Martin Luther King Jr.
1929-1968
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested 29 times. In 1956, during the Montgomery bus boycott, he was one of 89 people indicted under a 1921 anti-boycott ordinance and was ordered to pay 500 dollars or serve 386 days in jail. The Alabama Supreme Court upheld the conviction around the end of 1957. On 12 April 1963, two days after a judge had issued an injunction against parading, demonstrating and picketing in Birmingham, he was arrested with Ralph Abernathy and Fred Shuttlesworth. From his cell he wrote the Letter from Birmingham Jail, dated 16 April 1963, partly in the margins of a newspaper. The FBI began tapping his phone in the fall of 1963 on the written authority of the Attorney General.
He was assassinated on 4 April 1968. Cities and states began marking his birthday in 1971. President Ronald Reagan signed the federal holiday into law on 2 November 1983, after votes of 338 to 90 in the House and 78 to 22 in the Senate. It was first observed on 20 January 1986, and every state had adopted it by 2000. Congress awarded him a posthumous Gold Medal, and his memorial on the National Mall was dedicated in 2011.