Martin Luther King, Jr. Parade 2023

Community Parade in Downtown Griffin

Monday, January 16, 2023

3:00 PM - 4:00 PM (EST)

Downtown Griffin Parade Route

Event Details

The Martin Luther King Jr. parade will be held on January 16, 2023 at 3:00 PM. Lineup is at 2:30 PM using the Griffin parade route.

Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, in the United States, holiday (third Monday in January) honouring the achievements of Martin Luther King, Jr. A Baptist minister who advocated the use of nonviolent means to end racial segregation, he first came to national prominence during a bus boycott by African Americans in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955. He founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957 and led the 1963 March on Washington. The most influential of African American civil rights leaders during the 1960s, he was instrumental in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination in public accommodations, facilities, and employment, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. King was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1964. He was assassinated on April 4, 1968.

lmost immediately after King’s death, there were calls for a national holiday in his honour. Beginning in 1970, a number of states and cities made his birthday, January 15, a holiday. Although legislation for a federal holiday was introduced in Congress as early as 1968, there was sufficient opposition, on racial and political grounds, to block its passage. In 1983 legislation making the third Monday in January a federal holiday finally was passed, and the first observance nationwide was in 1986. The day is usually celebrated with marches and parades and with speeches by civil rights and political leaders.

For More Information:

Excellence In Achievement, Sheryl Brown

sdbrown@cityofgriffin.com

(678) 353-7041