These Places Are Closed In Crystal Lake, Cary For MLK Day Of Service

CRYSTAL LAKE AND CARY, IL — Most state and federal offices in Crystal Lake and Cary will be closed Monday for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a federal holiday honoring the slain civil rights leader.

There will be no mail delivery. FedEx will have modified services on MLK Day, while its Freight, Office, Critical, and Logistics divisions will be open as usual. UPS will be closed for the day, but limited locations and its Express Critical service will be available.

Banks will be closed and both the New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ will have the day off.

In Crystal Lake and Cary, schools will be closed. Meanwhile, the Crystal Lake Public Library and Cary Public Library will not be closed on MLK Day but many others may be so be sure to check before you head out.

Retail stores, restaurants and many other businesses are open as usual, although some, including Patch, observe MLK Day as a paid holiday.

King is the only non-president to have a national holiday named in his honor. He also is the only non-president with a memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. And Martin Luther King Jr. Day is the only federal holiday designated as a day of service.

The MLK monument and other iconic memorials on the National Mall are free to visit, but regular admission rates apply at museums or buildings within the mall area, including the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

In the past, MLK Jr. Day was one of the National Park Service’s free-admission days. In November, President Donald Trump removed MLK Day and Juneteenth from park service free-admission days, and added Flag Day, his birthday, on June 14.

The action did not change the status of MLK Day as a federal holiday. The spirit of the holiday as a day for service and recognition of King’s legacy continues through events and volunteerism.

King’s widow, the late Coretta Scott King, once said the greatest birthday her husband could receive “is if people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds celebrated the holiday by performing individual acts of kindness through service to others.”

The theme of the 2026 Martin Luther King Jr. Day observance is “Mission Possible 2: Building Community, Uniting a Nation the Nonviolent Way.”

The King Center describes the theme as “a blueprint for action” for building “a world where injustice ends, violence is replaced by compassion, and love becomes the prevailing force.” Events that started Monday and continue through Jan. 19 focus on the legacy and unfinished work of King, a driving force behind watershed voting, housing and civil rights legislation in the 1960s.

In the mid-1950s, King led efforts to desegregate the South through non-violent protest. His speeches, including the “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial during the 1963 March on Washington, are among the most iconic in U.S. history. It took 32 years for the federal government to finally approve a federal holiday celebrating King’s birthday.

At 35, King was the youngest person ever to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. He was awarded the prize in 1964 for his work to combat racial inequality through nonviolence. During his acceptance speech, he reiterated the importance of nonviolent protests and called attention to poverty.

“I am still convinced that nonviolence is both the most practically sound and morally excellent way to grapple with the age-old problem of racial injustice,” he said. “A second evil which plagues the modern world is that of poverty. Like a monstrous octopus, it projects its nagging, prehensile tentacles in lands and villages all over the world. Almost two-thirds of the peoples of the world go to bed hungry at night.”

The son, grandson and great-grandson of Baptist ministers, King’s birth name was Michael King Jr. He was born to Michael King Sr. and Alberta Williams King on Jan. 15, 1929.

But his father, the pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, had visited Germany in 1934 and was inspired by the teachings of Protestant Reformation leader Martin Luther, and began calling himself and later his son Martin Luther.

King was jailed 29 times and assaulted four times. Though his message resonated strongly among many, King was often targeted by police officers who saw his call for racial equality as a threat to American society. He frequently found himself in jail for practicing civil disobedience, including in Birmingham, Alabama, where he wrote the "Letter From a Birmingham Jail" that became a key civil rights document.

The FBI tracked King’s every move, intensifying their wiretaps and surveillance operations after the August 1963 March on Washington, where King delivered his “I Have a Dream speech,” regarded by many historians as the most important speech in the 20th century.

King traveled more than 6 million miles, gave 2,500 speeches and published five books and numerous articles. From 1957, when he was elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference formed to assist the civil rights movement, until his death in 1968, King traveled across the nation spreading the teachings of nonviolent resistance that had been inspired by Gandhi.

King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, as he stood on a balcony outside his second-floor room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Had he lived, King would have turned 96 on Wednesday, Jan. 15.