Just who did the expert planning?
By pleasant coincidence, the annual nationwide birthday tributes to Dr. Martin Luther King this weekend practically coincide with Tuesday’s Inauguration Day for America’s first black President.
For many — if not most — Americans, this blockbuster doubleheader, starting Saturday night in Culver City, amounts to winning the emotional World Series.
From Culver City to Washington, with Dr. King and Barack Obama going back to back, these will be the best of all times.
Saturday and Sunday are reserved for the Culver City tributes, followed by a day off on Monday (for travel?), and then Inauguration Day dawns at the outset of Tuesday morning.
Always congenial and low-key, Bill Wynn, the committee chair of this weekend’s back-to-back King Day tribute, is thrilled that Culver City’s celebration will be a willing beneficiary of the inauguration excitement.
For those who are keeping track, Dr. King’s 80th birthday actually is tomorrow. Inauguration Day, previously in March, was moved up to Jan. 20, at the behest of the President, for the start of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s second term in 1937.
Last year’s King Day programming was hailed as the most successful of Culver City’s undertakings, and Mr. Wynn is keeping that fact in mind.
“As a filmmaker, and as the chair for this year,” he said, “I want to equal last year’s program and also come up with a few ideas that I think will enhance this weekend. I hope that people will say, ‘Oh, they haven’t dropped the ball.’”
Mr. Wynn said that this essence of this weekend tribute “is the historic significance of these two events, Dr. King and Obama’s swearing-in.”
At the Senior Center at the intersection of Overland Avenue and Culver Boulevard, a showplace for civic events, Culver City will launch a two-day celebration of Dr. King’s birthday and achievements.
Festivities start on Saturday night at 6 with a documentary film, “The Promised Land,” followed by a discussion.
The one-hour film focuses on the final year of Dr. King’s life before his assassination 41 Aprils ago.
Array of Events
“The Promised Land” was part of a 13-segment series, “Eyes on the Prize,” that PBS carried in the late 1990s.
Film editor Lillian Benson will lead the post-film discussion.
Sunday afternoon’s 6-hour program, beginning at 12 noon, offers attractions for the whole family, and at the leisure of family members.
At the noon hour opening, cultural and historical artifacts from African history — in some places for sale, in others for viewing — will be available at an assortment of booths.
At 2 o’clock, high school students will take over the program.
In a segment called “Sojourn to the Past,” students will talk about their emotions and sense of history that were aroused when they traveled to the Deep South and visited legendary sites of the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
The Last Act
At 4, actors Antonio D. Charity, Ben Cain and Stephen Lamar will stage a one-act play, “The Meeting,” which seeks to envision what would have happened if two opposite-pole giants, Malcolm X and Dr. King, had met.
Dr. King preached non-violence and Malcolm X, regarded as a radical by some, disagreed, advocating that force should be utilized when advisable.
Mr. Wynn said historians believe the titans never actually met and visited with each other.
Both were assassinated, and as young men, in their 30s.
Once again, after the play, there will be an audience-participation discussion
