Politics & Government

Ronald Reagan and Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

On Nov. 2, 1983, President Ronald Reagan signed into law the bill that would institute Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. The holiday was first observed in 1986.

Reagan resisted the holiday at first. The union-backed bill would give federal workers a 10th annual holiday, cutting against the Great Communicator's vision of a smaller and more efficient government.

Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kansas) criticized other conservatives for putting fiscal concerns over the need to honor the civil rights leader.

"I suggest they hurry back to their pocket calculators and estimate the cost of 300 years of slavery followed by a century or more of economic, political, and social exclusion and discrimination," he said.

King biographer Taylor Branch said Reagan "expressed doubt about King's fundamental loyalty to the United States on the very day he signed (the) legislation."

Similar accusations were made on the Senate floor, where Sen. Jessie Helms (R-North Carolina) filibustered against the holiday, claiming King was a Communist.

Here are some of Reagan's remarks given just before signing the holiday into law:

Martin Luther King was born in 1929... In a nation that proclaimed liberty and justice for all, too many black Americans were living with neither.
Dr. King had awakened something strong and true, a sense that true justice must be colorblind, and that among white and black Americans, as he put it, "Their destiny is tied up with our destiny, and their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom; we cannot walk alone."

There was a change of heart. The conscience of America had been touched. Across the land, people had begun to treat each other not as blacks and whites, but as fellow Americans.

But traces of bigotry still mar America. So, each year on Martin Luther King Day, let us not only recall Dr. King, but rededicate ourselves to the Commandments he believed in and sought to live every day: Thou shall love thy God with all thy heart, and thou shall love thy neighbor as thyself.
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