Holiday honours civil rights leader

Press, 21 October 1983, Page 6

Holiday honours civil rights leader

NZPA Washington The Senate, on a vote of 78-22, sent President Ronald Reagan yesterday a bill establishing a national holiday in memory of Dr Martin Luther King, jun. That supreme honour has been accorded to only one other American, George Washington.

The holiday will be celebrated on the third Monday in January, beginning in 1986. Mr Reagan is committed to signing the legislation, which the House had approved earlier. Yesterday’s vote ended 15 years of efforts by supporters to create the holiday as a memorial to Dr King, the Baptist minister whose fight for equality through peaceful means won him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.

Four years later, Dr King was assassinated on the balcony of a Memphis, Tennessee, motel.

Lincoln emancipated the slaves, but it took Dr King to free their descendants from the back of the bus.

He preached a simple idea: That black people had every right to sit at lunch counters, to wait on white customers in department stores, to live where they choose — and to vote.

He said that it was all right, in those pursuits, to disobey the law, but not to strike back at one’s tormentors. Both ideas were alien to America. He led the cause with his own body, went to jail time after time, but clung to the belief — in the face of the police dogs, electric cattle prods and fire hoses — that non-violence was the path to equality.

Harry Truman once called Dr King a troublemaker and J. Edgar Hoover, of the‘Federal Bureau of Investigation, labelled him the most notorious liar in the country. But less than three decades after he started his revolution, the Government is blessing his work by making his birthday a legal Federal holiday. Maybe, as cynics suggest, Congress and Mr Reagan had the black vote in mind in finally embracing the idea. But that, too, is a tribute to Dr King. He and his followers made blacks a power to be heeded.