Instantaneously, both official and unofficial memorials and commemorations cropped up in cities and towns across the country. Conyers and New York Representative Shirley Chisholm resubmitted the proposal each subsequent congressional session until it gained the votes needed to pass. SUPPORTERS RESPOND TO MLK’S DEATHįour days after an assassin’s bullet struck the peace activist on April 4, 1968, Michigan Congressman John Conyers Jr submitted a bill to make King’s birthday a national holiday but the measure failed to gain popular support. Not long before his 18th birthday, his hero was dead. At 16, he would meet King at a Chicago Freedom Movement rally. Wonder first recalled hearing the young black minister speak on the radio when he was five years old and news of a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, travelled to Detroit. King’s life and death left an indelible mark on him.
Wonder and his 1980 single would play an outsize role in the creation of Martin Luther King Day the first national holiday honouring a black American, celebrated on the third Monday of January each year. “I said, ‘Well, no, I really believe it will.’”
“We’re in a time where I don’t think it’s going to happen,” Wonder recounted. Sign up for The Gleaner’s morning and evening newsletters.
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