Nikki Turpin, left, president of The Robbins House, speaks during an interpretive program on civil disobedience in commemoration of Martin Luther King Day at the Walden Pond Visitor Center on Monday, January 20, 2025. Ken McGagh/The Concord Bridge
Nikki Turpin, president of The Robbins House, speaks at Walden Pond Visitor Center. Photo: Ken McGagh/The Concord Bridge

Concord honors MLK with service and ‘disobedience’ 

By Christine M. Quirk — [email protected]

Photos: Ken McGagh/The Concord Bridge

Concordians honored the legacy of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. on Monday with charity, music, and disobedience. 

Families at the Concord Museum assembled “Kids’ Bags” to provide kid-friendly meals and snacks for local families in need. Children decorated the bags with messages such as “Dream big” and “The world is better because you’re in it.” 

Visitors to the Concord Museum decorated bags of meals and snacks to be donated to local children as part of a Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service at the Concord Museum on Monday, January 20, 2025.   Ken McGagh/The Concord Bridge
Visitors to the Concord Museum decorated snack and meal bags as part of a Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service.

Open Table sponsored a food drive at Crosby’s Marketplace, accepting donations for its food pantry and financial support for the Red Cross to help efforts in Southern California. 

At Trinitarian Congregational Church, the Music Makes Me Happy Chorus performed “Let My People Go,” a program of spirituals — songs that guided enslaved people along the Underground Railroad. 

And Walden Pond Visitors Center hosted its 31st annual program on “Civil Disobedience,” a discussion about King’s legacy and how Henry David Thoreau’s writing influenced him. The panel featured historian Richard Smith, known for his portrayal of Thoreau, and Robbins House president Nikki Turpin. 

“If you read ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail’ by Dr. King, and then you read ‘Civil Disobedience’ by Thoreau, you can see them dovetail together,” Smith said. 

Concord historian Richard Smith,  right, speaks as Nikki Turpin,  president of The Robbins House looks on, during an interpretive program on civil disobedience in commemoration  of Martin Luther King Day at the Walden Pond Visitor Center on Monday, January 20, 2025.   Ken McGagh/The Concord Bridge
Concord historian Richard Smith, right, speaks as Robbins House president Nikki Turpin listens during Monday’s civil disobedience program at Walden.

Peaceful resistance

A century before King led a march on Washington, Thoreau spent a night in jail for refusing to pay his poll tax as a protest against the Mexican-American War and slavery. A year later, Thoreau wrote a lecture about his experience, “On the Relation of the Individual to the State,” which he delivered at the Concord Lyceum on January 26, 1848. This same lecture, now called “Resistance to Civil Government,” was published in 1849 in Elizabeth Peabody’s “Aesthetic Papers.” The magazine only lasted one issue; Smith said it was barely noticed.

The essay next appeared in a posthumous collection of Thoreau’s writing, retitled “Civil Disobedience.” Over the following decades, it was read by — and influenced — writers and activists like Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas Gandhi, and a young preacher from Georgia named Martin Luther King Jr. 

Nikki Turpin, left, president of The Robbins House, speaks as Concord historian Richard Smith look on during an interpretive program on civil disobedience in commemoration  of Martin Luther King Day at the Walden Pond Visitor Center on Monday, January 20, 2025.   Ken McGagh/The Concord Bridge
Nikki Turpin, left, president of The Robbins House, and historian Richard Smith gave an interpretive program on civil disobedience in commemoration of Martin Luther King Day.

‘Disobey unjust laws’

Civil disobedience, Smith said, has been defined as “a symbolic, non-violent violation of the law, done deliberately in protest against some form of perceived injustice … open and visible, illegal and performed for the moral purpose of protesting and injustice, with the expectation of being punished.” 

The basis of this resistance is passive, Turpin said, but King was aware of the potential for violence. 

“Dr. King was reading ‘Civil Disobedience’ and thinking about how change can happen for African Americans during a time where the law itself is saying that one does not have equal rights,” she said. 

In these “peaceful protests,” Turpin said, activists were arrested, beaten, and jailed. 

“I think we have to have a real conversation about what we are willing to put on the line,” she said. 

Concord historian Richard Smith,  right, speaks as Nikki Turpin,  president of The Robbins House looks on, during an interpretive program on civil disobedience in commemoration  of Martin Luther King Day at the Walden Pond Visitor Center on Monday, January 20, 2025.   Ken McGagh/The Concord Bridge
Turpin and Smith discuss civil disobedience during the MLK Day program.

King said there was a legal and moral responsibility to obey “just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”

“I think about this quote through the lens of what’s lawful,” Turpin said. “What’s a law? Are you willing to break it? … I think Dr. King challenges us to think about why we put a box around that civil disobedience.

“The point is, you have to challenge the law,” she said. “There’s the law that is and then the law that is practiced. And what we’re starting to see as communities is that sometimes those laws are not practiced, or they’re only practiced for some people, but not all people. So there is no equity in that right … [and] that should be the first place I have equitable treatment.”

Inauguration Day 

Monday was Inauguration Day, the second time the event has overlapped with MLK day. 

“I’ve thought about today really hard,” Turpin said. “I think it’s a wake-up for us to see these two moments where the most opposite of things are intersecting.” 

The focus at Walden, however, was on King’s legacy. 

“I think that we’d really rather focus on Dr. King and the abolitionists and the other people that we’re talking about today,” Smith said. “We can use this information from the past and perhaps move forward with what we know from what we’re talking about today.”

Donate Banner