For a national holiday that experienced a most difficult birth, Martin Luther King Jr. Day has grown up to be healthy and robust.
Even after being signed into law by President Reagan in 1983, the holiday honoring the slain Civil Rights leader remained scrawny and underfed for years. As late as 1990, Arizona residents voted against recognizing the holiday, leading the National Football League to move a Super Bowl that had been planned for Phoenix. As late as 2000, the holiday was known in Virginia as Lee-Jackson-King Day, honoring two Civil War generals and a civil rights leader. Irony, apparently, is lost on Virginians. Later that year, when South Carolina agreed to recognize the holiday in honor of King, each state in the union was finally on board.
And while King’s role in organizing and leading disenfranchised citizens — along with his support of nonviolent protest — are worthy of recognition, the fact that the holiday has taken on a broader meaning is what gives it added heft in the national consciousness.
In 1994, President Clinton signed federal legislation turning Martin Luther King Jr. Day into a national day of service. President Obama is often credited for altering the focus of the holiday toward volunteerism, but the idea was institutionalized long before Obama entered the national spotlight.
Rather than just another day off, for millions of Americans today is a day to recognize King’s legacy by performing various works of charity. This might mean spending the day aiding a nonprofit organization. Or maybe participating in community service. Or maybe simply assisting a neighbor who needs some help around the house.
Either way, whether it’s in honor of King or simply because it’s the right thing to do, there are few ideas better than a national day of service. There is remarkable power in the sense of community that accompanies the serving of others, a selfless humility that pays dividends long after the day has passed.
And along the way, the notion of a national day of service has become a step toward creating the kind of post-racial society that King envisioned and that the election of Obama reflected. This doesn’t mean that we are blind to differences in color or upbringing or beliefs. It means that those differences should not prevent us from helping each other.
The caterwauling in Washington, D.C., often offensively belies this vision. Last week, it was revealed that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said during the 2008 campaign that Obama could be elected because he was light-skinned and spoke “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”
Most of us have moved beyond the use of the word “Negro” and the insinuation of outdated stereotypes, choosing not to be raging hypocrites like the supposedly progressive Reid. But that’s a discussion for another time.
For now, the focus is on the legacy of King and how the holiday in his honor has come to perfectly reflect the ideals of the nation.
As King himself once said, “An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.”
As he also said, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
That is the thinking that has come to embody Martin Luther King Jr. Day. And by turning it into a national day of service, by celebrating it in a fashion that goes beyond whether you might or might not have agreed with King’s philosophy and actions, we have made the holiday much more meaningful than simply an extra day off from work.
