Listener supported, WNYC Studios.

It's the Brian Marrisho on WNYC Good morning, everyone. We'll have a one-hour show today and then handoff at 11 o'clock to NPR in Washington for live coverage of the inauguration.

There is a lot of news already this morning that we'll get to some of before the handoff, including last-minute preemptive

pardons of Anthony Fauci, Liz Cheney, and others by President Biden this morning, and news

of day one executive orders, Trump as president, will be issuing on all kinds of things.

And here we are, really, on this very unusual and poignant intersection of Martin Luther King Day and inauguration day,

unless the King holiday and what it stands for get lost in the breaking news of inauguration day.

We'll begin this morning with the portion that I hosted yesterday of our annual Martin Luther King weekend event at the Apollo

theater. This runs about 20 minutes. My guests at the Apollo were Brooklyn College and

CUNY grad center historian, Dr. Jean Theo Harris, and Reverend Dr. Jackie Lewis of the Middle

Collegiate Church in the East Village. And as you'll hear, we presented this as a live

on-stage edition of our Centennial series, A Hundred Years of a Hundred Things. So we'll pick it up,

as I'm telling the audience in the house, what that is. On my radio show, in conjunction

with WNYC Centennial, we're doing a series called 100 Years of 100 Things,

and we're framing the conversation that we're about to have in the context of that.

We're up to Thing Number 60 in that series, which will call almost 100 years of Martin Luther King

and his quest for freedom in New York City and elsewhere

in the north. I'll say that again, Martin Luther King and his quest for freedom in New York City

and elsewhere in the north. And I say almost 100 years because Dr. King was born on January 15th,

1929 and he would have turned 96 this past Wednesday.

So we'll take the liberty of a little bit of rounding

to include this in the series.

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