ON January 15, 2007, Saipan observed Martin Luther King Day, a federal holiday. MLK Day is held in observation of the national change that Dr. King affected during his short life.
Martin Luther Ling was born in Atlanta, Georgia and graduated from Morehouse College in 1848; Crozer Theological Seminary in 1951, and Boston University in 1955.
Along with others, such as Ella Baker and Rosa Parks, he provided leadership during the famous bus boycotts of 1955-1956 in Montgomery, Alabama. Fred Shuttleworth and Charles K. Steele organized the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Dr. King assumed the presidency of the organization, pursing civil-rights strategies nationwide.
In 1963, he headed the March on Washington, the largest gathering of citizens in Washington, D.C., up to that date, gathering over 200,000 people.
Dr. King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.
Dr. King slowly broadened his basis for civil struggle, as he began to widen his concerns from civil rights to the growing anti-war movement and his awareness of the problem of systemic poverty.
He planned a Poor Peoples March in 1968. While preparing for that action, he stopped in Memphis, Tennessee, to gather the support of the sanitation workers in that city, who were striking in the process of organizing their union. He made his last speech, considered a strange premonition of his own death.
Dr. King was shot and killed in Memphis by James Earl Ray April 4, 1968.
His written works include: “Stride Toward Freedom” (1958); “Why We Can’t Wait” (1964) and “Where Do We Go from Here?: Chaos or Community” (1967). Martin Luther King’s personal effects are housed in the American History Museum, Washington, D.C.); the Lorraine Motel Civil-Rights Museum, Memphis, Tennessee; and The National Civil Rights Museum. Atlanta, Georgia. His personal papers in available for review and study at Stanford University.
The Martin Luther King Day of Service was introduced by Congressman John Conyers. D-Michigan four days after the assassination of Dr. King in 1968. The bill stalled in Congress, after which a petition containing six million names was submitted to Congress in support of the bill. Conyers and the late Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, D-New York, continued to submit the legislation each subsequent legislative session, but the bills were consistently rejected. It was not until the marches of 1982 and 1983 that Congress finally supported the bill.
After 15 years of consistent submission, the bill was finally signed into law by then-President Ronald Regan. However, individual states — such as Arizona, South Carolina, and New Hampshire and Utah — refused to make the holiday a state-mandated holiday, in direct defiance of federal mandate. Indeed, it was not until as recently as the year 2000 that South Carolina made the Martin Luther King Day a legal holiday for state employees.
The effect of Dr. King and the Civil Rights movement on American society is intrinsic and far-reaching. It is impossible to separate the two, having affected the anti-war movements and the 1970’s women’s movement. The Civil Rights Acts of 1964, the 23rd Amendment banning the Poll Tax (1964), the Voting Rights Act (1965), the Loving vs. Virginia Case (1967), and the Civil Rights Act (1968) provided legal precedent for the successful arguments of various women’s rights cases. These cases included: Phillips vs. Martin Marietta Corporation (1971) against family status discrimination; Reed vs. Reed (1971) cementing the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment and the Pittsburgh Press Company vs. Pittsburgh Commission on Human Relations (1973), banning gender-specific job advertisements.
Dr. King has served as an inspiration and a clarion beacon of dedication to various citizens who have lived through the civil rights movements. When asked how her life would have been different had Dr. King not struggled, Cynthia Sering, special education coordinator at Kagman Elementary School, tearfully stated that “Dr. King taught me to dream, and took away the limits and constraints that the rest of the world placed on women.” Her husband, Tom Sering, agreed, adding, “The [greatest] impact on me was [Dr. King’s] opposition to the Vietnam War. He made the anti-war movement an accepted part of American society.” They both stated that “the civil rights movements made people question the policies of the American government in all aspects.” They agree that the United States is still in the process of trying to achieve Dr. King’s legacy.
Martin Luther King Day serves as a reminder that civil rights, according to outstanding Americans from Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-New York. to Malcolm X, are human rights.

LAURALYNN SWEET, M.Ed
Capital Hill, Saipan