Martin Luther King Day January 12, 2016

In the United States, every January we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) Day. It is one of only three national holidays honoring an individual.

MLK was born in Atlanta, Georgia where he earned a B.A. in Sociology while still a teenager. As an unknown, 26-year-old pastor in Montgomery, Alabama, he organized the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott to protest poor treatment of black passengers. The boycott lasted more than a year during which MLK was arrested and his house bombed. But after that the Montgomery bus system was no longer segregated.

MLK studied the teaching of Mahatma Gandhi and believed non-violent resistance to fight against tyranny and oppression. He encouraged and trained his followers to resist the urge to lash out in anger. He would go on to win a nobel peace prize and become one of the most powerful voices in the 1960’s civil right movement.

But MLK’s strength made him powerful enemies too. The U.S. government began surveillance of MLK in order to silence and intimidate him. And in 1968 he was assassinated in Memphis. He was not even 40 years old. Today MLK is a national hero and the only non-president to have a prominent memorial on the National Mall in Washington D.C.

“You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be. And one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls you to stand up for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid…. You refuse to do it because you want to live longer…. You’re afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you’re afraid that somebody will stab you, or shoot at you or bomb your house; so you refuse to take the stand

Well, you may go on and live until you are 90, but you’re just as dead at 38 as you would be at 90. And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.” -MLK