Friday, January 14, 2011
MLK Day Celebrated Monday
Martin Luther King, Jr., Day will be observed on Monday, January 17, 2010 in honor of the pastor, civil rights leader and Nobel Prize winner for whom it is named.
Information from NobelPrize.org:
Martin Luther King, Jr., (January 15, 1929-April 4, 1968) was born Michael Luther King, Jr., but later had his name changed to Martin. His grandfather began the family's long tenure as pastors of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, serving from 1914 to 1931; his father has served from then until the present, and from 1960 until his death Martin Luther acted as co-pastor.
Martin Luther attended segregated public schools in Georgia, graduating from high school at the age of fifteen; he received the B. A. degree in 1948 from Morehouse College, a distinguished Negro institution of Atlanta from which both his father and grandfather had graduated. After three years of theological study at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania where he was elected president of a predominantly white senior class, he was awarded the B.D. in 1951.
With a fellowship won at Crozer, he enrolled in graduate studies at Boston University, completing his residence for the doctorate in 1953 and receiving the degree in 1955.
In Boston he met and married Coretta Scott, a young woman of uncommon intellectual and artistic attainments. Two sons and two daughters were born into the family.
In 1954, Martin Luther King became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Always a strong worker for civil rights for members of his race, King was, by this time, a member of the executive committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the leading organization of its kind in the nation.
He was ready, then, early in December, 1955, to accept the leadership of the first great Negro nonviolent demonstration of contemporary times in the United States, the bus boycott described by Gunnar Jahn in his presentation speech in honor of the laureate.
The boycott lasted 382 days. On December 21, 1956, after the Supreme Court of the United States had declared unconstitutional the laws requiring segregation on buses, Negroes and whites rode the buses as equals. During these days of boycott, King was arrested, his home was bombed, he was subjected to personal abuse, but at the same time he emerged as a Negro leader of the first rank.
In 1957 he was elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization formed to provide new leadership for the now burgeoning civil rights movement.
The ideals for this organization he took from Christianity; its operational techniques from Gandhi. In the eleven-year period between 1957 and 1968, King traveled over six million miles and spoke over twenty-five hundred times, appearing wherever there was injustice, protest, and action; and meanwhile he wrote five books as well as numerous articles.
In these years, he led a massive protest in Birmingham, Alabama, that caught the attention of the entire world, providing what he called a coalition of conscience. and inspiring his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail", a manifesto of the Negro revolution; he planned the drives in Alabama for the registration of Negroes as voters; he directed the peaceful march on Washington, D.C., of 250,000 people to whom he delivered his address, "l Have a Dream", he conferred with President John F. Kennedy and campaigned for President Lyndon B. Johnson; he was arrested upwards of twenty times and assaulted at least four times; he was awarded five honorary degrees; was named Man of the Year by Time magazine in 1963; and became not only the symbolic leader of American blacks but also a world figure.
At the age of thirty-five, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize. When notified of his selection, he announced that he would turn over the prize money of $54,123 to the furtherance of the civil rights movement.
In early April of 1968 King made his way to Memphis where he was to lead a protest march in sympathy with striking garbage workers.
On the evening of April 4, 1968, at the age of 39, while standing on the balcony of his room at the Lorraine in Memphis King was assassinated.
On June 10, 1968 James Earl Ray, a fugitive from the Missouri State Penitentiary, was arrested at Heathrow Airport in London, in connection with King’s murder. He was extradited to the United States and formally charged.
On March 10, 1969 Ray entered a plea of guilty and was sentenced to 99 years in the Tennessee State Penitentiary. In the years to follow Ray’s many attempts to withdraw his guilty plea and be tried by a jury were unsuccessful. Ray died in prison on April 23, 1998 at the age of 70.
The idea of Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a holiday was first promoted by labor unions during contract negotiations. After King's death, Representative John Conyers introduced a bill in Congress to make King's birthday a national holiday.
The bill first came to a vote in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1979, however it fell five votes short of the number needed for passage. Soon after, the King Center turned to support from the corporate community and the general public.
Six million signatures were collected for a petition to Congress to pass the law, termed by a 2006 article in The Nation as "the largest petition in favor of an issue in U.S. history."
At the White House Rose Garden on November 2, 1983, President Ronald Reagan signed a bill, proposed by Representative Katie Hall, creating a federal holiday to honor King. It was observed for the first time on January 20, 1986.
According to a Gallup poll conducted among citizens of the United States in 2000, King is the second most admired person of the 20th century.
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