MLK Day parade, Baltimore Book Festival to return in 2024
Two of Baltimore’s most anticipated annual events — the Martin Luther King Day parade and the Baltimore Book Festival — will return in 2024, though the future of a third festival, Light City Baltimore, appears to be in doubt.
The MLK Day parade will step off at noon Jan. 15 from the intersection of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Eutaw Street and is being organized jointly by the Mayor’s Office of
Arts & Culture and the Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts, the quasi-governmental agency charged with mounting the city’s public celebrations.
The grand marshal of the 2024 parade will be Ernestine Shepherd, 87, who in 2010 and 2011 was recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as the oldest competitive female bodybuilder in the world. Further details are expected to be made public next week, Todd Yuhanick, the organization’s interim CEO, said
Wednesday at BOPA’s December board meeting.
And for the first time in five years, BOPA will be involved in putting on the book festival, which will return to the Waverly neighborhood in the fall with an expanded footprint that will incorporate more local businesses.
The event is being jointly organized by BOPA, the mayor’s office and Waverly Main Street.
Both events have long been eagerly anticipated parts of Baltimore’s
cultural life, but both recently had fallen on hard times.
Like many other public events statewide, the parade and book festival went dark for several years because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
But when BOPA announced Jan. 5 that the parade would not be held for the third year in a row even as other events reopened, and instead urged city residents to celebrate King ’s legacy through a day of volunteer work, it sent shock waves through the city.
Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott publicly demanded the ouster of CEO Donna Drew Sawyer, and five days later, she resigned. The mayor’s office organized its own parade, and BOPA later paid Sawyer an $83,000 settlement in exchange for her departure.
Sawyer’s replacement is expected to be announced this month. Yuhanick is one of three candidates for the job, board chairman Brian D. Lyles said.
After that ruckus, there was little chance that BOPA would cancel the 2024 parade.
“I’m proud of the organization for stepping up and being part of an important day for Baltimore,” Yuhanick said.
Though the book festival quickly became a beloved annual tradition after it was founded in 1996, in later years the event bounced around from its original location in Mount Vernon and the Inner Harbor. In 2019, it merged with another event — Light City, a festival held in late March that celebrated the intersection of art and technology — to form a hybrid festival known as “Brilliant Baltimore.”
The pandemic descended after Brilliant Baltimore debuted, shutting off the lights for the next three years. Even after COVID-19 began to recede and people became more comfortable with being part of a crowd, the festivals remained shuttered, in part because fundraising lagged. Community leaders stepped into the gap by organizing a smaller literary event in April called The Waverly Book Festival.
Baltimore City Council member Odette Ramos, who spearheaded efforts to relocate the Baltimore Book Festival to Waverly, could not be reached for comment.
Yuhanick said that an expanded books bash is being pushed back to its original fall schedule because it takes a year for BOPA’s staff to plan an event of that magnitude.
“The more I thought about it, the more excited I became about partnering with Waverly,” Lyles said, noting that the neighborhood has a plethora of small, independent bookstores.
Light City is a more recent addition to Baltimore’s events calendar, debuting in 2016. Though initial events were deemed a success, it has not had the time to develop the passionate fan base enjoyed by the parade and book festival.
“We are reevaluating how and if Light City will come back in 2025,” Yuhanick said.
In a related development, Lyles and vice chairman Franklin N. McNeil Jr. said they are stepping down from BOPA’s board of directors Dec. 31 when their terms expire. Their successors have not yet been determined, Yuhanick said.
“Despite everything that has gone on during the past year, being chairman of the BOPA board has been a pleasure,” Lyles said. “It has been an interesting year, but I have welcomed the challenge.”
He was referring not only to Sawyer’s departure, but to a contentious June budget hearing during which he was publicly grilled about his leadership practices. Following that meeting, the mayor, City Council President Nick Mosby and Eric Costello, chairman of the Ways & Means Committee, issued a joint statement vowing to explore “alternative options” in the future — options that would have effectively put BOPA out of the business of running city festivals.
Less than two weeks later, the council temporarily sliced $1.7 million from BOPA’s budget, or 75% of the amount not set aside for artist grants.
Among the issues under contention was the recent discovery that, unbeknownst to most board members, BOPA had attempted to trademark the name of Artscape, the city’s largest outdoor festival — an initiative quickly shot down by city attorneys.
The $1.7 million was withheld subject to quarterly reviews; the Council’s Ways & Means Committee voted Tuesday to recommend that the second installment of $580,000 be returned to BOPA to fund the agency’s operations for the third quarter of the 2023-24 fiscal year.
Board member Andrew Chavez said BOPA’s five-member board is working with a consultant to help it reformulate its board, a difficult and time-consuming process.
“We’ve taken seriously the concerns expressed by City Council members and the Office of the Mayor that there was not sufficient oversight in the past and sufficient recording of decision-making by BOPA leadership over the past few years,” Chavez wrote in an email.
Brian Wentz, BOPA’s chief financial officer, urged the board to recruit new members with deep pockets, solid connections and expertise in fundraising.
“Historically, the board has not been constituted this way,” Wentz said. “But it’s really important for the future of this organization that we have a board that has the ability and the desire to raise money.”
One possibility, Chavez said, is that an interim board will be appointed soon consisting of business leaders, community members and artists who are willing to serve for one to two years while the consultant’s recommendations can be put into practice.
In addition to the departing Lyles and McNeill, BOPA’s current board members include Chavez, the artist and curator Jeffrey Kent and B.R. Hammed-Owens, an operations officer for the city.