LEXINGTON, Ky. (LEX 18) — Jeremiah Wrong has been producing media for years and is looking for ways to engage and inspire communities.

He released his first film, "After King 23," that's been years in the making. The film focuses on Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy and how it's being upheld.

"You know, some of the things that hit the media, you know it just kind of blows your mind," Wrong said. "You know, so it's like, OK, is this where we are in society after Dr. Martin Luther King, after all that we've been through, after all that we went through?"

Wrong interviewed several young Black boys and men from Louisville that voiced their concerns about issues in America — many of those issues are those that impact African Americans. Wrong wanted his film to challenge people to think about how they can continue to carry King's message.

"There are some people in the film that's actually worked directly with Dr. King. So they were able to share some insights," he said.

Wrong says this film will focus on the importance of ownership, education and systematic racism. As a native of Lexington, he wants his community to think about how those issues can be tackled.

"To bring it home is just to stir up that conversation in Lexington, you know, what can we do now?" Wrong said. "What can we do to implement change in Lexington, Kentucky?"

Wrong spoke a lot about issues in the black community, including police brutality and systematic racism. Years after King's "I Have a Dream” speech, Wrong shared what one young man thought King would think of American society today.

"He felt like Dr. King wouldn't be able to live with it," Wrong said. "You know, that it would be overwhelming of some of the experiences of things that we are involved in today."

Wrong says he wanted to bring this film to his hometown as a call to action.

"Anybody that has some spirituality should have a sense of responsibility in their small space with their families, with their community to respond a certain way," Wrong said.

This article was written by Rachel Richardson for WLEX.

The National Parks Service is waiving entry fees at all national parks on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

“The entrance fee-free days encourage people to discover the beauty, history and inspiration awaiting them in more than 400 national parks throughout the country," said National Park Service Director Chuck Sams.

National parks are a popular attraction for Americans.

In 2021, nearly 300 million people visiting a national park, according to the NPS.

National Parks are also an economic driver. They support more than 322,000 jobs across the country and add $42 billion to the economy, NPS states.

Entry fees will also be waived on several other days in 2023:

• April 22 – First Day of National Park Week  
• August 4 – Great American Outdoors Day  
• September 23 – National Public Lands Day  
• November 11 – Veterans Day  

ATLANTA —

President Joe Biden is marking Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday with a sermon Sunday at Atlanta's historic Ebenezer Baptist Church that aims to celebrate the civil rights leader's legacy while reviving the Biden administration's call for sweeping voting rights legislation.

Biden's failure to win passage of a measure that would have bolstered voting right protections, a central campaign pledge, is one of his biggest disappointments of his first two years in office. The task is even steeper now that Republicans control the House.

In advance of Biden's visit to the church where King once preached, White House officials said he was committed to advocating for meaningful voting rights action.

“The president will speak on a number of issues at the church, including how important it is that we have access to our democracy,” senior adviser Keisha Lance Bottoms said

Bottoms, who was Atlanta's mayor from 2018 to 2022, said “you can’t come to Atlanta and not acknowledge the role that the civil rights movement and Dr. King played in where we are in the history of our country.”

The stop at Ebenezer comes at a delicate moment for Biden after Attorney General Merrick Garland on Thursday announced the appointment of a special counsel to investigate how the president handled classified documents after leaving the vice presidency in 2017. The White House on Saturday revealed that additional classified records were found at Biden’s home near Wilmington, Delaware.

The Democrats’ voting rights bill, named after John Lewis, the late civil rights leader and Georgia congressman, included provisions that would have made Election Day a national holiday, ensured access to early voting and mail-in ballots and enabled the Justice Department to intervene in states with a history of voter interference, among other changes.

The legislation collapsed last year when two senators — Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Arizona's Kyrsten Sinema, a Democrat then and now an independent — refused to join Democratic colleagues in changing Senate rules to overcome a Republican filibuster. Sinema last month announced that she was changing her party affiliation, but she continues to caucus with Democrats.

Biden was invited to Ebenezer, where King served as co-pastor from 1960 until he was assassinated in 1968, by Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock, the senior pastor. Warnock, like many battleground state Democrats who won reelection in 2022, kept his distance during the campaign from Biden as the the president's approval rating lagged and the inflation rate climbed.

But with Biden beginning to turn his attention toward an expected 2024 reelection effort, Georgia is going to get plenty of his attention.

In 2020, Biden managed to win Georgia as well as closely contested Michigan and Pennsylvania, where Black votes made up a disproportionate of the Democratic electorate. Turning out Black voters in those states will be essential to Biden's 2024 hopes.

The White House has tried to promote Biden's agenda in minority communities. The White House has cited efforts to encourage states to take equity into account for public works projects as they spend money from the administration's $1 trillion infrastructure bill. The administration also has acted to end sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine offenses, scrapping a policy widely seen as racist.

The administration also highlights Biden's work to diversify the federal judiciary, including his appointment of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson as the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court and the confirmation of 11 Black women judges to federal appeals courts — more than those installed to those powerful courts under all previous presidents combined.

In Atlanta, Biden will the first sitting president ever to speak at a Sunday service at Ebenezer, Bottoms said.

Warnock told ABC's “This Week” that Biden will “sit in the spiritual home of Martin Luther King Jr., Georgia’s greatest son, arguably the greatest American, who reminds us that we’re tied in a single garment of destiny, that this is not about Democrat and Republican, red, yellow, brown, black and white. We’re all in it together."

King, who was born on Jan. 15, 1929, was assassinated in 1968 at age 39. He helped he fueled passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. Members of King's family were expected to be in attendance for Biden's visit.

The president plans to be in Washington on Monday to speak at the National Action Network’s annual breakfast on the King holiday.

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Associated Press writer Bill Barrow in Atlanta contributed to this report.

Video above: Massachusetts to mark MLK Day with events

America has honored Martin Luther King Jr. with a federal holiday for nearly four decades yet still hasn't fully embraced and acted on the lessons from the slain civil rights leader, his youngest daughter said Monday.

The Rev. Bernice King, who leads The King Center in Atlanta, said leaders — especially politicians — too often cheapen her father's legacy into a "comfortable and convenient King" offering easy platitudes.

"We love to quote King in and around the holiday. ... But then we refuse to live King 365 days of the year," she declared at the commemorative service at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where her father once preached.

The service, sponsored by the center and held at Ebenezer annually, headlined observances of the 38th federal King holiday. King, gunned down in Memphis in 1968 as he advocated for better pay and working conditions for the city's sanitation workers, would have celebrated his 94th birthday Sunday.

Her voice rising and falling in cadences similar to her father's, Bernice King bemoaned institutional and individual racism, economic and health care inequities, police violence, a militarized international order, hardline immigration structures and the climate crisis. She said she's "exhausted, exasperated and, frankly, disappointed" to hear her father's words about justice quoted so extensively alongside "so little progress" addressing society's gravest problems.

Video below: 'Embrace' sculpture unveiled on Boston Common ahead of MLK Day

"He was God's prophet sent to this nation and even the world to guide us and forewarn us. ... A prophetic word calls for an inconvenience because it challenges us to change our hearts, our minds and our behavior," Bernice King said. "Dr. King, the inconvenient King, puts some demands on us to change our ways."

President Joe Biden was scheduled Monday to address an MLK breakfast hosted in Washington by the Rev. Al Sharpton's National Action Network. Sharpton got his start as a civil rights organizer in his teens as youth director of an anti-poverty project of King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

"This is a time for choosing," Biden said, repeating themes from a speech he delivered Sunday at Ebenezer at the invitation of Sen. Raphael Warnock, the senior pastor at Ebenezer who recently won re-election to a full term as Georgia's first Black U.S. senator.

"Will we choose democracy over autocracy, or community over chaos? Love over hate?" Biden asked Monday. "These are the questions of our time that I ran for president to try to help answer. ... Dr. King's life and legacy — in my view — shows the way forward."

Other commemorations echoed Bernice King's reminder and Biden's allusions that the "Beloved Community" — Martin Luther King's descriptor for a world in which all people are free from fear, discrimination, hunger and violence — remains elusive.

In Boston, Mayor Michelle Wu talked about a fight for the truth in an era of hyper-partisanship and misinformation.

"We're battling not just two sides or left or right and a gradient in between that have to somehow come to compromise, but a growing movement of hate, abuse, extremism and white supremacy fueled by misinformation, fueled by conspiracy theories that are taking root at every level," she said.

Susquehanna Valley marks MLK Day with day of service

Wu, the first woman and person of color elected mayor of Boston, said education restores trust. Quoting King, she called for overcoming the "fatigue of despair" to enact change. "It is sometimes in those moments when we feel most tired, most despairing, that we are just about to break through," Wu told attendees at a memorial breakfast.

Volunteers in Philadelphia held a "day of service" focused on gun violence prevention. The city has seen a surge in homicides that saw 516 people killed last year and 562 the year before, the highest total in at least six decades.

Some participants in the effort's signature project, led by Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, worked to assemble gun safety kits for public distribution. The kits include "gun cable locks and additional safety devices for childproofing," according to organizers. They also include information about firearm storage, health and social services information, and coping in the aftermath of gun violence.

Other kits being assembled highlighted Temple University Hospital's "Fighting Chance" program and included materials to enable immediate response to victims at the scene of gunfire, organizers said. Recipients are to be trained in the use of the materials, which include tourniquets, gauze, chest seals and other items to treat critical wounds, they said.

In Selma, Alabama, a seminal site in the civil rights movement, residents were commemorating King as they recover from a deadly storm system that moved across the South last week.

Video below: Eight powerful Martin Luther King Jr. quotes

King was not present at Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge for the initial march known as "Bloody Sunday," when Alabama state troopers attacked and beat marchers in March 1965. But he joined a subsequent procession that successfully crossed the bridge toward the Capitol in Montgomery, punctuating efforts that pushed Congress to pass and President Lyndon Johnson to sign the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The Pettus Bridge was unscathed by Thursday's storm.

Maine's first Black House speaker urged residents Monday to honor King's memory by joining in acts of service.

"His unshakable faith, powerful nonviolent activism and his vision for peace and justice in our world altered the course of history," Rachel Talbot Ross said in a statement. Talbot Ross is also the daughter of Maine's first black lawmaker, and a former president of the Portland NAACP.

"We must follow his example of leading with light and love and recommit ourselves to building a more compassionate, just and equal community," she added.

At Ebenezer, Warnock, who has led the congregation for 17 years, hailed his predecessor's role in securing ballot access for Black Americans. But, like Bernice King, the senator warned against a reductive understanding of King.

"Don't just call him a civil rights leader. He was a faith leader," Warnock said. "Faith was the foundation upon which he did everything he did. You don't face down dogs and water hoses because you read Nietzsche or Niebuhr. You gotta tap into that thing, that God he said he met anew in Montgomery when someone threatened to bomb his house and kill his wife and his new child."

King, Warnock said, "left the comfort of a filter that made the whole world his parish," turning faith into "the creative weapon of love and nonviolence."

While echoing Bernice King's call for bolder public policy, Warnock noted some progress in his lifetime. As he's done through two Senate campaigns, Warnock noted he was born a year after King's assassination, when both of Georgia senators were staunch segregationists, including one Warnock described as loving "the Negro" as long as he was "in his place at the back door."

But, Warnock said, "Because of what Dr. King and because of what you did ... I now sit in his seat."

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Associated Press journalists Will Weissert in Washington, David Sharp in Portland, Maine, and Ron Todt in Philadelphia contributed.