Name: Martin Luther King Day Celebration
Start: 2026-01-19T12:00:00-08:00
Location: Nevada Theatre

Monday, January 19
Concert at the Nevada Theatre at 12pm
Community Conversation at the Methodost Church at 2:30pm
Nevada Theatre, Nevada City, California
DONATIONS WELCOME
A Gospel Concert to celebrate Martin Luther King Day
Building Community, Uniting a Nation In a Non-Violent Way
On Monday, January 19th, the MLK Community Choir will celebrate Martin Luther King’s legacy with a free gospel concert at noon in the Nevada Theatre. The choir will be led by Stan Thomas-Rose, bringing back the traditional program that was led by Zenobia Brokenbrough and the Bethel AME (African Methodist Episcopal) Choir for forty years, and including them along with about 50 local singers who are seeking to celebrate and strengthen our community and our nation.
The MLK Day noon concert tradition was started in 1982 when Rosa Lopez and Ken Crow invited the Bethel AME Church Choir to broadcast a live performance on KVMR from the Miner’s Foundry, and over the next 40 years the event became a celebrated community tradition which sometimes included local high school choirs and others.
In 2012, an AME choir member, Helena McDaniels, who was also singing with the Trinity Community Chorus (directed by Stan Thomas-Rose) made a connection between the two choirs, and within a few years the two groups became so closely bonded that both directors independently began thinking of the group as “The MLK Choir” instead of as two combined choirs. The noon concert tradition lapsed after the 40th annual concert in 2022, but now Paul Emery, who produced many of the concerts for KVMR, is reviving the tradition with Stan Thomas-Rose as the “official” choir director, but still fully involved with Zenobia and the Bethel AME Choir. Singers from many local churches, the Music in the Mountains and InConcert Sierra choruses and other local groups are represented in this year’s choir.
This year our noon concert will be aimed at building community and uniting our nation peacefully. Attendance is free, but donations are invited to help pay for concert costs. The program will include speakers and poetry as well as singalongs led by local musicians, patriotic songs, hymns, spirituals, gospel songs, and an original song that’s become our traditional closing. Come and join us as we seek to remember our great legacy and walk together into “that shining city on a hill.”
Just up the street from the concert, at the Methodist Church, “Remembering Martin Luther King, Jr: A Community Conversation,” is offered by Creating Communities Beyond Bias and Color Me Human, two area non-profits. A series of small group discussions will focus on King’s message as well as racism, justice, and equality. Participants will be encouraged to think of some action they can do to create justice, compassion, or equality on the community.
The two organizations have produced many Martin Luther King Day events in the Nevada City-Grass Valley area over the past years.