Celebration of King holiday still faces pushback

Day to remember, commemorate the civil rights leader varies by state

Monday was Martin Luther King’s Birthday, the federal holiday that honors the assassinated civil rights leader. Well, not everywhere. All 50 states celebrate the public holiday on the third Monday in January, but not all states, cities and towns dedicate it solely to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Some package it as a broader celebration of both Rev. King and Confederate leaders.

State-by-state naming differences are remnants of fierce opposition to a holiday that was not officially recognized by all states until 1999.

A federal holiday honoring Rev. King was first proposed four days after he was assassinated, in 1968, but it took almost two decades of campaigning for it to be approved and designated at the national level.

Proposals to honor Rev. King met strong resistance in Congress, and when the holiday was enacted, many states were slow to acknowledge it. New Hampshire became the last state to officially recognize the holiday in 1999 after years of acrimonious debate.

When the proposal to create the holiday was debated in Congress in 1979, Republicans led the charge against it. The strongest opposition came from lawmakers in the Deep South.

Opponents argued that giving federal employees a new paid vacation day would be too expensive and that it was inappropriate to bestow such an honor upon Rev. King because he had never held elected office.

But by 1983, many Republicans in Congress had changed their minds. The King Holiday Bill passed the House and the Senate with bipartisan support and was signed by a Republican president.

Although Martin Luther King Jr. Day is commemorated by the federal government and, in some form, by all 50 states, some, like Arizona and Idaho, combine commemorations of Rev. King’s birthday with a holiday to honor civil rights.

A release by Nueces County, Texas, referred to the day as a “County Civil Rights Holiday.”

Biloxi, Miss., drew backlash on Twitter last week after the city’s official Twitter account posted an alert to residents about municipal closings on the holiday, calling it “Great Americans Day.” On Monday morning, city council voted to make the city’s holiday name match that of the federal holiday honoring Rev. King.

And then there are a few states in the Deep South — Arkansas, Alabama and Mississippi — that combine celebrations of the civil rights icon and that of Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general.

(Lexington, Va., even honors Lee and another Confederate general, Stonewall Jackson, with a parade and celebration during the weekend leading up to Rev. King’s birthday.)

Critics have decried those arrangements as an unholy merger that commemorate both freedom and slavery — a combination that is nonsensical at best and inflammatory at worst.

Arkansas lawmakers have tried in recent years to separate the two holidays— most recently, Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson is reviving an effort to remove Lee from the holiday — but the measures have been opposed from constituents who call the effort an affront to Southern heritage or by lawmakers who say they have better things to do.