The memory of Nobel Laureate Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. is honored with a federal holiday observed on the third Monday of January across the nation. Courtesy/history.com
National News:
Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the United States. President Ronald Reagan signed the bill in 1983 in the White House Rose Garden designating this date a federal holiday honoring Martin Luther King, Jr., to be observed on the third Monday of January.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was born in Atlanta in 1929, the son of a Baptist minister. He received a doctorate degree in theology and in 1955 organized the first major protest of the civil rights movement: the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott.
Influenced by Mohandas Gandhi, he advocated nonviolent civil disobedience to racial segregation. The peaceful protests he led throughout the American South were often met with violence, but King and his followers persisted, and the movement gained momentum.
A powerful orator, he appealed to Christian and American ideals and won growing support from the federal government and Northern whites.
In 1963, he led his massive March on Washington, in which he delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” address. In 1964, the civil rights movement achieved two of its greatest successes: the ratification of the 24th Amendment, which abolished the poll tax, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited racial discrimination in employment and education and outlawed racial segregation in public facilities.
In October of that year, King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He donated the prize money, valued at $54,600, to the civil rights movement.
In the late 1960s, King openly criticized U.S. involvement in Vietnam and turned his efforts to winning economic equality for poorer Americans. By that time, the civil rights movement had begun to fracture, with activists such as Stokely Carmichael rejecting King’s vision of nonviolent integration in favor of African American self-reliance and self-defense.
In 1968, King intended to revive his movement through an interracial “Poor People’s March” on Washington, but escaped white convict James Earl Ray assassinated him April 4, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee.
Source: www.history.gov
Read the I Have a Dream” speech from the National Archives here.
Ten Profound Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes:
“Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”
“The art of acceptance is the art of making someone who has just done you a small favor wish that he might have done you a greater one.”
“Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies – or else? The chain reaction of evil – hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars – must be broken, or else we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.”
“Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him.”
“A lie cannot live.”
“Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.”
“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
“I have decided to stick to love … Hate is too great a burden to bear.”
“Only in the darkness can you see the stars.”
“If physical death is the price that I must pay to free my white brothers and sisters from a permanent death of the spirit, then nothing can be more redemptive.”
