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At 7:30 p.m. this coming Monday, Jan. 15, eleven area choral groups will celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. The concert will be given in the Wellsboro High School Auditorium at 227 Nichols Street in Wellsboro. Donations will be accepted at the door.

Joining in song will be the Hamilton-Gibson Children’s Concert Choir, the Hamilton-Gibson Young Women and Young Men’s Choirs, the Wednesday Morning Musicales, the Wellsboro Women’s Chorus, the Wellsboro Men’s Chorus, the Miller Singers, the Wellsboro Area High School Dickens Choir, the Rock L. Butler Middle School Seventh and Eighth Grade Chorus, the First Presbyterian Church Choir of Wellsboro and the St. Peter’s Catholic Church Choir. The choral groups will sing four selections together, and each will also sing individual numbers.

This concert is being held in collaboration and with the support of the Wellsboro Area School District.

Martin Luther King, Jr., an American Baptist minister, was a nonviolent activist and the most visible spokesperson and leader in the Civil Rights Movement from 1955 until his assassination in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968. Dr. King led the fight against segregation to gain equal rights under United States law for African Americans.

In the years that followed his death, his wife, Coretta Scott King testified before Congress multiple times, calling for a federally recognized day to honor the life and work of her late husband. Millions of people signed petitions.

Both houses of Congress passed the bill to establish Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in 1983 and President Reagan signed it into law on Nov. 20 of that year. This federal holiday has been observed to mark King’s birthday, his life and achievements on the third Monday of January each year since 1986.