Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day

Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a national holiday.  It's January 19, although the late civil rights leader's birthday is on the 15th.  I'm off from work today, or should I say I WAS off for earlier this morning (I work on one of those problematic late night "graveyard" shifts). To many, I suppose, these "Monday" holidays can be seen as some extra free time.  But I think that the intent with the establishment of these special days on our calendar is for each of us to step back and reflect, at least a little, on their meaning and whom they are honoring...

Into the 1960s, even after the United States Supreme Court had, in 1954, unanimously nullified the "separate-but-equal" policy enacted after the ill-advised Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896 that officially legalized and institutionalized racial segregation (and consequently, racial discrimination) in America, blacks were being prevented from sharing the same rights as citizens that whites had, especially in the Deep South.  Dr. King's struggle on behalf of blacks...and ultimately, us all...started in 1955 when he organized a boycott of Montgomery, Alabama's bus system after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger and was arrested for it.  For the next several years, King and others marched and pushed for integration and equal rights for all.  He was a strong voice in favor of peaceful protest, and during the 1960s when others were promoting a more violent agenda for revolution, he played the role of peacemaker.  Martin Luther King, Jr. was also very clear in his denunciation of the U.S. military involvement in Vietnam from its outset, and this refusal on his part to compromise his own principles cost him much popularity at the time with those who had supported his civil rights activism but also supported the war effort.  At the end of his bitterly short life (assassinated at age 39), he was working hard to expose the poverty conditions of millions in this country and improve them.  Never fully understood and respected during his lifetime, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., by no means a perfect person (as none of us can honestly claim to be, either), has shown himself to have been a visionary whose compassion and stances on behalf of the downtrodden will go down through history...