The Long Road to Honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

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Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was born January 15, 1929, and assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968. Just four days after his death, a young congressman from Michigan, John Conyers, first proposed legislation to make Dr. King’s birthday a holiday.

It would take nearly two decades for that holiday to become a reality.

In 1983, after a long campaign of public pressure, then-President Ronald Reagan signed Conyers’s bill into law as King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, stood and looked on. In the signing ceremony, Reagan said: “Dr. King had awakened something strong and true, a sense that true justice must be colorblind, and that among white and black Americans, as he put it, ‘Their destiny is tied up with our destiny, and their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom; we cannot walk alone.’ ”

The first federal holiday was celebrated January 20, 1986, but various states observed it in different ways. Wisconsin has the oldest state celebration, dating back to 1980. Nine states initially refused to observe the holiday, and it was not until 2000 that all fifty states gave state employees a paid holiday. In Arizona, it took a boycott by NFL players to bring the holiday to reality. Even today, Alabama and Arkansas honor the Confederate general Robert E. Lee’s birthday on the same date.

Martin Luther King wrote for The Progressive four times during the 1960s. His best-known piece, “Tears of Love” (also referred to as the “Letter From Birmingham Jail”) was published in July 1963. Written in longhand, in his jail cell on April 16, 1963, the letter addresses members of the clergy who had called King’s civil disobedience actions “unwise and untimely.”

“More and more,” he wrote in The Progressive, “I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.”

“More and more,” MLK wrote in The Progressive, “I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will...” 

King noted that it was the structural nature of racism that made the necessity of a civil rights movement inevitable: “You deplore the demonstrations that are presently taking place . . . but I would say in more emphatic terms that it is even more unfortunate that the white power structure of this city left the Negro community with no other alternative.”

In a cover story for the May 1960 issue titled “The Burning Truth in the South,” Dr. King wrote about the growth of the sit-in movement. “An electrifying movement of Negro students,” as he called it, that “has shattered the placid surface of campuses and communities across the South.”

“Negroes have also experienced sharp frustrations as they struggle for the realization of promises expressed in hollow legislative enactments or empty electoral campaign oratory,” he wrote. “Conferences from the lowest levels of officialdom up to the Chief Executive in the White House result in the clarification of problems—but not their solution.”

As King explained, it was this new tactic of nonviolent civil disobedience that gave the oppressed a powerful tool against their oppressors: “The key significance of the student movement lies in the fact that from its inception, everywhere, it has combined direct action and non-violence. . . . This quality has given it the extraordinary power and discipline which every thinking person observes.”

In commemoration of the one hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, Dr. King wrote in The Progressive (December 1962) of “The Luminous Promise” of that document, combined with the Declaration of Independence. “All tyrants, past, present, and future, are powerless to bury the truths in these declarations,” he stated, “no matter how extensive their legions, how vast their power, and how malignant their evil.”

That promise has yet to be realized, King continued, because the “unresolved race question is a pathological infection in our social and political anatomy, which has sickened us throughout our history.”

“There is but one way to commemorate the Emancipation Proclamation,” King wrote fifty-five years ago. “That is to make its declaration of freedom real; to reach back to the origins of our nation when our message of equality electrified an unfree world, and reaffirm democracy by deeds as bold and daring as the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation.”

In his final piece for The Progressive, in November 1966, less than two years before his death, King wrote on the topic of the newly emerging “Black Power” movement. “Millions of Negroes are frustrated and angered because extravagant promises made less than a year ago are a shattered mockery today. When the 1965 voting rights law was signed it was proclaimed as the dawn of freedom and the open door to opportunity.” But this did not happen, he said, and “as a consequence the old way of life—economic coercion, terrorism, murder, and inhuman contempt—continued unabated.”

Black Americans, he concluded, “can still march down the path of nonviolence and interracial amity,” but only if white Americans “meet them with honest determination to rid society of its inequality and inhumanity.” “Negroes,” he continued, “have to acquire a share of power so that they can act in their own interests as an independent social force” to “seek a community of justice and security so that their children will be able to identify with the American dream as equals and not through the bars of a grim slum prison.”

Martin Luther King was killed by an assassin in Memphis, Tennessee on the night of April 4, 1968, as he worked to accompany unionized sanitation workers struggling for that “community of justice and security.”

Norman Stockwell is publisher of The Progressive.