Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial: Overcoming
This is in the history books: In 1983, Congress passed and President Ronald Regan signed the law making a national holiday.
This is history, but it’s not in many books: My Utah state legislature made us the last state to recognize the holiday. In 2000 our legislators finally renamed our generic “Human Rights Day” Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. The argument for preferring the broader “human rights” name went something like, “Civil and human rights is bigger than just one person. Many people struggled for human rights, not just Martin Luther King, Jr.”
And so we kept the faceless “human rights” day for many years. That I recall,
