Martin Luther King, Jr., Day is a federal holiday. Almost immediately after King’s death in 1968, there were calls for a national holiday in his honor. Beginning in 1970, a number of states and cities made his birthday, January 15, a holiday. Although legislation for a federal holiday was introduced in Congress as early as 1968, there was sufficient opposition, on racial and political grounds, to block its passage. In 1983 legislation making the third Monday in January a federal holiday finally was passed, and the first observance nationwide was in 1986.
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