Editor’s note: Versions of this editorial have appeared at earlier holidays.
It was 43 years ago that President Ronald Reagan made the third Monday in January an official federal holiday to honor Martin Luther King Jr.’s Jan. 15 birthday.
With King’s widow Coretta Scott King, then-Vice President George H.W. Bush and then-U.S. Sen. Joe Biden and others standing with him outside the White House, Reagan told those listening and watching that King lived on in our collective nation’s heart.
“In America in the ’50s and ’60s, one of the most important crises we faced was racial discrimination,” he said. “The man whose words and deeds in that crisis stirred our nation to its very depths and soul was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
“In a nation that proclaimed liberty and justice for all, too many Black Americans were living with neither.”
Reagan noted that King had lived his life fighting for equality while using nonviolence as a central method for his brand of advocacy and activism.
As effusive as Reagan was when he signed HR 3706, getting to that day was a journey. He had initially opposed creating a federal holiday to recognize King.
Throughout his life, King changed, too, although his clear commitment to nonviolence continued throughout his life.
Long before he was assassinated at 39 while fighting for better pay and conditions for Black sanitation workers in Memphis, King’s rise to worldwide prominence began when he entered Morehouse College in Atlanta at just 15 years old. He attended Crozer Theological Seminary and was ordained at 19 before receiving his theology doctorate from Boston University.
King’s reputation as an orator, scholar, theologian and activist committed to improving lives at the grassroots level grew as he moved with his wife from Montgomery to Atlanta. His civil rights work with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference took him from community to community, focusing on local issues with national implications.
King had a number of Louisiana connections. In 1957, he and others were at the New Zion Baptist Church in New Orleans when they founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The Louisiana Conference of The United Methodist Church is fond of pointing out that King attended vespers at Southern University. It should be noted that the famous Montgomery bus boycott was modeled after a 1953 Baton Rouge bus boycott.
Democracy should include all of us. And yes, sometimes that can mean argument and protest. Too often today, we see leaders who seek only to inflame, yet constant provocation will never forge the kind of movement that can truly change a nation. That’s why someone like King will long be revered. We may not appreciate the agitation at the time, but years later, we can see how King was able to take the energy of a people hungry for justice and hone it into an instrument to achieve positive, lasting change.
