Montgomery County held its 30th Annual Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Tribute & Celebration at the Music Center at Strathmore in North Bethesda, Maryland on January 20, 2025. The theme of the event was “The View from the Bridge: Injustice, Resistance, and Hope.”
The program wove together a diversity of artistic performances with storytelling about three “iconic bridges” connected to civil rights: the Black Bayou Bridge (Mississippi), the Edmund Pettus Bridge (Alabama), and the Talbot Avenue Bridge (Silver Spring, Maryland!).
The story of the Talbot Avenue Bridge, representing the program’s “Hope” subtheme, was told through clips from The Bridge film (2017) by Jay Mallin (Rosemary Hills), followed by remarks by Talbot Avenue Bridge Committee members Pat Tyson (Lyttonsville) and Anna White (North Woodside). They came on stage carrying the Talbot Avenue Bridge Lantern Walk’s Unity Lantern and lanterns representing communities on either side of the bridge and placed them on a table in front of the podium to symbolize the connecting spirit of the bridge.
You can watch a video recording the program at the link below. To watch the 10+ minute segment about the Talbot Avenue Bridge go to 2:00:44.
It was great to see many bridge community members in the audience. Thank you for being part of the “human bridge” we are building and growing!
P.S. The stories of the first two bridges are at 50:58 (Black Bayou Bridge, representing “Injustice”) and 1:19:25 (Edmund Pettus Bridge, representing “Resistance”). And all the artistic performances were excellent; in particular, we recommend Daryl Davis’s musical narrative “Harmony Over Hate: Using Music to Bridge the Gap of Division,” starting at 1:05:35, in which he tells the inspiring story of befriending Ku Klux Klan leaders.
Talbot Avenue Bridge Community 