Sherry Larson
People’s Defender
Monday, January 16, is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. This day is set aside to celebrate the life of this Baptist minister and social activist who led the civil rights movement in the U.S. from the mid-1950s until he was assassinated on April 4, 1968.
King devoted his life to the nonviolent struggle for justice in the United States. History.com states that his “leadership played a pivotal role in ending entrenched segregation for African Americans and to the creation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”
Britannica.com states that King came from a middle-class, college-educated family in Atlanta, Georgia. Both his father and his maternal grandfather were Baptist ministers.
King was a gifted student, and history.com reports that he skipped grades 9 and 12 before enrolling in Morehouse College in 1944. King obtained a degree in sociology with no plans of becoming a minister until the Morehouse president convinced him otherwise. “After earning a divinity degree from Pennsylvania’s Crozer Theological Seminary, King attended graduate school at Boston University, where he received his Ph.D. degree in 1955.”
Some less-known facts about King’s life provided by history.com include his going to jail 29 times for acts of civil disobedience and other trumped-up charges. Nearly ten years before his assassination, a woman named Izola Ware Curry attacked King while he was doing a book signing in Harlem. Curry plunged a seven-inch letter opener into King’s chest. He underwent several hours of delicate surgery. He later affirmed his nonviolent beliefs and declared that he had no ill will against his mentally ill attacker.
King’s famous “I have a dream” speech occurred on August 28, 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial. He declared, “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed – we hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.”
King is among four other Americans whose birthdays the U.S. celebrates as National Holidays. President Ronald Reagan signed the bill to honor King. The holiday became recognized for the first time in 1986 and continues the 3rd Monday of January, close to King’s January 15 birthdate.