Happy Birthday, Reverend King

Stevie Wonder was in his teens when he attended the memorial service for Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., who was assassinated in April 1968. Shortly afterwards, people who respected Reverend King began to petition the government to make January 15, King’s birthday, a federal holiday.

As Stevie Wonder put it, “We ought to have a way to honor this human being and reaffirm the ideals he lived and died for; to honor him through a national holiday would also, of course, bestow a great honor on black America by implicitly acknowledging him as a symbol of the tremendous contributions black people have made to this country’s historical development.”

But there was little progress toward making such a holiday until the 1980s. When Wonder released the album “Hotter than July” in 1980, which contains the song “Happy Birthday,” he requested that fans join together in making January 15, 1981, a national holiday. Americans from around the country gathered on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., that January to draw attention to the movement. In the short run, nothing happened, but Wonder kept rallying support and in 1983, he lobbied Congress in person. In that year MLK Day finally became a nationwide holiday. It became the tenth holiday of the federal calendar.

The first official observation of Reverend King’s birthday took place in 1986, and it included a special public performance at the Kennedy Center in New York City. Wonder led the audience in a knockout singing of the song.

Happy Birthday, Reverend King!

(256 words)