Martin Luther King, Jr., Day

nHumanities thinks it's a shame--literally--that Wyoming does not recognize Martin Luther King, Jr., Day and instead acknowledges a hybrid Martin Luther King, Jr., Wyoming Equality Day (passed into law in 2000), usually shortened to "Equality Day."

Equality Day.

If you Google that one, you'll find pages of results related to Women's Equality Day (it occurred August 26th) and the Religious Coalition for Equality's Equality Day (it'll be January 23rd), but you'll have to search long and deep in your results to find mention of Wyoming's Equality Day. (We gave up after 11 pages of results.)

According to the Infoplease web site, Congress passed the Martin Luther King holiday in 1983 with Ronald Reagan signing the legislation into law. Infoplease reports,

A number of states resisted celebrating the holiday. Some opponents said King did not deserve his own holiday--contending that the entire civil rights movement rather than one individual, however instrumental, should be honored. Several southern states include celebrations for various Confederate generals on that day. Arizona voters approved the holiday in 1992 after a tourist boycott. In 1999, New Hampshire changed the name of Civil Rights Day to Martin Luther King, Jr., Day.

The web site does not mention that resistance to the holiday apparently still exists in Wyoming.

We think a nice way to celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr., Day is to visit some of the wonderful web sites on the internet that celebrate the great man's life:

• The King Center, established by his widow Coretta Scott King
• The Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute, established by Stanford University
  
• The new Martin Luther King, Jr., Newspaper Archive, which documents more than 50,000 historical newspaper pages
• Dr. King's "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech (delivered in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 3, 1968, the night before his death), from American RadioWorks web site Say It Plain: A Century of Great African American Speeches
• The Poynter Institute's Links to the News on Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, an incredible list of online sources