Cold Won't Stop This Year's Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Marade

On the chilly morning of January 15, 2024, former mayor Wellington Webb and first lady Wilma Webb joined the group gathered by "I Have a Dream," the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial by the City Park Esplanade, where they kicked off one of the country's largest MLK celebrations.

Today, January 20, 2025, Denver is experiencing another chilly morning, but people will again gather by "I Have a Dream" at 10:30 a.m. for an MLK ceremony that will be followed by the annual Marade, a march/parade to Civic Center Park.

As a state legislator, Wilma Webb was instrumental in pushing to make MLK Day a holiday in this state; it took her four tries before the Colorado Legislature finally approved creating a King holiday and Governor Richard Lamm signed the bill into law in 1984, establishing the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Colorado Holiday Commission.
The push for such an observance wasn't just rocky in Colorado. Four days after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Congressman John Conyers of Michigan introduced the first legislation to create a federal holiday in his honor. Three years later, petitions with 3 million signatures in support of a King holiday were presented to Congress — but the legislation did not move forward. In 1979, the King Holiday Bill finally made it to the floor of the House, where it was defeated by five votes that November. Finally, in August 1983, the House passed the King Holiday Bill; it was approved by the Senate in October and was signed into law in November.

By then, states had already taken action. In 1973, Illinois created the first state King holiday; Massachusetts and Connecticut followed suit the next year.

By the time the first national King Holiday was observed on January 20, 1986, seventeen states — including Colorado — had official state holidays. The Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Colorado Holiday Commission had held its first Marade the previous year, with Wilma Webb at the head of a group of about 15,000 people, who gathered by the City Park statue dedicated to MLK.

But not the current statue.

Second MLK statue

Back in the early ’70s, even as Congress was turning down efforts to create an MLK holiday, Denver bowling alley owner Herman Hamilton came up with the idea of commissioning a statue that would connect Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old Chicago boy who was killed in 1955 while visiting relatives in Mississippi. After he talked to a white woman, he was kidnapped, beaten, shot and tossed in the river; his killers were acquitted at trial.

Hamilton worked with budding sculptor Ed Rose on a proposal to create a statue made of sheet metal and bronze, "King and Companion," which was erected in City Park in 1976 as a U.S. Bicentennial project. But from the start, the piece was the focus of controversy — critics fretted that King's head was too big, funders refused to pay for the statue, and Rose had to sue to be compensated for his work.

Finally, renowned Denver-based sculptor Ed Dwight — who'd been in line to become the first Black astronaut — was given a million-dollar contract to create a replacement sculpture of King for City Park that placed the civil rights leader on top of a three-layer pedestal bearing bronze representations of Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Mahatma Gandhi and Rosa Parks.

"King and Companion" was removed to make room for the new piece, which was unveiled on the Esplanade in 2003. (Ironically, Dwight, who was honored with a 2023 MLK Jr. Business Social Responsibility Award in Denver, was snubbed for a commission to create the King memorial in Washington, D.C. The work went to a Chinese artist and debuted in 2011, when it immediately became the source of controversy over a paraphrased quote. Ultimately, then-Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, a Coloradan who today is Ambassador to Mexico, ordered the quote removed.)

After first offering the city's spare King statue to local schools, Denver finally donated "King and Companion" to the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Cultural Center and Museum in Pueblo, established in an old orphanage for Black children. Although that museum has since closed, the work — now known as "Prophet for Peace — still stands outside the historic building that's now occupied by the nonprofit Friendly Harbor.

Because of the cold, a march that was planned for Pueblo was canceled, but there will be an MLK program inside the El Pueblo Museum at noon on January 20.

Denver's Marade marches on

Denver's 2025 MLK ceremony actually started early: On January 13, sculptor Dwight and others gathered by "I Have a Dream," which had been vandalized last year by two men who stole and sold a large bronze panel from the piece; Dwight tracked it down and oversaw the repairs. The restored statue was rededicated last week.

And people will show plenty of dedication today, when the fortieth annual MLK Marade will go on despite the cold. However, the start of the celebration has been pushed back until 10:30 a.m. because of the weather and the closing ceremony in Civic Center Park has been canceled. Learn more here.

Portions of this story are reprinted from an article published in July 2023.