A brief history of the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Today we celebrate the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

This past Saturday, I was honored to join more than 200 people of all races, nationalities, and religious beliefs at the Pima County Democratic Party African-American Caucus reception at the Pima County Democratic Party headquarters (one does not have to be African-American to be a member) in an evening of music, prayer, and speeches. What we all share in common humanity is a commitment to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s goals of civil rights, social and economic justice, and peace. Many of the advocates who worked so hard to achieve the passage of the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday in Arizona were present at the reception.

Frances Romero of Time magazine published this essay last January. A Brief History Of Martin Luther King Day – TIME:

"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. Fifteen years prior, on April 4, 1968, she 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.

Reinvigorated by the President's support, King's widow, Coretta, testified before joint hearings of Congress and organized a nationwide lobby to support the bill. Yet in November 1979, Conyers' King-holiday bill was defeated in the House by just five votes. Coretta continued her fight for approval of a national holiday, testifying before Congress several more times and mobilizing governors, mayors and city council members across the nation to make the passage of a King-holiday bill part of their agenda. Singer Stevie Wonder became a prominent proponent and released the song "Happy Birthday" in 1980 — it became a rallying cry. He and Coretta went on to present a second petition to Congress, this one containing 6 million signatures of support. Their work finally paid off when the House passed the bill with a vote of 338 to 90.

The bill faced a somewhat tougher fight in the Senate, however. In an opposition campaign led primarily by Republican Senators John P. East and Jesse Helms of North Carolina, some attempted to emphasize King's associations with communists and his alleged sexual dalliances as reasons not to honor him with a federal holiday. As part of his efforts, on Oct. 3, 1983, Helms read a paper on the Senate floor, written by an aide to Senator East, called "Martin Luther King Jr.: Political Activities and Associations" and also provided a 300-page supplemental document to the members of the Senate detailing King's communist connections. Some Senators expressed outrage over Helms' actions, including New York's Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who threw the document to he ground, stomped on it and deemed it a "packet of filth."

Arguing that any person opposing a King holiday would automatically be dubbed a racist, Helms urged the Senate not to be bullied into elevating King to "the same level as the father of our country and above the many other Americans whose achievements approach that of Washington's" by making him one of the few individuals honored by a federal holiday. The day before the bill passed the Senate, District Judge John Lewis Smith Jr. denied Helms' request to unseal FBI surveillance tapes of King that were due to remain sealed until 2027. President Reagan signed the bill into law in November 1983 and the first official holiday was observed on the third Monday of January 1986.

At the time, only 27 states and Washington, D.C., honored the holiday. Most famously, all three Arizona House Republicans including current Senator and former presidential candidate John McCain, voted against the bill in '83. The state did not vote in favor of recognizing the holiday until 1992, not only rejecting pleas from Reagan and then Arizona governor Evan Mecham but also losing the NFL's support when the league moved Super Bowl XXVII from Sun Devil Stadium, in Tempe, to California in protest. Arizona was not the only state openly contemptuous of federal law. In 2000, 17 years after the law's official passage and the same year it pulled the Confederate flag down from its statehouse dome, South Carolina became the last state to sign a bill recognizing Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a paid holiday.

In a controversial visit to the Lorraine Hotel im Memphis, TN during the 2008 presidential campaign, Sen. John McCain admitted that he later came to regret his vote. McCain regrets vote against King holiday – The New York Times:

McCain spoke in a steady rain outside the Lorraine Hotel where King was slain, which is now the National Civil Rights Museum. McCain was faced with a scattering of boos when said he had erred in the past when he voted as a freshman in Congress against the Jan. 20 holiday celebrating King.

"Even in this most idealistic of nations, we do not always take kindly to being reminded of what more we can do, or how much better we can be, or who else can be included in the promise of America," McCain said. "We can be slow as well to give greatness its due, a mistake I made myself long ago when I voted against a federal holiday in memory of King. I was wrong and eventually realized that, in time to give full support for a state holiday in Arizona."