Dr. Martin Luther King Jr Day Monday January 16, Take A Moment To Remember, Reflect And Honor His True Legacy - I've Been To The Mountaintop Speech, Letter From A Birmingham Jail, Poor People's Campaign

The third Monday in January is a Federal holiday in honor of the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.  that was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan in 1983.

Dr King was born on January 15, 1929 and assassinated April 4, 1968.

According to Politico:

... Almost 50 years after his death, we remember MLK as the transcendent figure who helped lift the South out of Jim Crow. We also remember him as almost preternaturally calm in the face of great pressure and danger. He was indeed all of these things. But the passage of time has obscured his dimensionality. In the last years of his life, King expanded his vision beyond the former Confederacy and took on a broader struggle to dismantle America’s jigsaw edifice of racial and economic discrimination—a struggle that took him deep into northern states and cities, where onetime allies became bitter enemies. He did so even as he strained to keep a fractious civil rights movement unified, and in the face of unremitting sabotage from federal authorities.

He was a young man, still in his 30s—foisted onto the national stage with actors many years or decades his senior, suspect in the eyes of both younger and older civil rights leaders—and the burdens of leadership took their toll on him.... 

Here's an excerpt of Dr. King's last speech, I've Been To The Mountain Top, on the night before his assassination.

Dr. King is remembered and honored for his civil rights leadership including his 1963 "Letter from a Birmingham Jail".

Retains its power year after year, decade after decade: https://t.co/iNCjtUaSJ8

— Jeffrey Goldberg (@JeffreyGoldberg) January 16, 2022

An original copy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail" has a home at Samford University. In honor of #MLKDay2022, learn about the significance of this piece of history.

Read more: https://t.co/UgjH5aJsRx@SamfordDiverse @SamfordULibrary #MLKDay #MLK pic.twitter.com/rHs19xpjgK

— Samford University (@SamfordU) January 17, 2022

Mehdi Hasan adds:

"For most Republicans, Dr King is just the guy who said to forget about skin color; they basically just know one quote of his, out of context, & they repeat it ad nauseam."

My commentary, for #MLKDay, on the real MLK vs the 'Santa Clausification' of him:pic.twitter.com/8C2SQVwZaH

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) January 16, 2023

You can learn more about Dr. King from the Ezra Klein Show podcast with Harvard Professor of Social Sciences Brandon Terry.

Martin Luther King Jr was only 39 years old when he was killed.

I love this photo of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his daughter, Yolanda, playing baseball in the yard.

Thank you, Dr. King.#MLKDay pic.twitter.com/bQQtUoiAsP

— Mathew Brownstein (@MBrownstein89) January 16, 2023