From the start, the push for a national King holiday prompted fierce political tug-of-war on campus and off. Less than a week after King’s assassination, Representative John Conyers (D-MI), then a junior congressman, introduced a bill calling for a King observance—one he would introduce again and again. President Jimmy Carter advocated for it, to no avail, in 1970. The next year, Stevie Wonder literally lent his voice to the campaign in a new single, “Happy Birthday,” that begins:
You know it doesn’t make much sense
There ought to be a law against
Anyone who takes offense
at a day in your celebration.
The big showdown came in 1983, when archconservative Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC) filibustered the MLK Day bill on the Senate floor, carrying a tome with information from King’s FBI file and insinuating, Red Scare-style, that King was a Communist. In response, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) stomped the file to the ground. Days after that dustup, Congress voted for a King holiday. Staring down a possible veto override if he objected, President Ronald Reagan begrudgingly sealed the deal. Even then, some states waxed defiant. South Carolina didn’t recognize it as a paid day off for public workers until 2000, and Alabama and Mississippi continue to lump in King with Confederate General Robert E. Lee in a deeply odd hybrid holiday every third Monday in January.
Some colleges and universities also held out. Administrators, students, staff and faculty grappled with questions that spoke to the wider national contestation, sparking a conversation about the holiday but also the demands of university life. Should classes just be cancelled or merely paused to allow attendance at Martin Luther King-specific events? Should such a holiday be best experienced by days of service—as recommended by President Bill Clinton in the early 1990s—or by fruitful class discussions that centered on racial equity or social change? While administrators pondered the cost of paying wages for a holiday, some instructors lamented the loss of another teaching day.
And there were other calculations. Didn’t observing the King holiday signal disregard for not just King, but for black students and faculty? Would student advocates become protesters? Or would alternate observances become so large and prominent—as they did in the Henrico County, Virginia school system, where almost 5,000 students boycotted school on the second official national King holiday in 1987—so that recognizing the day might be the best choice?