Time mag: Monday, Jan. 18, 2010 “Martin Luther King Jr. Day”
By Frances Romero
"This is not a black holiday; it is a people's
holiday," said Coretta Scott King after President Ronald Reagan signed the
King Holiday Bill into law on Nov. 2, 1983. But in the complicated history of
Martin Luther King, Jr Day, it has only recently been a holiday for all the
people, all the time.
Fifteen years earlier, on April 4, 1968, Mrs. King had lost
her husband, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to an assassin's bullet. In the
months after the death of the civil rights icon, Congressman John Conyers Jr.
of Michigan introduced the first legislation seeking to make King's birthday,
Jan. 15, a federal holiday. The King Memorial Center in Atlanta was founded
around the same time, and it sponsored the first annual observance of King's
birthday, in January 1969, almost a decade and a half before it became an
official government-sanctioned holiday. Before then, individual
states including Illinois, Massachusetts and Connecticut had passed their own
bills celebrating the occasion.
The origins of the holiday are mired in racism, politics,
and conspiracy. Three years after Conyers introduced preliminary legislation in
1968, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference — which King headed from its
inception until his death — presented Congress with a petition signed by more
than 3 million people supporting a King holiday. The bill languished in
Congress for eight years, unable to gain enough support until President Jimmy
Carter, former governor of Georgia and the first Democratic President since
Lyndon Johnson, vowed to support a King holiday.
Read much more here: http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1872501,00.html
