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Falls Church will draw on its deep civil rights history for a day of remembrance, reflection and community action honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

The Annual Dr. King Day March for Unity & Freedom will take place Saturday, Jan. 18, two days before the federal holiday on Monday, Jan. 20. Organized by the Tinner Hill Heritage Foundation, the City of Falls Church, the Social Justice Committee of the City of Falls Church and Vicinity, and the Falls Church Episcopal, the event will include a march, speakers, music, lunch and a social justice workshop.

Participants can begin gathering and making signs at 10 a.m. at the Tinner Hill Civil Rights Monument, 510 S. Washington St. An invocation and opening remarks are scheduled for 11 a.m., followed by the march at 11:15 a.m.

The procession will travel east on Washington Street to the Falls Church Episcopal at 115 E. Fairfax St. A complimentary lunch, featured speakers and small-group discussions will continue there until 3 p.m.

Civil rights activist Joan Trumpauer Mulholland will deliver the featured address. Mulholland was a Freedom Rider in the summer of 1961, challenging segregation on interstate buses across the South. She also participated in a Jackson, Mississippi, lunch-counter sit-in and the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

Attendees are also invited to honor King’s commitment to service by supporting the Patrick Henry Family Shelter at 3080 Patrick Henry Drive in Falls Church. Monetary donations and items for families are being collected through an effort led by the Social Justice Committee and the Chi Beta Omega Chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Inc.

Keeping King at the Center

Edwin Henderson II, founder of the Tinner Hill Heritage Foundation, wants the holiday’s central purpose to remain clear: commemorating King himself and the movement he helped lead.

Henderson said service and charitable giving can be meaningful parts of the occasion, but they should be explicitly connected to King’s life and work. King was a Nobel Peace Prize recipient, a minister, a moral leader and the most visible figure in the Civil Rights Movement before his assassination, Henderson said.

He worries that the holiday could eventually become commercialized in the same way Presidents Day is often associated with retail sales. He also cautioned against treating a brief January discussion of King as an adequate substitute for teaching the broader Civil Rights Movement.

A former Fairfax County U.S. history teacher, Henderson recalled seeing educators skip an end-of-year civil rights unit because they had already discussed King earlier in the school year. That approach, he said, overlooks a landmark period in American history.

A Family Rooted in Civil Rights History

Henderson’s connection to the movement began during his childhood in Tuskegee, Alabama, about 40 miles from Montgomery.

Born in 1955, he grew up as the Montgomery bus boycott and other pivotal events were unfolding across Alabama. He noted that Emmett Till was killed that year and Rosa Parks refused to surrender her bus seat soon afterward.

His grandfather, Edwin Bancroft Henderson, moved from Falls Church to Tuskegee in 1965 and spent the final 12 years of his life living with Henderson’s family. The elder Henderson had met King around the period of the Montgomery bus boycott.

The family also had ties to Booker T. Washington. Henderson’s aunt Edith married Ernest Davidson Washington, the son of Washington and his second wife, Olivia Davidson.

Henderson attended Tuskegee’s laboratory school and grew up surrounded by the institution’s cultural and historical legacy, including the stories of Washington, George Washington Carver and the Tuskegee Airmen.

That upbringing gave him an unusually close view of the people, places and institutions that shaped Black history and the struggle for civil rights.

Why Falls Church Matters

Falls Church has its own foundational place in that history.

The Tinner Hill Heritage Foundation traces its origins to a 1915 dispute over an attempt to restrict where Black residents could own or purchase property in Falls Church. Some residents faced restrictions involving land they already owned.

In response, community members formed the Colored Citizens Protective League and challenged the discriminatory effort. Henderson said the group’s work helped produce an important victory against explicitly racial property restrictions.

The organization evolved the following year into the first rural branch of the NAACP in the United States. That history is now commemorated by the Tinner Hill Civil Rights Monument, where Saturday’s gathering will begin.

For Henderson, that legacy makes Falls Church a particularly fitting place to examine King’s message and celebrate the continuing pursuit of social justice.

Confronting Racism in the Present

Henderson also credited his wife, Nikki Graves Henderson, with helping establish the Social Justice Committee of the City of Falls Church and Vicinity.

The idea emerged after the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, where torch-carrying white supremacists marched toward the University of Virginia campus amid protests over the planned removal of a Robert E. Lee statue.

Nikki Henderson feared similar demonstrations could reach Tinner Hill. She envisioned a local organization that would help people engage in difficult conversations about race and confront hatred directly while seeking understanding, mercy, equality and equity.

Edwin Henderson said those conversations remain urgent. He pointed to companies including Walmart and Meta pulling back from diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives while praising Costco for maintaining its position.

He described those corporate decisions as signs of a broader retreat from social justice and individual freedoms as President-elect Donald Trump prepared to take office on Jan. 20.

Nonviolence Was Not Passivity

Henderson also rejected the idea that King’s commitment to nonviolent resistance amounted to passivity.

He said King and Malcolm X pursued the same broad goal of resisting racial oppression, even though they advocated different strategies. Henderson considers both men heroes and believes each helped build a new consciousness within the Black community.

King’s approach required demonstrators to risk beatings and imprisonment by placing their bodies directly in harm’s way, Henderson said. That willingness to endure violence without responding in kind was active resistance, not submission.

He sees that same courage in Mulholland, who faced harassment and violence as a white activist participating in Freedom Rides and Mississippi lunch-counter demonstrations alongside Black civil rights workers.

“We Are Enough”

Despite his concerns about the next four years, Henderson said he refuses to approach the future with fear.

He expects difficult policies and possible attacks on rights and equity, but believes people of moral integrity will endure. The nation has survived worse periods, he said, and political momentum can eventually shift again.

His hope for Saturday is both immediate and ambitious: to fill the street and the church with people prepared to honor King, consider the country’s present direction and decide what must be done next.