late, great civil rights leader through community building efforts.
The Charleston-Institute Chapter of The Links, Incorporated hosted its Fourth Annual Community Birthday Celebration for Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
The event brought many out to the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Center in Charleston on MLK Day Monday despite the frigid temperatures.
Activities reflecting Dr. King’s vision of service and community empowerment filled the family-friendly event with food backpack giveaways, music and spoken word presentations, as well as grant presentations to support impactful community initiatives.
Co-chair of the Charleston-Institute Chapter of The Links, Inc. MLK Celebration Katherine “Kitty” Dooley said another main highlight of the event is a scavenger hunt with the goal of finding facts and history about Dr. King and the Civil Rights Movement.
She said the organization decided that the focus should specifically be about the children and their education about Dr. King’s life and legacy.
“Children were missing the true meaning of Dr. King’s life and legacy, it seemed like it was just another day off, it was another three day weekend,” said Dooley. “A lot of the other programs seem to focus not on the youth but the adults, so our idea was to have an educational program for the children.”
She said they also updated the educational scavenger hunt to include women of the Civil Rights Movement, artists who contributed to its impact as well young people who are leaving an impact and working to continue to ensure equity and unity across the nation.
Dooley said in addition, they would be holding a panel discussing the events that took place in West Virginia, specifically in the Charleston area during the Civil Rights Movement.
President of the Charleston-Institute Chapter of The Links Betty Spencer said another impactful activity underway during the event is a collaborative art piece led by acclaimed artist Ian Bode. She said the community can contribute by painting portions of the portrait of Dr. King.
Spencer said one of the portraits from a previous year is hanging up at the Kanawha County Public Library downtown where everyone can see the impact Dr. King has made through an artistic lens.
“So many people get an opportunity to see that and it’s always a different theme,” Spencer said. “This year it’s the speech in Selma Alabama and so that will be what they get to paint on today.”
Dr. King started gaining national attention as a prominent civil rights leader when he led the first significant black nonviolent demonstration of our time, the bus boycott, in December of 1955. The boycott lasted for 382 days and was followed by the U.S. Supreme Court declaring it unconstitutional for buses to be segregated on Dec. 21, 1956. 
Between 1957 to 1968, Dr. King traveled around the country to speak wherever there was injustice and protest as well as leading a massive protest in Birmingham, Alabama that caught the attention of the world.
On August 28, 1963, Dr. King directed a peaceful march made up of 250,000 people on Washington D.C. where he delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.
Dooley said it’s more crucial than ever for people, particularly young people, to learn about the vision of unity and the legacy Dr. King leaves behind.
“We’re living in an era where people don’t want to discuss history, particularly the history of this country as it deals with racism, discrimination and segregation,” she said. “Those are all things that Dr. King fought against, and if people do not know their history, they’re forced to repeat it.”
Spencer added that it’s also about highlighting to young people of privileges’ they might take for granted today which Dr. King worked to help make possible.
“You know, these children are free and people have been free for a while now, but we also want them to remember that maybe their great grandparents, everybody has not always been free in this country, they had to fight for their freedom and we want to make sure that they know that,” Spencer said.
At age 35, Dr. King was the youngest man in history to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
“Dr. King was for people, he was for humanity,” Dooley said.
He was assassinated on April 4, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee.
The Charleston-Institute Chapter of The Links, Incorporated boasts a long-standing tradition of fostering community engagement through its programs such as the annual MLK Birthday Celebration. They state that the event underscores their efforts of promoting equity across all facets of society.