Martin Luther King, Jr. birthday
BY VICTOR G. MIMONI
Wednesday, January 14, 2009 7:05 PM EST
Wednesday, January 14, 2009 7:05 PM EST
On Monday, January 19, a day before Barack Obama is sworn in as the first African-American President of the United States, the country will mark the 24th observance of Martin Luther King’s birthday.
All post offices, public schools and government buildings will be closed. Metropolitan Transportation Authority trains and buses will run on a weekday schedule, except for limited-stop busses on Staten Island, which will not run. Many businesses will be closed.
Why should we make a holiday for a private citizen?
He was born Michael Luther King on January 15, 1929 to an Atlanta, Georgia couple; Alberta and Michael Luther King, a Baptist minister. Though both had been given the name Martin, the erroneous name found its way into the records - not uncommon among poor people at the time.
The younger King graduated from Morehouse College in 1948, having been appointed assistant pastor to his father at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.
He married Coretta Scott in June of 1953. On November 17, 1955 their first child was born.
Two weeks later, on December 1, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus to a white man. King helped organize a bus boycott to protest segregation.
On January 30, 1955 their house was bombed. Shortly afterward he was arrested, the first of some 20 times he was jailed over the next 13 years.
The boycott continued until November, when the U.S. Supreme Court declared segregated buses unconstitutional.
In the year that followed there were eight bombings of black churches, businesses or residences in Montgomery and an unexploded bomb was found on King’s front porch.
But the buses remained integrated.
On August 28, 1963, King helped organize a “March for Jobs and Freedom” on Washington D.C., in part to call for passage of President Kennedy’s civil rights legislation, which was stalled in Congress.
By mid-day, 250,000 people filled the Capitol Mall. King delivered one of the most memorable addresses in American history - his “I Have a Dream” speech.
At the end of 1963, he became the first African-American to be named Time magazine’s “Man of the Year.”
A year later, King became the youngest man ever to win the Nobel Peace Prize and donated the $54,123 award to the civil rights movement.
On April 3, 1968 while supporting a sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis, Tennessee, King delivered his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech, warning his followers both of the dangers ahead and the promises of freedom and equality.
He concluded in part, “I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.”
The next evening, while standing on the walkway in front of his motel room, he was shot by a sniper and died within the hour, in the emergency room of Saint Joseph’s Hospital.
He was 39 years old.
In 1983, President Ronald Reagan signed a law making the third Monday in January a federal holiday, starting in 1986.