Martin Luther King Day
January 16, 2023
Each year, on the third Monday in January, we celebrate MLK Day. As I am sure you know, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968) was a Baptist minister and social activist. He dedicated his life to the nonviolent struggle for justice in the United States. King’s leadership played a pivotal role in ending entrenched segregation and to the creation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
10 Things You May Not Know
1. Over six million people signed a petition given to Congress in an attempt to get the holiday recognized. This petition was submitted to Congress in 1970. This was and remains the largest petition in US history.
2. MLK day is also celebrated in Hiroshima, Japan, where the mayor holds a dinner at the mayor’s office to celebrate the city’s calls for peace with Dr. King’s human rights beliefs.
3. Toronto, Canada also celebrates MLK day.
4. King was born Michael King Jr. on January 15, 1929. In 1934, however, his father, a pastor at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, traveled to Germany and became inspired by the Protestant Reformation leader Martin Luther. As a result, King Sr. changed his own name as well as that of his five-year-old son.
5. King was such a gifted student that he skipped grades nine and 12 before enrolling in 1944 at Morehouse College, the alma mater of his father and maternal grandfather. Although he was the son, grandson and great-grandson of Baptist ministers, King did not intend to follow the family vocation until Morehouse president Benjamin E. Mays, a noted theologian, convinced him otherwise. King was ordained before graduating college with a degree in sociology.
6. On September 20, 1958, King was in Harlem signing copies of his new book, Stride Toward Freedom when he was approached by Izola Ware Curry. The woman asked if he was Martin Luther King Jr. After he said yes, Curry said, “I’ve been looking for you for five years,” and she plunged a seven-inch letter opener into his chest. The tip of the blade came to rest alongside his aorta, and King underwent hours of delicate emergency surgery. Surgeons later told King that just one sneeze could have punctured the aorta and killed him. From his hospital bed where he convalesced for weeks, King issued a statement affirming his nonviolent principles and saying he felt no ill will toward his mentally ill attacker.
7. On June 30, 1974, as 69-year-old Alberta Williams King played the organ at a Sunday service inside Ebenezer Baptist Church, Marcus Wayne Chenault Jr. rose from the front pew, drew two pistols and began to fire shots. One of the bullets struck and killed King, who died steps from where her son had preached nonviolence. The deranged gunman said that Christians were his enemy and that although he had received divine instructions to kill King’s father, who was in the congregation, he killed King’s mother instead because she was closer. The shooting also left a church deacon dead. Chenault received a death penalty sentence that was later changed to life imprisonment, in part due to the King family’s opposition to capital punishment.
8. Mahatma Gandhi, who fought for Indian independence from British rule using nonviolent methods, had a great influence on Dr. King. He visited India in 1959, eleven years after Gandhi was assassinated, and wrote a short story about that trip, entitled “My Trip to the Land of Gandhi.”
9. Both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi were influenced by Henry David Thoreau, a 19th-century American essayist and philosopher who wrote about his philosophy of civil disobedience in a popular essay, “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience.”
10. The bulk of Dr. King’s civil rights work occurred during an 11-year period. During that time, he traveled over six million miles, gave more than twenty-five hundred talks or speeches, and wrote five books, as well as numerous articles.