Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day Celebration 2025

The Howard Thurman Center and the City of Boston would love to welcome you at the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr Day Celebration 2025!

Start your year in community with thoughtful, inspirational attendees and speakers at the George Sherman Union Metcalf Ballroom.

This year’s program will include remarks from President of Boston University Dr. Melissa L. Gilliam, and a keynote conversation with author and poet Cole Arthur Riley facilitated by Boston University’s Dr. Shively T.J. Smith, the Associate Professor of New Testament at the School of Theology. Riley is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us and Black Liturgies: Prayers, Poems, and Meditations for Staying Human. Her writing has been featured in The Atlantic, Guernica, and The Washington Post. Cole is also the creator and writer of Black Liturgies, a project that integrates spiritual practice with Black emotion, Black literature, and the Black body. The program will also include readings from BU students from Boston, and musical selections performed by Hamilton-Garrett Youth Choir.

This event is co-sponsored by BU Libraries, Boston University Government & Community Affairs, and the Boston University Dean of Students office.

*Because of the size of this event, this will take place in Boston University's GSU ballroom, not The Howard Thurman Center.

In addition, the library is offering tours of the MLK Reading Room after the celebration. You can sign up for a tour by clicking on the links below:

Tour times:

1:45 pm

2:05 pm

2:25 pm

2:45 pm

The Boston University Libraries proudly holds an archival collection of Dr. King’s manuscripts, notebooks, correspondence, printed material, financial and legal papers, photographs, and other items dating from 1947 to 1964. We welcome you to join a tour of the Martin Luther King Jr. Reading Room in the Mugar Memorial Library today. Meet at the library entrance on the first floor of the George Sherman Union to join a planned tour.

Planned Program

Event and Theme Introduction: “The Darkness at Midnight”

Nicholaus Bates

Director of Howard Thurman Center for Common Ground

Remarks from Boston University

Dr. Melissa L. Gilliam

President, Boston University

Reading: Excerpt from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “A Knock a Midnight”

Mariaelena Suazo Rosario (CGS ’28)

Remarks from the City of Boston

Segun Idowu

Chief of Economic Opportunity and Inclusion

Reading: Cole Arthur Riley’s biography

Bermina Chery (CAS ’25)

Keynote

Cole Arthur Riley

Featured Conversation

Associate Professor of New Testament at BU’s School of Theology Dr. Shively T.J. Smith and Cole Arthur Riley

Closing Remarks

Nicholaus Bates

Musical Arrangement

Hamilton-Garrett Youth Choir

“Everybody wishes to love and be loved. He who feels that he is not loved feels that he does not count. Much has happened in the modern world to make men feel that they do not belong.” - From Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s sermon “A Knock at Midnight”