MLK Commemorative Commission Celebrates King Week Jan. 3-20, 2025
Celebrate King Week, a tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s enduring legacy. Engage in a series of events leading up to the Martin Luther King Holiday, each echoing his message of unity, justice, and equality. Experience the rich tapestry of community gatherings, educational workshops, and vibrant parades. Culminate this inspiring week with our solemn Memorial Service, held on MLK Day, honoring the life and aspirations of one of history’s most influential leaders. Join in keeping the dream alive!
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Remembering Nikki Giovanni
(June 7, 1943-December 9, 2024)
Knoxville lost a powerful voice with the passing of our very own Nikki Giovanni on Dec. 9, 2024. Her legacy will live on among the many writers and readers she cultivated, inspired, and delighted. We are proud that she called Knoxville home.
In her words from “Knoxville, Tennessee”
I always like summer
best
you can eat fresh corn
from daddy’s garden
and okra
and greens
and cabbage …
and go to the mountains with
your grandmother
and go barefooted
and be warm
all the time
not only when you go to bed
and sleep
Learn More About Nikki Giovanni
2024 Annual MLK Parade, March and Juneteenth Celebration
There was a great turnout of participants and spectators for the 2024 MLK Jr Parade and celebration on Juneteenth. Dozens of City staffers and many of our Summer in the City interns helped celebrate the day by marching from Chilhowee Park to Dr. Walter Hardy Park. City Comms captured the day in video and still pictures. Check out the highlights.
View photo gallery on Facebook
Watch a video of Celebration
Carla Jones breaks gender, color barriers at KFD
Carla Renee Jordan Jones is one flat-out character you’ll never forget. This is a life-loving, family-loving, job-loving and sports-loving woman. For 30 years come December 2024, she’s been serving the city she loves – Knoxville – in a job she treasures. “For me going to work every day is like going to the playground.”
Her playground is the Knoxville Fire Department (KFD). Life for her is wrapped around family first, then her God and church, and then the KFD. Her office sits across the hall at KFD Headquarters from Chief Stan Sharpe. In June 2020 she was the first woman and the first-ever black woman to be promoted to the position of KFD assistant chief. In this role, she has key supervisory responsibility for logistics, recruiting and ISO ratings for fire insurance.
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Library Gathers WBIR Videos to Develop Black History Collection
The Knox County Public Library’s Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound (TAMIS) preserves East Tennessee’s cultural history through film, video and audio. Underrepresented community stories found in their WBIR-TV news collection were gathered to make a Black History Collection more accessible. The collection includes just over 100 records in the Calvin M. McClung special collections catalog. Click here to read more about the project from KnoxTNToday.com.
View WBIR Black History Collection
The Middlebrook Legacy: We Celebrate Black History
Legacy Award honoree, civil rights activist, friend of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., ordained minister, community leader and loving father—all titles rightfully attributed to the Reverend Harold Middlebrook.
While Middlebrook has called Knoxville home since 1977, he was actually born in Memphis in 1942, he attended Morehouse College and Lemoyne-Owen College, and was ordained a minister in 1966.
More than 10 years after his ordination, he moved to Knoxville to pastor at Mount Calvary Baptist Church.
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BLK History Month poem by Nikki Giovanni
 If Black History Month is not
viable then wind does not
carry the seeds and drop them
on fertile ground
rain does not
dampen the land
and encourage the seeds
to root
sun does not
warm the earth
and kiss the seedlings
and tell them plain:
You’re as Good as Anybody Else
You’ve Got a Place Here, Too
From Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea, 2002
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