The area's Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. festivities will conclude this evening as the Scioto County Martin Luther King Committee awards its annual scholarship to a local high school student.

Rev. David Malone said the scholarship program will begin at 7 at Notre Dame High School.

That is not the only activity scheduled for today, however.

The committee will host workshops for children at Farley Square from 10 a.m. to noon.

The annual winter picnic will follow until 1 p.m., also at Farley Square.

Today is a federal holiday and several businesses, including the United States Postal Service, are closed.

Of course, Scioto County is not the only area celebrating King's life.

Yolanda King urged an audience at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta - where her father preached for several years - to be a force for peace and love, and to use the King holiday Monday to ask tough questions about their own beliefs on prejudice.

“We must keep reaching across the table and, in the tradition of Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, feed each other,” Yolanda King, 51, said at the end of an hourlong presentation that was part motivational speech, part drama.

The stage and television actress performed a series of one-actor skits that told stories including a girl's first ride on a desegregated bus and a college student's recollection of the 1963 desegregation of Birmingham, Ala.

After the performance - attended by members of the extended King family and Yolanda's sister, the Rev. Bernice King - Yolanda King and her aunt, Christine King Farris, signed copies of their books, and Bernice King graciously posed for photographs with attendees.

Yolanda King told The Associated Press that the King holiday provides an opportunity for everyone to live her father's dream, and that she has her mother's example to follow in her death.

“I connected with her spirit so strongly,” Yolanda King said when asked how she is coping with her mother's loss. “I am in direct contact with her spirit, and that has given me so much peace and so much strength.”

This year's King holiday activities were the first since the death of Coretta Scott King, who died Jan. 31 at age 78 of complications from ovarian cancer and after suffering a stroke five months earlier.

The Associated Press contributed to this story. JEFF BARRON can be reached at (740) 353-3101, ext. 236.