MLK Day: An Opportunity to Celebrate Culver City’s Treasures

The following letter was sent to Culver City Patch by Rebecca Rona, a member of Culver City’s MLK Planning Committee. It has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

Unfortunately, we don’t really celebrate President Washington’s and President Lincoln’s birthdays any more.  And now that we’re more informed about Christopher Columbus’s history, we don’t celebrate him much either.  But in Culver City and throughout the country, we can look forward to honoring and celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the eloquent and determined leader of the Civil Rights Movement, who continues to inspire.

Some years we focus more on delightful music, other years more on fascinating speakers or significant movies or intriguing plays.  But whatever the program entails, when the event is over, our audience always leaves feeling informed, entertained, inspired, further connected to the community and—simply put—good about having honored Dr. King, one of our greatest heroes.

This coming Sunday, Jan. 15—Dr. King’s actual birthday—we will open wide the doors of the (Overland Ave. at Culver Blvd.) for a full day’s worth of activities for adults and children, from 11 a.m. until 7 p.m. Visitors may arrive at any time, refreshments will be served, and all activities are free.

Although we will feature certain non-Culver City participants most of our presenters and performers hail from Culver City. And so this event is a wonderful opportunity to celebrate some of Culver City’s treasures.

Rev. Leon Campbell of the Culver City-based Agape International Spiritual Center will present the invocation and personal remarks; panelists responding to this year’s theme, “Have We Achieved Dr. King’s Dream?” will include former Congresswoman Diane Watson; Mayor Micheal O’Leary; Saundra Davis, former president of the Culver City School Board; and Daniel Lee, a community activist and member of this year’s Martin Luther King Celebration Committee.

Our audience will take part in an interactive presentation entitled “Stepping Up to the Dreamer,” a creation of the poet Charlotte Sista C. Ferrell, a longtime member of Culver Palms United Methodist Church and founder of its Mustard Seed Ministries program.

Playwright Christina Harley, who’s award-winning, delightful and thought-provoking play The Dreamers will be given a staged reading by some exceptional actors, has been named an unofficial Culver City resident. Not long after attending a meeting or two to pitch her play, she found herself serving on both the programming and publicity subcommittees and accepting a variety of Celebration assignments.

Audience members often report they’re fondest of the young winners of the Martin Luther King Student Speech contest, and this year might be no exception. In the fall, nearly 100 students from the CCUSD wrote essays; in December, 18 of these students auditioned and : a fifth grader, a middle school student and a high school student.

The majority of our musicians also hail from Culver City (or Culver City Adjacent): the Culver City High School Jazz Combo, the Culver City High School Choral Singers and the West Los Angeles College Jazz Ensemble.  So too does Dr. Luther Henderson, music professor at LA City College, who coordinated the day’s musical presentations.

Dr. Larry Earl will describe the holdings of the Mayme A. Clayton Library and Museum, a Culver City institution that contains one of the largest collections of African American documents and other memorabilia in the nation.

This is the seventh year that we’ve held the celebration as an official city event, and the seventh year I’ve served on the MLK Celebration committee.  I’m an unabashed champion of this event.

 Rebecca Rona