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:

… 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 Americas
jigsaw edifice of racial and economic discriminationa 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 30sfoisted onto the national stage with
actors many years or decades his senior, suspect in the eyes of both younger
and older civil rights leadersand 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”.

Mehdi Hasan adds:

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.