Reagan never really believed King deserved a federal holiday, and the establishment of the memorialization was on its surface a hard-won victory for King’s supporters. Civil rights leaders faced immense opposition from both congress and the president in the years leading up to its passing. In October of 1983, for example, when the bill reached the senate floor, North Carolina senator Jesse Helms filibustered it, condemning King’s “calculated use of nonviolence as a provocative act,” and insisting he was a communist.
As support for the holiday gained momentum in 1981 and 1982, Reagan vehemently opposed the idea, arguing that such a tribute would cost the federal government too much money (an estimated $18 million per year) and that “we could have an awful lot of holidays if we start down that road.” On October 19, 1983, Reagan attended his bimonthly President’s News Conference in the East Room of the White House. Shortly after he took to the podium he fielded a question on King. “Mr. President,” a reporter asked, “Senator Helms has been saying on the Senate floor that Martin Luther King, Jr., had communist associations, was a communist sympathizer. Do you agree?” With no discernable pause Reagan responded, “We’ll know in about thirty-five years, won’t we?”, referring to when King’s FBI file would be unsealed.
However, in a dramatically about-face, Reagan capitulated in the final months of 1983. The month following his news conference—and fifteen years after Michigan congressman John Conyers first introduced legislation for the King observance—Reagan sat on the White House lawn and signed a bill establishing a federal holiday for a man he had spent the previous two decades opposing, whilst several hundred attendees sang “We Shall Overcome.”
Yet even after he publicly changed his position, Reagan wrote a letter of apology to Meldrim Thomson, Jr., the Republican governor of New Hampshire, who had begged the president not to support the holiday. His new position, Reagan explained in the letter, was based “on an image [of King], not reality.” Reagan’s support for the federal King holiday, in other words, had nothing to do with his personal views of the civil rights leader. Instead the holiday provided Reagan with political pretext to silence the mounting criticism of his positions on civil rights. By 1983 Reagan faced an onslaught of criticism from groups such as the NAACP and the Urban League for his aggressive assaults on affirmative action and court-ordered busing. With a reelection bid on the horizon, he began to make more concerted efforts to pacify his critics and soften public opinion over his open hostility to civil rights. The King holiday was the primary component of this effort.