Whenever the Martin Luther King holiday is celebrated each year, a number of memories swirl through my head. I was in high school when the civil rights leader was assassinated. It was a tough time for America.
What many may not know is that just four days after Dr. King died, a congressman from Michigan, John Conyers, introduced a bill in the House calling for a national holiday tied to Dr. King’s birthday. That was 1968. The measure went nowhere for years.
Congressman Conyers tried every year to propose the same bill and for years it received little to no interest from most of his colleagues.
The idea never had traction until the early 1980s. The Congressional Black Caucus produced 6 million signatures on a petition supporting the MLK holiday. 1983 marked the 20th anniversary of Dr. King’s “I Have A Dream” speech.
The legislation calling for the MLK holiday finally made it to the floor of the United States Senate in 1983. The History Channel Web site cites one moment on the floor of the Senate when North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms introduced FBI documents aimed at smearing Dr. King.
“As Helms pressed to introduce FBI smear material on King—whom the agency had spent years trying to pinpoint as a Communist and threat to the United States during the height of his influence—into the Congressional record, tensions boiled over,” per the History Channel account. “Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the senator from New York, brought the materials onto the floor, then dropped them to the ground in disgust in a pivotal moment of the debate.”
The next day, senators passed the bill authorizing the holiday by a vote of 78-22. President Ronald Reagan wasted no time signing the measure into law. The first Martin Luther King Holiday became a federal holiday three years later, in 1986.
This was the first time in modern American history that a private citizen had a federal holiday named in his honor. It took a long time and much heavy lifting to make the MLK Holiday a reality.
We take for granted that everyone is in favor of this holiday, but it wasn’t always so and had many opponents that delayed the final decision. All those that made this holiday a reality, honoring a man that argued for peaceful, nonviolent change in American race relations, should be remembered.
The King Center encourages people to make this holiday a day on, not a day off. For ideas on how to celebrate the Martin Luther King holiday, go the the King Center Web site at this link.