As a way to honor a man who inspired thousands, one day a year is set apart in recognition.

The Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) holiday Monday marked the 25th anniversary of the day of service that celebrates the Civil Rights leader’s life and legacy.

Observed each year on the third Monday in January as “a day on, not a day off,” MLK Day is the only federal holiday designated as a national day of service to encourage all Americans to volunteer to improve their communities, according to the Corporation for National and Community Service website.

“The MLK Day of Service inspires hundreds of thousands of Americans to come together to serve their community,” according to the Corporation for National and Community Service website. “Citizens in all 50 states deliver meals, refurbish schools and community centers and collect food and clothing.”

On MLK Day, volunteers can also recruit mentors, support job-seekers, build homes and provide other services for veterans and military families and help citizens improve their financial literacy skills.

After a long struggle, legislation was signed in 1983 to mark the birthday of King as a federal holiday. Americans first observed the holiday in 1986. In 1994, Congress designated the holiday as a national day of service and charged the Corporation for National and Community Service with leading this effort. This day of service helps to empower individuals, strengthen communities, bridge barriers, address social problems and move us closer to King’s vision of a “Beloved Community.”

“Everyone can be great because everybody can serve,” King said.

Observing the Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday through service is a way to begin each year with a commitment to making every community a better place.

“Your service honors Dr. King’s life and teachings and helps meet community challenges,” according to the Corporation for National and Community Service website. “Service also brings people together of all ages, backgrounds and abilities.”

The MLK Day of Service encourages all types of service, particularly projects that have a lasting impact and connect participants to ongoing service. The most successful projects connect to the life and teaching of King, meet a pressing community need and include time to reflect on his teachings, according to the Corporation for National and Community Service website. 

“King was a vital figure of the modern era and a pivotal figure in the Civil Rights Movement,” according to the Corporation for National and Community Service website. “His lectures and dialogues stirred the concern and sparked the conscience of a generation. His charismatic leadership inspired men and women, young and old, in the United States and around the world.”

Following in the footsteps of his father, in February 1948, at the age of 19, King entered the Christian ministry and was ordained at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.

King was, by this time, a member of the executive committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the leading organization of its kind in the nation.

In 1954, upon completion of graduate studies at Boston University, he accepted a call to serve at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. While there, he was an instrumental leader in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, made famous by the nonviolent resistance and arrest of Rosa Parks.

The boycott lasted 382 days. During these days of boycott, King was arrested, his home was bombed and he was subjected to personal abuse, but at the same time, he emerged as a leader of the first rank. On December 21, 1956, the Supreme Court of the United States declared the laws requiring segregation on buses unconstitutional.

King resigned this position in 1959 and moved back to Atlanta to direct the activities of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

In 1957, he was elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization formed to provide new leadership for the now burgeoning civil rights movement. The ideals for this organization he took from Christianity; its operational techniques from Gandhi.

In the eleven-year period between 1957 and 1968, King traveled over six million miles and spoke over 2,500 times, appearing wherever there was injustice, protest and action; and meanwhile, he wrote five books as well as numerous articles.

In these years, he led a massive protest in Birmingham, Alabama, that caught the attention of the entire world, providing what he called a coalition of conscience and inspiring his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” a manifesto of revolution, according to the Nobel Peace Prize website.

King planned the drives in Alabama for the registration of people of color as voters; he directed the peaceful march on Washington, D.C., of 250,000 people to whom he delivered his address, “l Have a Dream”; he conferred with President John F. Kennedy and campaigned for President Lyndon B. Johnson; he was arrested upwards of 20 times and assaulted at least four times; he was awarded five honorary degrees; he was named Man of the Year by Time magazine in 1963; and he became not only the symbolic leader of American black people but also a world figure.

At the age of 35, King was the youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize. When notified of his selection, he announced that he would turn over the prize money of $54,123 to the furtherance of the civil rights movement, according to the Nobel Peace Prize website.

From 1960 until his death in 1968, he served as co-pastor with his father at Ebenezer Baptist Church.

On the evening of April 4, 1968, King was standing on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, where he and his associates were staying while leading a protest march in sympathy with striking garbage workers of that city when a sniper’s bullet struck him in the neck. He was rushed to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead about an hour later at the age of 39.

Shock and distress over the news of King’s death sparked rioting in more than 100 cities around the country, including burning and looting. Amid a wave of national mourning, President Lyndon B. Johnson urged Americans to “reject the blind violence” that had killed King, whom he called the “apostle of nonviolence,” according to the History Channel website.