MLK Day Of Service 2023 Focus On Civil Rights Leader’s Unfinished Work

ACROSS AMERICA — Americans on Monday will honor the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., a driving force behind watershed voting, housing and civil rights legislation in the 1960s, with service projects and events addressing the structural changes King spent his life working to achieve.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day is the only federal holiday designated as a day of service. The 2023 theme for the King Center observance is “It Starts With Me: Cultivating a Beloved Community Mindset to Transform Unjust Systems,” continuing the life’s work of the slain civil rights leader a majority of Americans say is unfinished.

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 2023 MLK Day observance comes as a conservative U.S. Supreme Court appears willing to put another nail in the coffin of the landmark Voting Rights Act King had championed. Passed in 1965, it was aimed at eliminating racial discrimination against minority voters.

The case heard by the justices would make it harder to create Black electoral majority congressional districts and have far-reaching effects on minority voting power across the United States. At issue are lawsuits seeking to force Alabama to create a second Black majority congressional district. About 27 percent of Alabamians are Black, but they form a majority in just one of the state's seven congressional districts.

The latest showdown over the federal Voting Rights Act could have far-reaching effects on minority voting power across the country. It comes about a decade after a more balanced court gutted the Voting Rights Act, striking down the formula at the heart of the legislation. It required that states and other political jurisdictions with a history of discrimination against minority voters receive approval from the federal government before redrawing electoral districts.

Legislation to restore the protections of the Voting Rights Act — the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act — has not been reintroduced in the new 118th Congress. It passed the House in August 2021, but the Senate did not take it up after it was introduced in October of that year.

Had he lived, King would have turned 94 on his birthday, which is Jan. 15, but is always celebrated on the third Monday in January. He was felled by an assassin’s bullet — the antithesis of his message of non-violent activism — as he stood on the balcony outside his second-floor hotel room in Memphis, where he planned to march the next day with striking sanitation workers.

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.

Here are five things to know about the social activist and humanitarian:

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 was resonating 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 Ghandi.

King is the only non-president to have a national holiday named in his honor. President Ronald Reagan signed a bill in 1983 establishing Martin Luther King Jr. Day, to be observed on the third Monday in January near King’s birthday on Jan. 15. The first observance was in 1986. King is also the only non-president with a memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. He is honored across the country, where about 900 streets and boulevards are named after him, according to Derek Alderman, who heads the geography department at the University of Tennessee. About 70 percent of them are in Southern states: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina and Texas.