In the United States, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr birthday is celebrated every year on the third Monday in January. This year, it will be on January 15, the exact day he was born. It is a public holiday to honour his legacy as a civil rights leader. Dr. King is widely regarded as America’s pre-eminent advocate of nondiscrimination and the world’s greatest civil rights leader.
The holiday is meant to transform Dr. King’s life and teachings into community action, empower individuals, strengthen communities, bridge barriers, and create solutions to social problems.
Shortly after the 1954 Supreme Court decision: Brown v. Board of Education which held that segregated schools were unconstitutional, Dr. King joined the civil rights movement.
Born in Atlanta, Georgia, a city plagued by racial discrimination at the time, King’s oratorical skills, personal courage and determination to raise public awareness of racism and segregation in the US catapulted him into the leadership of the civil rights movement.
A Baptist minister by training, King was a pastor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, which was the epicenter of the civil rights movement against racial segregation in public transportation. It was there that Rosa Parks, a black seamstress had refused to give up her seat in a bus to a white male.
Her arrest for civil disobedience sparked a grassroots movement led by Dr. King who organized a bus boycott in Montgomery. The year-long boycott attracted national attention when he and other civil rights activists were arrested and beaten in 1955. It ended with a ban on racial segregation on all Montgomery buses by a United States District Court.
During the next decade, Dr. King organized several non-violent protests and mass demonstrations to draw attention to racial discrimination and to demand civil rights legislation to protect the rights of African-Americans. Dr. King’s peaceful demonstrations were countered by white police with police dogs, fire hoses, creating a controversy which generated newspapers headlines around the world.
Dr. King led several peaceful demonstrations in the late 1950s and 1960s to achieve legal equality for African-Americans.
His non-violent tactics of civil resistance and his moderate stance attracted many whites, but they were diametrically opposed to the militant and divisive image of Malcolm X who advocated freedom by any means necessary. King embodied the hopes and dreams of African Americans and of white progressives across the country.
Dr. King led similar demonstrations against poverty and international conflict, including the Vietnam War, but he was always true to his principles that men and women everywhere, regardless of colour, ethnicity or creed are equal members of the human race.
From 1955 until his death on April 4, 1968, Dr. King’s leadership of the civil rights movement achieved more genuine progress toward racial equality in America than in the previous 350 years. So powerful was the civil rights movement and Dr. King’s leadership that Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act in 1964, the same year he was honoured with the Nobel Peace Prize. He was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
His charismatic leadership inspired men and women, young and old in the US and around the world. It sparked the conscience of a generation that culminated in the historic march on Washington, DC on August 28, 1963 which drew over 250,000 in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial. It was there the icon of the civil rights movement King is an icon of the civil rights movement,
Our leaders should emulate some of Dr. King’s teachings in order to heal and bring harmony to Guyana.
