MARTIN LUTHER KING JR DAY
Martin Luther King Jr. was one of the most important figures in the fight for civil rights, using methods of peaceful protest to ensure that every human received the rights that they deserve. On Nov. 2, 1983, Ronald Reagan signed a bill making King’s birthday, Jan. 20, a federal holiday, according to the American Presidency Project website. The San Marcos MLK Jr. Day festivities are spearheaded by the Dunbar Heritage Association — a local nonprofit with the mission of preserving Black culture through social practices, traditions, rituals, knowledge, spiritual beliefs, language, and artistic expression. The DHA held a wreath-laying ceremony, followed by a march through the historic Dunbar Neighborhood that ended at the Dunbar Recreation Center where free food and music awaited participants.
Historian Joleene Snider, Texas State University History Department senior lecturer emeritus, said the impetus for the Civil Rights movement in America occurred toward the end of WWII when the troops were integrated due to insufficient manpower.
“What they discovered is that once you were in the middle of a battle, nobody cared what color you were as long as you were shooting at the enemy and keeping them from shooting at you. … But the contradiction, the hypocrisy of asking men to serve the country, to fight on those battle lines and then to come home and go back to segregated institutions in every aspect of life in the Amer- ican South was an even more profound injustice, particularly to those men who had served,” Snider said. “One of the things Russia complained about and castigated the United States over — and they had such a valid point that was undeniable — [was that the American Declaration of Independence touts] freedom, equal opportunity, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness [for all], and that whole mystique of the free world; then we practiced an extreme form of racism and segregation, and it was a valid criticism. It hurt America’s sense of leadership in the free world. So those things started to come together in the late 1940s.”
King began to be heavily involved in the Civil Rights Movement at 26 years old when Rosa Parks bravely refused to give up her seat on the bus for a white passenger in Montgomery, Ala. on Dec. 1, 1955.
“He did have a doctorate degree, and a lot of his studies in his graduate program were about Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi had a passive resistance movement in India, and [he knew] how Gandhi had essentially defeated the British in every way imaginable with that passive resistance,” Snider said. “He had already been very familiar with that and had already begun to think of it as a way to oppose racism in the American South when Rosa Parks wouldn’t get up that day.”
According to the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute website, the Montgomery bus boycott was a one year and one month long mass protest held by the the Montgomery Improvement Association, of which King was the president, that led to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that segregation on public buses was unconstitutional. This served as validation that the method of passive resistance could prove useful in furthering the rights of all Americans.
Snider said 1963 is when the Birmingham Riots occurred, which were televised.
“Everybody was watching ‘Bull’ Connor instructing his city Fire Department to turn those powerful fire hoses on these kids, … and literally rolling these children, these small bodies down the street. The hoses were so powerful, and they were turning loose these attack dogs on people, many of them children,” Snider said. “At each of these junctures, it’s King’s words that became so much a part of the movement and the sacrifice of the movement … When he changed clothes out of his suit and tie and put on his dungarees. People knew he was ready to go to jail, and he was marching with them. He was always in the front line of any major march.”
It was from the Birmingham jail in 1963 where King wrote his famous letter.
“I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the eighth-century prophets left their little villages and carried their ‘thus saith the Lord’ far beyond the boundaries of their hometowns; and just as the Apostle Paul left his little village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to practically every hamlet and city of the Greco-Roman world, I too am compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my particular hometown. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid,” King wrote in his letter from Birmingham jail. “I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.”
Later in the same year, King gave his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington, according to the NAACP website.
“Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood; now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children. It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment,” King declared in front of an estimated crowd of 250,000. “I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. 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.’” As a result of the hard work of Civil Rights leaders, Snider said the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, and the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965.
The MLK Jr. Research and Education Institute website states that King was shot on April 4, 1968 by James Earl Ray, who later confessed to the crime and was sentenced to a 99-year prison term. King’s contributions will never be forgotten, and each year on his birthday people across the United States march in his honor.
