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Fifteen years earlier, on April 4, 1968, Mrs. King had lost her husband, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to an assassin's bullet. In the months after the death of the civil rights icon, Congressman John Conyers Jr. of Michigan introduced the first legislation seeking to make King's birthday, Jan. 15, a federal holiday. The King Memorial Center in Atlanta was founded around the same time, and it sponsored the first annual observance of King's birthday, in January 1969, almost a decade and a half before it became an official government-sanctioned holiday. Before then, individual states...
...emphasize King's associations with communists and his alleged sexual dalliances as reasons not to honor him with a federal holiday. As part of his efforts, on Oct. 3, 1983, Helms read a paper on the Senate floor, written by an aide to Senator East, called "Martin Luther King Jr.: Political Activities and Associations" and also provided a 300-page supplemental document to the members of the Senate detailing King's communist connections. Some Senators expressed outrage over Helms' actions, including New York's Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who threw the document to he ground, stomped on it and deemed...
...same level as the father of our country and above the many other Americans whose achievements approach that of Washington's" by making him one of the few individuals honored by a federal holiday. The day before the bill passed the Senate, District Judge John Lewis Smith Jr. denied Helms' request to unseal FBI surveillance tapes of King that were due to remain sealed until 2027. President Reagan signed the bill into law in November 1983 and the first official holiday was observed on the third Monday of January...
...Arizona was not the only state openly contemptuous of federal law. In 2000, 17 years after the law's official passage and the same year it pulled the Confederate flag down from its statehouse dome, South Carolina became the last state to sign a bill recognizing Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a paid holiday...
...pictures of the last days of Martin Luther King Jr...