On January 19^th at 3:00 p.m. St. Peter’s will host a Martin Luther King, Jr. celebration sponsored jointly between our Sanctuary Performing Arts and the Coalition on Diversity and Equity (CoDE) who we partner with often for things like MLK and Juneteenth. This is our third year to sponsor a MLK program with them. This year however is the first time we are honoring King with a concert. It will feature works of 19th, 20th, and 21st century composers. It most especially features Sawney Freeman, an enslaved person who escaped and came to CT.  He composed in the early 1800s.  His music was discovered after more than 200 years of being lost in the archives at Trinity College in Hartford.  Anthony Pandolfe, music director at St. John’s Essex and band director at Edwin O. Smith High School found it and arranged it for strings.  While we cannot prove it, he may be one of the earliest African American composers in the country.