Patrick Comerford
Until Trump intervened and abolished the federal holiday, the third Monday in January was marked each year in the US as Martin Luther King Jr Day, a federal holiday celebrating the life and achievements of the civil rights leader, the Revd Dr Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King’s actual birthday was on 15 January 1929, and he was murdered on 4 June 1968. But on Martin Luther King Day today, it is worth considering the choices the US faces this week.
Forty-five years ago, on 3 January 1981, in a series in The Irish Times on ‘The Spell of the Sixties,’ I wrote a full-page feature for the front page of the Saturday supplement ‘Martin Luther King and the End of a Dream.’
Three years later, when it came to writing my first book, Do You Want to Die for NATO?, I headed chapters with quotations from Martin Luther King on nonviolence and the arms race.
King’s march on Washington on 28 August 1963 is in sharp contrast with Trump’s march on the Capitol on 6 January 2021 as he refused to accept that he had lost the presential election.
On that August day almost 63 years ago, Martin Luther King led more than 200,000 people in a march on Washington, not to overturn democracy, but to extend democratic rights to all Americans, including jobs and freedom.
On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, King called on Americans ‘to sit down together at the table of brotherhood’ and meet our promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all.
In contrast, Trump spoke in front of the White House, calling on Mike Pence to overturn the democratic will of the people, and calling on his own followers to fight. He told them ‘you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.’
And he told them, ‘We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.’
In yet another display of his pathological, if not congenital, compulsion to exaggerate and lie, Trump claimed his crowd was larger in numbers than those who marched on Washington with Martin Lutger King.
He spoke of the US today in degrading language, comparing it with a ‘third world country’ and ‘a communist country.’ He mocked people’s weight, skin colour and background, mocked the members of the supreme court and mocked state governors and legislatures.
As he addressed the mob in an incoherent and rambling address, they included neo-nazis and members of far-right and white supremacist militias as he spoke of them as ‘amazing patriots’ and promised them, ‘The best is yet to come.’
And so, it is egregious hypocrisy that Trump could later say Martin Luther King ‘exemplified the quintessential American belief that we will leave a brighter, more prosperous future for our children.’ He spoke of King as ‘a giant of the civil rights movement whose nonviolent resistance to the injustices of his era – racial segregation, employment discrimination, and the denial of the right to vote – enlightened our Nation and the world.’
Has any American president been so crass, so vulgar, so bigoted, so smug and so self-righteous?
He recalled how, ‘In the face of tumult and upheaval, Dr King reminded us to always meet anger with compassion in order to truly “heal the hurts, right the wrongs and change society”.’
He spoke of the ‘spirit of forgiveness’ and the need ‘to bind the wounds of past injustice by lifting up one another regardless of race, gender, creed, or religion, and rising to the first principles enshrined in our founding documents.’
He claimed he was committed to ‘upholding’ King’s ‘legacy and meeting our sacred obligation to protect the unalienable rights of all Americans.’
Needless to say, these proved to be hollow words. Despite being a federal holiday, Trump signed an executive order last month removing two days from the National Park Service’s list of free days: Martin Luther King Jr Day and Juneteenth (19 June), commemorating the day the last group of enslaved people learned they were free after the Union won the Civil War.
It is interesting that it was a Republican President, Ronald Reagan, who signed the holiday into law in 1983, and it was first observed three years later. At first, some states resisted observing the holiday as such, giving it alternative names or combining it with other holidays. It was officially observed in all 50 states of the US for the first time 26 years ago in 2000.
The idea of Martin Luther King Jr Day as a holiday was promoted by trade unions in negotiations. After King’s death, Representative John Conyers (Democrat, Michigan) and Senator Edward Brooke (Republican, Massachusetts) introduced a bill in Congress to make King’s birthday a national holiday. The bill first came to a vote in the House of Representatives in 1979. However, it fell five votes short of the number needed. Only two other figures have national holidays in the US honouring them: George Washington and Christopher Columbus.
Soon after, the King Center turned to support from the corporate community and the general public. The success of this strategy was cemented when Stevie Wonder released his single ‘Happy Birthday’ to popularise the campaign in 1980 and hosted the Rally for Peace Press Conference in 1981. Six million signatures were collected for a petition to Congress to pass the law, termed by a 2006 article in The Nation as ‘the largest petition in favour of an issue in US history.’
Senator Jesse Helms and Senator John Porter East (both Republican, North Carolina) led the opposition to the holiday and questioned whether King was important enough to receive such an honour. Helms criticised King’s opposition to the Vietnam War and accused him of espousing ‘action-oriented Marxism.’ Helms led a filibuster against the bill and alleged King had associations with communists. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (Democrat, New York) declared the document a ‘packet of filth,’ threw it on the Senate floor and stomped on it.
President Reagan originally opposed the holiday. When asked about Helms’s accusations that King was a communist, he said ‘We’ll know in 35 years, won’t we?’ But on 2 November 1983, Reagan signed a bill into law to create a federal holiday honouring King. The final vote in the House of Representatives was 338-90 and the final vote in the Senate was 78-22. The holiday was observed for the first time 40 years ago on 20 January 1986, and since then was observed on the third Monday of January.
Although the federal holiday was signed into law in 1983 and took effect three years later, not every US state chose to observe the January holiday at the state level until 1991. New Hampshire became the last state to name a holiday after King, which they first celebrated in January 2000.
South Carolina was the last state to recognise the day as a paid holiday for all state employees.
Technically, Trump alone does not have the power to cancel MLK Day or any established federal holiday – that would require an act of Congress. But legalities and constitutional checks and balances no longer seem to command respect in the White House.
As I re-read Trump’s hollow words from five years, I wonder what the US faces today, with the rise in racism, the fast erosion of democratic and human rights, and unprecedented war-mongering and sabre-rattling.
I concluded my feature in The Irish Times 45 years ago in January 1980:
‘For King, nonviolence was no mere tactic, it was a necessary form of action, of sacrificial love, in a world of increasing hatred and violence. The question is not so much was he a failure of the ’60s, but whether he can be a success in the ’80s before it is too late.
“In our day, the choice is either nonviolence or non-existence”.’
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