MLK Holiday

Through my research I found Avoice Online, an online library on African American voices in politics throughout history. The website was made through the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, Inc (CBC). Avoice works toward providing resources to educators, and all people, on an organic take of the legislative contribution of Black people. I came across the history of making Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s birthday a national holiday.

On January 20, 1986, King’s birthday was first celebrated as a national holiday. I have not spent much time looking at the ways in which national holidays are created.  Just four days after the assassination of King a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, John Conyers, called for a national holiday honor Dr. King’s contribution. From 1968 to 1983, the bill was presented and amended consecutively to Congress. The bill was seen as a bipartisan issue. Commemorating the life of a radical civil rights leader can be malicious toward the white supremacist ideology in the United States. In 1983, the North Carolina Republican senator Jesse Helms called out King as a communist enemy. Petitions were carried out nationwide among communities and public support was crucial to the bill. Throughout the United States, states were passing bills to make Dr. Martin King’s birthday a statewide holiday. This pressured for the federal government to acknowledge the bill as something the public wants.

The United States has invested in white supremacist, patriarchal ideology for so long that passing this bill was huge would be a national appraisal to King and his radicalism. In some ways, I find this pushback against the bill parallel to the work of treatment of King in his life. Dr. King was in jail calling out to his white clergymen in “Letter From Birmingham Jail” and this bill calls for a cluster of white men to acknowledge his worth and effort. No matter what the members of Congress personal believed they were voted onto those seats to listen to their constituents. November of 1983 President Ronald Reagan enacts the bill into law.

http://www.avoiceonline.org/mlk/timeline.html