The King Center Enriches Atlanta With A Purposeful…
Atlanta’s King Holiday Observance saved the town’s custom of a full week of function. This 12 months, the King Center kicked off 2026 with packed programming that blended tradition, neighborhood, and pink carpet power, all while pushing one pressing message to the entrance: nonviolence is just not comfortable, it’s strategic.
Source: Paras Griffin/Getty Images
The 2026 King Holiday Observance ran January 12 through January 17 in Atlanta forward of the federal Martin Luther King Jr Holiday with a theme of“Mission Possible II: Building Community, Uniting a Nation the Nonviolent Way.” With Dr. Bernice King entrance and heart, it in the end framed the week as a reminder that the King legacy is just not only meant to be remembered, it’s meant to be practiced.
Monday, Jan. 12: MLK Week Opened On Auburn Avenue With Hoops, Hopes And Dreams
The week kicked off Monday, January 12, with Andscape’s “Hoops, Hopes and Dreams” screening premiere and Black Carpet Experience.
Hosted by Dr. Bernice A. King and Dr. Jay, the opening night time centered on aspirations, alternatives, and storytelling in sports activities and tradition, setting the tone for a week that would transfer past ceremony and into real conversations about what neighborhood building seems to be like proper now.
It also explored the little-known fact that Dr. King was an astute basketball participant.
Thursday, Jan. 15: Watts Pulled Up To Atlanta With A Peace Blueprint And A Film That Refused To Look Away
Source: Paras Griffin / Getty
One of the most highly effective stops on this 12 months’s lineup got here Thursday night time at the College Football Hall of Fame, where Nothing to See Here: Watts (a community-led documentary about a county in California) introduced an intense, unfiltered look at how relationship building and truth-telling can interrupt violence.
On the pink carpet, Bernice A. King summed up the most important false impression people still carry about the town.
“Utopia. Unachievable. Pie in the sky,” King told BOSSIP, including that some people deal with it like it’s weak “because everybody is tough, you know, in this world, you got to be tough. You got to fight back and nothing can be further from the truth.”
Nothing to See Here: Watts introduced Atlanta a documentary that doesn’t attempt to “inspire” viewers with polished messaging. It forces you to sit with what violence seems to be like in real time, what it steals from a neighborhood, and what it takes to construct something steady after the harm has already been performed.
The movie is usually shot in selfie mode, and that alternative issues. Instead of feeling like an exterior manufacturing dropping in for a storyline, it performs like a collaborative file. The neighborhood is telling its own story in its own voice, with the sort of closeness that makes you’re feeling like you might be in the room, not just watching from a distance.
To put it in perspective, this was not a fast turnaround project. The documentary took three years to create, and that time exhibits how layered the storytelling feels and how many voices had been introduced into the room.
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