Moving performances and informative speakers captivate each year’s audience of Coolidge Corner’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. event. The event was designed to highlight the fight for civil rights throughout history, acknowledge racism’s continued impact on the community and work as a community to address it.

Held this year on Monday, Jan. 16, the focus was on educating the struggle for freedom and equality throughout history in order to better understand and appreciate King’s life’s work. The event’s speakers and performers included historian Edward J. Larson, Brookline Town Selectman Bernard Greene, performers from the Joyful Voices of Inspiration choir, poet Regie Gibson, poet Jennifer Barber, owner of FastFrame Hsiu-Lan Chang, co-founder of Brookline For The Culture Adena Walker and co-founder of Brookline For The Culture Zahriyannah Karakashian-Jones.

Bernard Greene, the chair of the Town of Brookline MLK Celebration Committee, said for the past six years, the event has aimed to cover a broad range of social justice issues to honor King.

“We always try to make the event more broad to deal with the general issues of racial and social justice that King was a big part of,” Greene said. “And to do that, we talk about things that predated his time, for example, the revolutionary war period.”

Larson said his speech was designed to illustrate the importance of actions in Massachusetts, and specifically the Boston area, in early civil rights movements in order to give the event’s viewers a sense of Boston’s connection to racism.

“What I tried to bring into [the presentation] was how this is part of the story of Massachusetts, the story of the greater Boston area, the story of here. This place has an important legacy in the first great emancipation out of the Revolutionary War,” Larson said.

Speaker and member of Brookline for The Culture Zahriyannah Karakashian-Jones said she hopes the event will not just inform the community, but urge people to take action.

“I hope people take away from this event that Massachusetts, despite what we’ve been told, was not this 100 percent liberal, accepting, non-racist space that we have been led to believe,” Karakashian-Jones said. “There was racism, there’s still racism here. The more that we are able to acknowledge those things, the more we’re able to undo some of the wrongs that racism has caused, and hopefully, inspire Brookline residents to not just see the problem but do something about it.”