Boston Arts Academy Spirituals Ensemble perform at the 2025 MLK Jr. Memorial Breakfast. This year, coalition of four organizations, including the committee that organizes the memorial breakfast, has organized a weekend full of events to celebrate the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife Coretta Scott King.

This weekend, organizations across the metropolitan Boston area will mark an expanded celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day with a three-day program of rallies, parties and performances to commemorate the life of the Civil Rghts leader and honor his spirit and that of his wife, Coretta Scott King.

The inaugural MLK Boston Beloved Community Weekend marks a collective effort to build unity across the region, organizers say. The weekend’s events are being planned by a host of local organizations: Embrace Boston, an organization dedicated to dismantling structural racism through projects at the intersection of arts, community, research and policy; Project 351, a nonprofit dedicated to nurturing the next generation of youth dedicated to community service; the Boston Children’s Chorus; and the MLK Jr. Memorial Breakfast Committee, which puts on an annual event dedicated to the leader and awards scholarships and other recognition to those engaged in work to promote diversity and inclusion.

The event came out of conversations that Jay Williams, co-chair of the Breakfast Committee and lead pastor of the Union Combined Parish in the South End, was having with the heads of two other organizations — Embrace Boston President and CEO Imari Paris Jeffries and Boston Children’s Chorus Executive Director Andrés Holder.

They were brainstorming ways to better support each other’s mission. “How do we build something that transcends our individual organizations and hopefully will endure for years to come?” said Williams.

The name of this weekend’s celebrations stems from the philosophy of “The Beloved Community,” which philosopher-theologian Josiah Royce coined in the early 1900s. Royce also founded the Fellowship of Reconciliation. King was a member of the Fellowship and popularized the belief decades later, according to The King Center in Atlanta, an organization founded by Coretta Scott King in the year following her husband’s assassination.

“It is important that we take this opportunity and take these moments to reaffirm our commitment to each other, to reaffirm our empathy towards each other, and to use moments of celebration as affirmation periods,” Paris Jeffries said. “That is what we mean by the beloved community.”

The message takes on special meaning now, the organizers say, given the political divisions in the country.

“All of the messages we’re hearing from the White House is that some people are entitled to be here — read: the rich and the wealthy white folks — and others don’t belong here, the immigrant, the poor person, the person of color,” Williams said. And so, this weekend is “about building bridges and beginning the work of rebuilding from the division the [Trump] administration is sowing,” he said.

The weekend will be headed by a quartet of events:

The only event not open to the public is on Saturday, Jan. 17, when Project 351 holds its annual launch event to celebrate this year’s cohort of youth leaders and kicks off their year of service and leadership activities.

On Sunday, Jan. 18, Embrace Boston will host its annual and now sold-out Embrace Honors MLK gala, recognizing artists and civic and community leaders advancing the vision of the Kings.

On MLK Day, Monday, Jan. 19, the MLK Jr. Memorial Breakfast Committee will host its annual breakfast event at the Westin Copley Place. The keynote speaker at this year’s Breakfast is Nikole Hannah Jones, creator of the 1619 Project that reexamined American history through the lens of the slavery and its impacts. The project first ran in the New York Times Magazine in 2019.

Later on Monday, the Boston Children’s Chorus will hold its 23rd annual MLK tribute concert, called “Where Conscience Walked.”

Other events, from musical performances and service days to religious gatherings and parties, will also be held throughout the weekend. The events will see “a theme and a message that will be pulled again and again over the course of three or four days, but by different voices and in different ways and that invites everybody in,” said Carolyn Casey, founder and executive director of Project 351. “It is an affirmation about the richness of the diversity in both our city and our commonwealth, and the strength that we gain from that.”

The array of events is also a reminder of the opportunities for joy, said Paris Jeffries. “What we wanted to make sure is that Boston practices abundance in this moment where so many things are set up to keep us separate, to make us hunker down and do things on our own,” he said.

The Beloved Community Weekend is also happening against the backdrop of Boston’s Everyone250 campaign, an effort to bring a broader lens to the celebrations marking the United States’ 250th anniversary. Celebrations to mark the semiquincentennial are being planned across the country, including in Boston, and this weekend’s organizers see it as an important addition to those other celebrations.

“Just like America was founded in Boston, so was the Kings’ family story founded here,” Paris Jeffries said, referring to how the Kings met in Boston in the early 1950s. King was pursuing a doctoral degree in systematic theology at Boston University and Coretta Scott was a student at the New England Conservatory. “We are one of their founding cities,” he said.

Beyond looking at their past, the Kings’ vision of “the beloved community” is part of building toward a better future.

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” Williams said, quoting a 1958 article written by King. “The way we bend it is by loving each other, drawing each other in and shaping a community that’s rooted not in ethnic identity or religion or nationality, but in the commonality of our humanity.”

A full list of events included in The Beloved Community Weekend programming can be found at mlkboston.com.