Birthday celebration pays tribute to King
Woodstock celebrates Martin Luther King Jr.’s struggle for equality for all with its 29th Annual Birthday Tribute to the civil rights icon on Sunday, Jan. 19, at 2 p.m. at the Mescal Hornbeck Community Center at 56 Rock City Road.
Speeches and music will focus on the ongoing quest for freedom for those who are oppressed.
Maverick Concert’s Executive Director Kitt Potter and Marlene Merritt will lead everyone in the Black national anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” to usher in the celebration honoring King’s ideals and dreams of a society based on equality for all.
Merritt, a singer-songwriter, actress, spoken world performer and recording artist, is perhaps best-known for starring in Michael Monasterial’s plays “Sam Cooke Where You Been Baby” and “Fragile Explosion — The Life on Nina Simone.”
Potter is a vocal stylist, actress, percussionist and lyricist who has performed with some of the greatest musicians on the East Coast and has appeared across the U.S. and Europe.
Featured guests include the Rev. G. Modele Clarke, pastor of Kingston’s New Progressive Baptist Church; Pam Africa, of International Concerned Family & Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal; Frank Waters and Tyrone Wilson, of Harambee; and Woodstock Town Supervisor Bill McKenna.
Clarke has long been an advocate of street, jail and prison outreach ministries. Born in Trinidad, he has lectured and ministered in Uganda, Trinidad, Grand Cayman Island and Puerto Rico. He serves as the current president of the Ministers’ Alliance of Ulster County and president of the Mid-Hudson Chapter of Healing Communities, which creates relationships with returning citizens and their families.
Africa serves as a grassroots organizer and a revolutionary. She has built a worldwide movement to free Mumia Abu-Jamal, whose supporters call him a political prisoner who was unjustly convicted of murdering Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner in 1981. Abu-Jamal was originally sentenced to death before his sentence was changed to life without parole.
Waters and Wilson are both leading forces in Harambee, a Mid-Hudson Valley-based coalition that supports and promotes the strength of community through cultural and educational events that enrich the lives of youngsters
ASSOCIATED PRESS FILE PHOTO and adults. Their initiatives include creating Black History Month Kingston 2019, MyKingstonKids, Harambee’s African American Festival, supporting the restoration of the Pine Street African Burial Ground and other projects.
For more information, call (845) 679-7320.