Ken Hamblin III
Audio By Carbonatix
At 10 a.m. today, January 19, 2026, thousands of people will gather by “I Have a Dream,” the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial at the City Park Esplanade, to kick off one of the country’s largest MLK celebrations.
A dusting of snow won’t delay the festivities. Last year, the weather was so cold that the start of the parade was postponed and the ceremony at the end canceled altogether; the year before, the thermometer never topped zero. But as the group heads off on the 2.5 mile Marade, a march/parade to Civic Center Park this morning, the temperature should be above freezing.
The MLK observance has faced much bigger challenges than bad weather. State legislators started pushing for a state holiday to honor Martin Luther King Jr. in the early ’70s; on her fourth try, state legislator Wilma Webb finally got the legislation approved. Then-Governor Richard Lamm signed the bill into law in 1984, establishing the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Colorado Holiday Commission, which continues to plan the holiday events forty years later.
Evan Semon
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, Till was kidnapped, beaten, shot and tossed in the river; his killers were acquitted at trial.
Ed Rose’s “King and Companion.”
Library of Congress
Hamilton worked with budding sculptor Ed Rose on a proposal to create a statue made of sheet metal and bronze, “King and Companion.” It 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. That work went to a Chinese artist and debuted in 2011, when it immediately came under fire over a paraphrased quote. Ultimately, then-Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, a Coloradan who left the U.S. Senate to join the Obama cabinet, then went on to become 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,” and repaired after it was vandalized in 2020 — still stands outside the historic building that’s now occupied by the nonprofit Friendly Harbor mental-health center.
There’s a march scheduled in Pueblo for noon on MLK Day 2026; it will wind up at the El Pueblo Museum, which is hosting a major History Colorado exhibit devoted to Dr. Martin Luther King’s legacy around Colorado.
Denver’s Marade marches on
Last year’s MLK ceremony in Denver started early: On January 13, 2025, sculptor Dwight and others gathered for a rededication of “I Have a Dream,” which had been vandalized the year before by two men who stole and sold a large bronze panel from the piece; Dwight tracked it down and oversaw the repairs.
On January 20, a brave crowd gathered by the repaired statue for the start of a very chilly fortieth annual MLK Marade. That year’s celebration in Civic Center Park after the Marade was canceled because of the cold.
While this year’s will go on, it’s been moved to the Colorado State Capitol because of ongoing construction work at Civic Center Park. But at least the route along East Colfax Avenue has been restored.
The rocky times in D.C. haven’t ended, though: President Donald Trump has removed the MLK holiday from the list of free days at National Parks.
Learn more about the MLK Marade here, as well as other Colorado MLK events here.
Portions of this story are reprinted from an article published in July 2023.
