The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day at Bates is a community-wide opportunity to discuss, teach, and reflect on the legacy of civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.

MLK Day 2025

This year’s observance, centered on Sunday and Monday, Jan. 19–20, explores the theme Bending Toward Justice: Peace and Nonviolence. A preliminary schedule of events will be published in early December.

This year’s keynote speaker is scholar and author Erica Chenoweth, an expert in mass movements, nonviolent resistance, terrorism, political violence, revolutions, and state repression.

Chenoweth is the academic dean for faculty development and the Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard Kennedy School, faculty dean at Pforzheimer House at Harvard College, and a Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute

Chenoweth’s current book project, The End of People Power, investigates why civil resistance movements in recent years are meeting with less success.

About MLK Day at Bates

Each year, Bates students, faculty, staff, local community members, and campus visitors gather on MLK Day to examine contemporary human issues through the lens of King’s work and ideas, broadly defined.

The format, an all-college gathering followed by a full day of talks, panels, presentation, performance, and film, emerged in the 1990s, but Bates has observed King’s birthday since the 1980s.

In 1986, the first year the federal holiday was observed, Bates welcomed Odella Williamson, a former NAACP chapter leader, to campus.

In 2003–04, the college’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day Planning Committee became a standing committee of the faculty.