Government offices will be closed on Monday, Jan. 20,
in observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

The federal holiday is designated as a national day of
service to encourage all Americans to volunteer and
improve their communities, according to the National
Museum of African American History and Culture.

President Ronald Reagan signed the King Holiday Bill
into law on Nov. 2, 1983, thus designating the third
Monday in January a federal holiday in observance of
civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, according
to the museum.

The U.S. Postal Service, banks and stock markets will
also be closed on Jan. 20, however most restaurants,
grocery stores and retail stores will remain open.

President Ronald Reagan signing the MLK Holiday
Bill 1983.

Martin Luther King Jr. (January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968)

On January 15, 1929, Martin Luther King Jr was born in Atlanta,
Georgia, the son of a Baptist minister. King received a doctorate
degree in theology and in 1955 helped organize the first major
protest of the African American civil rights movement: the
successful Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Influenced by Mohandas Gandhi, he advocated civil disobedience
and nonviolent resistance to segregation in the South. The
peaceful protests he led throughout the American South were
often met with violence, but King and his followers persisted,
and the movement gained momentum.

Martin Luther King Jr.
(born Michael King Jr.; January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968)

 
MIKE GRACIA

Douglas Wilder, the first African American to be elected governor
of an American state, took office as Governor of Virginia on this
day in 1990. Wilder broke a number of color barriers in Virginia
politics and remains an enduring and controversial figure in the
state’s political scene.

Born in 1931 in Church Hill, a poor and segregated neighborhood
of Richmond, Wilder is the grandson of slaves and is named for Frederick Douglass. He grew up in the Jim Crow era, graduating
from Richmond’s Virginia Union University in 1951. Wilder fought
in the Korean War, earning the Bronze Star, before studying law
at Howard University and returning to Richmond to practice.

On December 6, 1961, Syracuse running back Ernie Davis
became the first African American player to win the
Heisman Trophy, college football’s top individual award,
beating Ohio State fullback Bob Ferguson. Earlier in day,
Davis met with President John Kennedy at the Waldorf-
Astoria Hotel in New York. "I never thought I’d ever be
shaking the hand of the President of the United States,"
he says.   

As a senior in 1961, Davis rushed for 823 yards and scored
14 touchdowns. The previous season, he rushed for 877
yards.

Davis was the first pick in the 1962 NFL draft, by Washington,
which traded him to the Cleveland Browns. But he never
played in the NFL. Davis was diagnosed with leukemia later
in 1962, and died on May 18, 1963. He was only 23.         

In Montgomery, Alabama on December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was
jailed for refusing to give up her seat on a public bus to a white
man, a violation of the city’s racial segregation laws.

The successful Montgomery Bus Boycott, organized by a young
Baptist minister named Martin Luther King Jr., followed Park’s
historic act of civil disobedience.

“The mother of the civil rights movement,” as Rosa Parks is
known, was born in Tuskegee, Alabama, in 1913.

She worked as a seamstress and in 1943 joined the Montgomery
chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People.

Martin Luther King Jr. (1929 – April 4)

Rosa Louise McCauley Parks  (1913 –  2005)