Martin Luther King Jr. Day march, ceremony, concert in Victorville

The 16th Annual Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Commemorative Peace March & Ceremony will be held on Monday near Victorville City Hall.

Presented by the High Desert Alumnae Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, the march will begin at 10 a.m. at the corner of Seneca Road and Civic Drive. The march will end at the Civil Rights Memorial near city hall on Civic Drive, where a ceremony will include local leaders sharing words of inspiration.

City officials said that the Civil Rights Memorial was created to “honor and remember” the sacrifices and triumphs of America’s Civil Rights Leaders.

Discovery School of the Arts fifth grader Sophia Burciaga, who won the city’s Annual Civil Rights Memorial Essay Contest, will read her winning essay submission. Burciaga, a student in Rachel Martindale’s class, wrote the essay that spotlights the legendary mathematician Katherine Johnson, who worked for NASA.

Victorville officials at the ceremony will unveil a bronze plaque featuring a portion of Sophia’s essay.

Who is Katherine Johnson?

Johnson was born in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, on Aug. 26, 1918.

At an early age, she worked to master geometry and algebra. She started high school when she was just 10, and college when she was 15. After she graduated with honors at 18, Johnson taught Black students math, according to National Geographic.

She later enrolled in graduate school at West Virginia University to study math but left early to raise a family and return to teaching.

In 1952, at age 34, she learned about jobs for Black women with mathematics and computing skills at the Langley laboratory at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which would later become NASA.

Johnson and the other women worked as “human computers,” figuring out the difficult calculations needed for spaceflight. During her time there, she broke racial barriers, like using the bathroom that was supposed to be for white women only.

One of her biggest accomplishments at NASA was helping calculate the trajectory, or path, of the country’s first human spaceflight in 1961, making sure astronaut Alan Shepard, Jr., had a safe trip.

A year later, she helped figure out John Glenn’s orbit of the planet, another American first. In 1969, she calculated the trajectories of Neil Armstrong’s historic mission to the moon on Apollo 11.

Johnson’s story was told in the 2016 film Hidden Figures, a film about three Black women mathematicians who worked at NASA.

Johnson died on Feb. 24, 2020, at the age of 101. In her honor, NASA dedicated the Katherine G. Johnson Computational Research Facility at the Langley Research Center in Virginia.

Plaques recognizing Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Asa Philip Randolph, Frederick Douglass, Cesar Chavez, Harriet Tubman, Lucy Burns, Jackie Robinson, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper are displayed at the memorial based on winning essays from previous years.

City officials said that the Civil Rights Memorial was created to “honor and remember” the sacrifices and triumphs of America’s Civil Rights Leaders.

For more information on the memorial, visit VictorvilleCA.gov/civilrightsmemorial.

Concert

Dreamers, Visionaries and Leaders will present “Generations… a Message in the Music honoring Dr. Martin Luhter King Jr.” at 6 p.m. Monday at the Victor Valley College Performing Arts Center.

The show will honor Dr. King and will include a free concert by Nayanna Holley and the Dorian Holley Band.

Victor Valley College is located at 18422 Bear Valley Road. For more information, visit facebook.com/dvlproject or call 760-245-4271, ext. 2395, or 760-242-2487.

Breakfast

The MLK Peace Breakfast is scheduled at 8 a.m. on Monday Jan. 15 at First Baptist Church, 1320 Barstow Road in Barstow. Tickets are $20 per person.

Daily Press reporter Rene Ray De La Cruz may be reached at 760-951-6227 or RDeLaCruz@VVVDailyPress.com. Follow him on Twitter @DP_ReneDeLaCruz.

This article originally appeared on Victorville Daily Press: Martin Luther King Jr. Day march, ceremony, concert in Victorville