Bellingham MLK Day 2025 events include speech by local who leads national King archive

Bellingham residents looking for an MLK Day event this year won’t be disappointed.

Area residents will get the chance to see local author Clyde Ford, who just so happens to run the Martin Luther King, Jr. Publishing Project, speak this weekend. On Friday evening, Jan. 17, Ford will be featured at an event co-sponsored by Village Books and the Salish Current in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

“It really came to be because I’ve known the people who created the Salish Current, I’ve known Mike Sato and Amy Nelson for many, many years, and we wanted to find a way in which I could support their venture,” Ford said in a phone call with the Bellingham Herald.

Ford has been involved in Bellingham’s MLK Day commemorations for decades – he was instrumental in getting the first citywide commemoration instituted in the 1990s.

“I moved to Bellingham in late 1989 and the first MLK Day would have been 1990, and I found that I had to travel to Seattle in order to find an event that I could be part of,” Ford said. “So when I got back, I resolved that that would change. I invited then NAACP president, and we did have a local chapter of the [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] in those days, the late Dr. Reneé Collins, to accompany me into Tim Douglas’s office. Tim was the mayor at the time, and basically we said to Tim, we’ve got to do something, because Bellingham as a city doesn’t officially commemorate Martin Luther King Jr. Day.”

Bellingham MLK Day event Jan. 17

Friday’s event, which will take place at the Bellingham Unitarian Fellowship, will focus on King’s legacy as what Ford calls an “inconvenient hero.”

“The I Have a Dream part wasn’t planned, right? That was an afterthought,” Ford said. “It was actually Mahalia Jackson, who had heard King speak about his dream some months before, who was standing behind him on the podium, whisper, ‘Hey, Martin, tell them. Tell them about the dream’…. And while most people focus only on that one final portion of the speech, most of the speech was about what it would take to get to the point of being able to manifest that dream.”

The problem with focusing on one section of one speech is that you ignore the less convenient parts of King’s message, according to Ford.

“I mean, you think about the beginning parts of that speech, it was King talking about the hard work that needed to be done in the south in particular, but throughout the country,” Ford said.

As a result, Ford says people tend to simplify King’s message, when in reality it’s much more complicated.

“That speech came in 1963, there were so many other important elements of King’s life that came after that event,” Ford said. “Why would we want to freeze him in 1963, right? He had not been given the Nobel Peace Prize yet. Selma had not happened yet. The March Against Fear had not happened yet. His organizing the Poor People’s Campaign had not happened yet, his ‘Beyond Vietnam’ speech had not taken place yet.”

Any reexamination of King’s legacy in recent years – particularly the idea that King didn’t go far enough in dismantling more deeply-rooted forms of racism – is a result of reducing King’s work to a single speech.

“When you freeze King as just ‘I Have a Dream,’ then all of those things are true,” Ford said. “When you look at King’s life beyond ‘I Have a Dream,’ then you see that he addressed all of those issues. Selma wasn’t about a march across the bridge, right? It wasn’t even about just voting rights, which was part of the project. Jimmy Lee Jackson was murdered by an Alabama State Trooper. John Lewis was attacked because he was marching to protest the murder of Jimmy Lee Jackson. King came back to Selma to support the efforts, not only to secure voting rights, but to reduce police violence.”

In much of his work with the HarperCollins project, Ford said he has focused on how to understand King’s work in a modern context.

“There are two things we’re doing,” Ford said. “One is, we’re taking material that King all has already, published or presented or spoken of, but modifying it in such a way that it really speaks to the current times,” Ford said. “So for instance, every year we publish the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech with a different person writing the forward.”

The other piece of the project has been releasing any of King’s writings that haven’t been published yet. Between the two sides of the project, Ford estimates that they’ve published roughly a dozen works.

“We probably have ten or 12 titles in it now that have been published, with more coming,” Ford said.

Other MLK Day events in Bellingham

The event with Ford is one of several going on around Whatcom County over the MLK holiday weekend. Here are some of the other public events you should know:

• United We Stand: Where Justice, Love and Freedom Prevail, hosted by the Community Consortium for Cultural Recognition, from 10:00 a.m to 2:00 p.m. at Bellingham High School on Saturday, Jan. 18. Service projects start at noon.

• Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of Service Community Work Party, 12:30 to 3:30 p.m. at Squalicum Creek Park on Saturday, Jan. 18.

• Community Co-op 25th Annual MLK Day Celebration, 7:00 p.m. at the Bellingham Unitarian Fellowship on Monday, Jan. 20 (Martin Luther King Jr. Day).