Martin Luther King Jr.

Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day. It’s a federal holiday. His birthday was last Wednesday, January15th.

On November 2, 1983, President Ronald Reagan signed the King Holiday Bill into law, designating the third Monday in January a federal holiday in observance of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The legislation to recognize Martin Luther King Jr. Day was first introduced just four days after his assassination on April 4, 1968. Still, it would take 15 years of persistence by civil rights activists for the holiday to be approved by the federal government and an additional 17 years for it to be recognized in all 50 states. Today, it is the only federal holiday designated as a national day of service to encourage all Americans to volunteer and improve their communities. (source)

This was the only good thing Reagan did.

In 1987 Arizona’s Republican governor Evan Meacham cancelled MLK Day as his first act in office. For this racist weasel-shit stunt, he won a boycott of his state. His proud, bigoted stand backfired.

By 1989 only 44 states had adopted MLK Day.

In 1991 the NFL moved the 1993 Super Bowl from Phoenix, Arizona, to Pasadena, California as part of the ongoing boycott of Arizona. Classic fuck around and find out on Meacham's part. By the way, in 1988 Meacham was impeached and removed from office. It wasn’t for his self-banjaxing racism though. Like others of his party, he'd tuned out to be a total crook.

Meacham was indicted on six felony counts of perjury and filing a false campaign report in which he had failed to include a $350,000 loan to his campaign by a local real estate developer. (source)

Arizona citizens finally voted to enact MLK Day in 1992. It took losing the Super Bowl (and all the related lovely money) for the state to do the right thing. We can stick this in the money doesn't talk, it swears folder.

In 1999 New Hampshire was one of the last states to adopt MLK Day as a paid state holiday. It replaced their optional Civil Rights Day.

In 2000, South Carolina gave it up. They were the very last state to make MLK Day a paid holiday for all state employees. Until then, employees could choose between celebrating it or one of three Confederate-related holidays. 

WHAT SHITHEELS!

It should come as no surprise to me that, in Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas, Confederate Memorial Day is still celebrated AND state employees get a paid day off. It’s also commemorated in Kentucky, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, Missouri, Louisiana, and Virginia.

Jesus. It honestly shouldn’t stun me that so many of my fellow Americans are such racist, insecure, pea-brains. I mean, I’m an old woman—this isn’t fresh news. Hell’s bells, 77,303,573—nearly 50% of the citizens who bothered to participate in democracy—voted for the burnt orange, spackled white supremacist and his equally bigoted bankrolling buddies, Apartheid Clyde and Putin. Why am I still amazed that people can be such vast pools of rabid warthog smegma?

If "Did Not Vote" had been a presidential candidate, they would have beaten Donald Trump by 9.1 million votes, and they would have won 21 states, earning 265 electoral college votes to Trump's 175 and Harris's 98. (source)

What do we get when we don’t vote? Government by degenerate, tiny schwanzed, crooked oligarchs.

Like, I suspect, many others, I am finding it hard to look at resurgent racism as just one in a series of presidential offenses or another in a series of Republican errors. Racism is not just another wrong. The Antietam battlefield is not just another plot of ground. The Edmund Pettus Bridge is not just another bridge. The balcony outsideroom 306 at the Lorraine Motel is not just another balcony. As U.S. history hallows some causes, it magnifies some crimes.
~ Michael Gerson 

Dr. King was only 39 when he was murdered.

In 1955, when King was just 26 years old, he became the spokesman for the 13 month Montgomery bus boycott. It ended with the U.S. Supreme Court (in the days before they were completely bought and paid for by plutocrats) ruling that segregation on public buses is unconstitutional.

In 1963 he was a driving force behind March for Jobs and Freedom, (AKA the March on Washington) where he gave his I Have A Dream speech.

There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, when will you be satisfied? We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities.

We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating: for whites only.

We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote.

No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream. (source)

In 1964 King became the youngest person to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

On April 4, 1968 he was murdered, shot in the face by James Earl Ray. King was standing on the balcony of his room at the the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.

We must live together as brothers or perish together as fools.

Out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope.

I could really use a stone of hope right now.