In celebration of Martin Luther King Day, we have digitized the top march and parade routes to make it easier for you to find the best viewing location and plan your day. Bing Maps makes it easier to visualize information in a way that is natural and easy to understand. Surprisingly, most parade web sites don’t provide any maps, so we translated paragraphs of directions and, in some cases, some non-scaled maps to digital cartography. Conveniently, Bing Maps has a set of tools built in for doing this.
Each year in the third week of January, the United States celebrates the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. a man considered to be the formative figure in the modern fight for civil rights, and his legacy looms large in the work of all those who follow him in his cause. Across the US, different cities celebrate in a variety of ways ranging from speeches, to hands on community involvement activities to parades and marches to honor the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
Martin Luther King, Jr. March – Nashville
So far, the site includes over 25 parade routes, including events in Austin, Baltimore, Charlotte, Columbus, Dallas, Denver, Fort Worth, Honolulu, Houston, Jacksonville, Long Beach, Los Angeles, Mesa, Miami, Nashville, New York City, Phoenix, San Diego, Seattle, San Antonio, San Francisco, Savannah and Washington D.C. I’ll be happy to add more routes – just tweet me @BingMaps.
In order to view the specific routes, you’ll need to first load the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Parades and Marches Collection. The collection will load along the left hand side with all of the routes listed alphabetically by city name. Clicking a city link will light up an icon on the map. If you’re zoomed in, the map will redirect you to the city you selected with the route highlighted. If you’re zoomed out, simply click the city link and once you see a popup you can either zoom into the area or click the “Zoom” link on the popup. With each route I’ve provided the distance, the parade/march date and time and a link to the site from which I derived the route. In some cases I included a picture from the site, as well.
Martin Luther King, Jr. March – Seattle
You want mobile access? I made the collection public and checked the box for letting others copy items from this list of places. So, it’s a tiny bit of work, but here’s how you do it. First, load the list of Marches and Routes. Next login to Bing Maps with your Microsoft Account ID. Once you find the route (or routes) you want, click it and you’ll find an option on the popup to “Save to your places.” From the My Places menu you can now export it as KML or GeoRSS and import it into your favorite mobile mapping application.
In the words of Barack Obama, “Dr. King taught us that ‘an individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.’ In honor of this spirit, Americans across the country will come together for a day of service. By volunteering our time and energy, we can build stronger, healthier, more resilient communities.”
Chris Pendleton
Principal Program Manager Lead
Microsoft, Bing Maps