America celebrates the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr and the many things he did on January 16. The holiday wasn’t accepted the moment it was proposed by Representative John Conyers. When Conyers introduced it, the bill was stalled, causing an uproar of petitions being sent to Congress.

The public press pushed for this holiday and continued to assist with civil right marches in Washington during 1982 and 1983. Eventually with all the attention it was getting, President Ronald Reagan signed this holiday into law.

Many states didn’t take the holiday at first, saying he wasn’t deserving of the holiday and in place of it, people insisted America instead celebrate and honor confederate generals. After countless boycotts, eventually, all the states accepted the holiday, not as Martin Luther King Jr. Day, but as a civil rights day showing the support for his movement as a whole and just him individually.

When you’re getting up at noon, try to remember the things King has done for the Civil Rights movement. He helped organize The Great March in Washington, where he delivered his I Have a Dream speech, which led as a stepping stone to the Civil Rights movement. It had around 250,000 participants making it one of the biggest events for that time. His speech was ranked the top American speech in a 1999 poll of scholars and was engraved in the Lincoln Memorial.  Students across the states continue to study his words.

King was also one of the youngest to ever get the Noble Peace Prize at age thirty-five. He got it for leading non-violent resistance to racial prejudice in the U.S on October 14, 1964. His non-violent ways were inspired by Mahatma Gandhi ways when he went to go visit India.

All of these achievements were what made him a good leader in the eyes of his fellow African-Americans during the time of the Civil Rights movement. He led many protests and wrote five books and several articles. He was renowned worldwide as the symbolic leader of African Americans.