On the eve of Martin Luther King’s birthday, soul and gospel legend Mavis Staples is due at UC Davis on Jan. 14 to sing about the civil rights movement—a movement in which she played an activist role.

The Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts is presenting the concert in honor of King’s legacy.

Staples is scheduled to participate the same day in a free Forum@MC titled “Civil Rights: The Music and the Movement.”

Staples was a preteen in her native Chicago in 1950 when she started performing with her family at local churches and then on a weekly radio show. In 1957, after Mavis graduated from high school, the family took its show on the road. Roebuck “Pops” Staples sang and played guitar, his children sang—and they became known as “God’s Greatest Hitmakers.”

By the mid-1960s, inspired by Pops’ close friendship with Rev. King, the Staple Singers had become the spiritual and musical voices of the civil rights movement, according to Mavis Staples’ Web site.

She calls her Mondavi Center concert “We’ll Never Turn Back,” taken from her 2007 album of the same name. Among this collection of songs of racial struggle of the 1950s and ’60s, one of the most moving is “My Own Eyes”—about a night that Staples spent in jail “at the behest of a racist cop” in West Memphis, Ark., according to Amazon.com.

The album also includes “Eyes on the Prize,” “We Shall Not Be Moved,” “Down in Mississippi” and “On My Way.”

AT A GLANCE

WHAT: Forum@MC, “Civil Rights: The Music and the Movement,” with Mavis Staples and Milmon Harrison, associate professor in the African American and African Studies Program. (The Mondavi Center had previously announced a different faculty participant.) Organizers said Jeffrey Callison of Sacramento radio station KXJZ's Insight program will be the forum host.

WHEN: 5 p.m. Jan. 14, Studio Theatre, Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts

ADMISSION: Free

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WHAT: “We’ll Never Turn Back,” concert by Mavis Staples

WHEN: 8 p.m. Jan. 14

WHERE: Jackson Hall, Mondavi Center

ALSO: Preperformance lecture by Jon Fox, bluegrass writer and historian, 7 p.m., Studio Theatre

TICKETS: (530) 754-2787 or (866) 754-2787, or www.mondaviarts.org

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UC Davis hosts the sixth annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Scholarship Fund Award Dinner, Jan. 15, on what would have been King's 80th birthday.