With the extreme civil unrest in the United States and world, especially following the Black Lives Matter protests during the summer, Martin Luther King Jr. Day is a day of reflection and refocus, according to many. 

MLK Day comes on the Monday of January closest to his birthday. Reg Stewart, vice president of diversity and inclusion at Iowa State, explained that MLK Day is a time to evaluate progress and reflect on issues that have been addressed throughout the year. 

“It is always the day I sort of recalibrate, you know, we got a new basket of problems to address, how do we deal with them? But I also stop and take some time to look at the progress we have made,” Stewart said. “So it is a reflective day, not just a day to articulate how far we have to go, and sometimes, you have to stop and look at what we accomplished.”

Martin Luther King Jr. was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on Jan. 15, 1929. He is the son of Michael King Sr. and Alberta Williams King. 

Starting public school at age 5, King was said to be advanced for his age, skipping both the ninth and 11th grades. After attending Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, King earned a sociology degree. 

In 1948, King went on to the liberal Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, where he was the valedictorian of his class in 1951 and elected student body president while earning a fellowship for graduate study.

Amidst finishing his dissertation, King became a pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church of Montgomery, Alabama, in 1954. In the following year, King completed his graduate degree at Boston University by the time he was 25 years old.

After the arrests of Claudette Colvin and Rosa Parks for refusing to give up their seats to a white passenger on the bus, King began meeting with E.D. Nixon, head of the local NAACP chapter, marking the beginning of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. 

King was elected to lead the historic boycotts, and approximately 40,000 Black bus riders boycotted the system. 

For 382 days, Montgomery’s Black community walked to work in protest while enduring harassment, violence and intimidation.

In King’s first speech as civil rights leader he declared there was no alternative other than to protest. 

“For many years, we have shown amazing patience. We have sometimes given our white brothers the feeling that we liked the way we were being treated,” King said in his speech. “But we come here tonight to be saved from that patience that makes us patient with anything less than freedom and justice.”

This was just one of more than 2500 addresses King gave while he advocated for civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance to segregation. 

Matè Muhammad (formly Matt Bruce), the Field operations director at Des Moines Black Liberation Movement, said King is misinterpreted to justify arguments that are hyper-pacifist. Muhammad remembers this after Officer Darren Wilson murdered 18-year-old Michael Brown.

“I think King was clear to us the true evils and harms in the world come from systemic oppression and economic neglect, and not the response to them,” Muhammad said. “He says it is really hard to delegitimize any response to such a violent reality. I think his words are twisted to be very very pacifist when they really are not.”

King led a coalition of civil rights groups in a nonviolent campaign in Birmingham, Alabama. At the time, Birmingham was denoted as the “most segregated city in America” and a home police force with a vendetta for the movement. 

The violence during protests was a one-way street while Black Americans were assaulted by officers, police dogs and fire hoses. Amidst the movement in 1963, King wrote “Letter from Birmingham City Jail.”

“We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor, it must be demanded by the oppressed,”  King said in “Letter from Birmingham City Jail.”

Toward the end of the Birmingham campaign, King joined other civil rights leaders in organizing the March on Washington on August 28, 1963, where he gave his “I Have a Dream” speech.

“There are so many voices telling us how separate and apart we are, and Dr. King represents a seminal voice,” Stewart said. “This historic anchor for us to go back.”

Stewart said King’s message of unity greatly impacts the world, but there is no voice of unity today because of deep partisan and ideological divides. Muhammad doesn’t expect lawmakers to initiate change; instead, they need to be pushed and replaced if necessary.

Muhammad said like King, he has seen how money and antiquity in American politics has attempted to hinder and undermine progress.

“We see ourselves very advanced as a nation but are very behind in representation and just the models of government, and I think those are two variables; when you put them together, it is a breeding ground for corruption,” Muhammad said. 

In an address King gave on May 10, 1967, he talks of the three evils in the world, which are racism, poverty and war. They continue to be prevalent issues now.

“I think that is the message he ended up actually laying his life on,” Muhammad said.

While Dr. King is revered for his accomplishments now, he was falsely viewed and identified as a threat by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) all of his life. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover  subjecting him as a target of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO). 

The series of illegal projects was aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting and disrupting American political organizations. COINTELPRO began monitoring Dr. King during his involvement with the Montgomery Bus boycott according to Stanford University. 

On April 4, 1968, King was assassinated at age 52 after he was shot at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.  

“I think a lot of times, the academy and the political atmosphere in America really drives people when they are thinking of leadership throughout history, to think of it as these many different ideas that are conflicting with each other,” Muhammad said. “But I think King is one of those people who really shows how unified the fight really is and how common the issues are, how to carry on a tradition of freedom fighting.”

Stewart encourages students to read King’s texts and truly expand their understanding on it as well as participate in community service.

“That is going to have to be weeded out with a lot of hard work and long-term sustained intense political pressure and social pressure and economic reformation and redistribution and just general shifting in society’s moral values,” Muhammad said.

“There comes a time when one must take the position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but he must do it because conscience tells him it is right.” 

-“Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution” by Martin Luther King Jr.