The first federal holiday of the calendar year is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, in honor of one of the most influential activists of the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The holiday is celebrated annually on the third Monday in January; while Dr. King’s birthday was January 15, 1929, it is celebrated this way in accordance with the Uniform Monday Holiday Act. This year, it falls on Monday, January 19.
Check out our previous articles on the holiday for more information.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a leader in the African American activist community and a well-known public figure. He is best known for his practices of civil disobedience as protest, such as sit-ins of establishments that did not allow African American patrons and events such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott denying business to transportation companies that maintained segregated buses.
His decades of effort (combined with those of other activists such as Bayard Rustin, Malcolm X, Ella Baker, Stokely Carmichael/Kwame Ture, and more) resulted in the passing of laws such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Fair Housing Act of 1968, and other major pieces of legislation that represented enormous leaps towards ending racial discrimination in the American legal system and society at large.
Tragically, King was assassinated at the age of 39, while he was in Memphis, Tennessee to support African American city sanitation workers striking against dangerous working conditions and lower wages than their white coworkers. His impact is still widely felt today, and his values are often cited by activists looking to continue his nonviolent practices.
Martin Luther King, Jr. Day is a federal holiday, so you can expect schools, banks, and government buildings to be closed, and businesses to be either closed or operating on limited hours.
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