On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, nearly 100 Longwood students signed up to carry on the eight- year tradition of giving back to
the community through the MLK Service Challenge.
To participate in the service, students signed up in the preceding fall 2012 semester before winter break and during a brief window at the beginning of the spring semester.
Students gathered in the Lankford Student Union Ballroom at 9 a.m. before going out and serving the community.
The different acts of service included volunteering at the YMCA, helping out at the Pregnancy Support Center, volunteering at the Longwood Center for the Visual Arts, cleaning up at local parks, preventing trash from going into the local waterways and volunteering at local churches.
Students worked until 3 p.m. at their various locations, assisting other volunteers and regular workers at their location. Students washed windows, marked where fallen trees were, cleared off trails, painted and picked up trash along with other jobs that were needed.
At the end of the day, students were asked to reflect on their service and state whether or not it was something that Martin Luther King Jr. would agree with in front of the groups.
All of the students in each group agreed that no matter what the task was — be it helping prepare for an event that is more than a month away, aiding non-profit organizations by doing tasks normally done by paid members of the organization, aiding
less fortunate members of the community or cleaning up the environment — it definitely would be something Martin Luther King would have been proud of.
Congressman John Conyers (D-MI) was the first to propose legislation for a holiday commemorating Martin Luther King Jr. no more than four days after King was assassinated on April 4, 1968.
After Congress stalled the bill, citizens began to submit petitions endorsing the bill to Congress, and Illinois became the first state to adopt MLK Day as a state holiday in 1973.
During his presidency, Jimmy Carter vowed to support a King holiday, an act that gave a slowly dying idea new life as it floundered on the floor of Congress. The combined inward pressure of Conyers and Rep. Shirley Chisholm (D-NY) and the outward pressure of the 1982 and 1983 Civil Rights marches on Washington were enough to have Congress pass the bill in 1983, and Ronald Regan had it signed into law on Nov. 2 of that year.
Originally, Conyers’ bill placed the day on Martian Luther King's birthday — Jan. 15. However, the powers that be thought it too close to Christmas and New Year’s, and so moved it to the third Monday in January.
Consequently, it was this change that helped overcome opposition to the law. Not to say that no opposition remained. In 1987, newly elected Arizona governor Evan Mecham decided to remove MLK Day as his first official act. This act set off a nationwide boycott of the state and even influenced the NFL into moving the location of the
1993 Super Bowl to Pasadena, Calif. due to the boycott. In 1992, angry Arizona voters enacted MLK Day and the 1996 Super Bowl is held in Tempe, Ariz.
The last states to make MLK day an official holiday were New Hampshire, adopting MLK Day as a paid state holiday and thereby replacing its optional Civil Rights Day in 1999; Utah, becoming the last state to recognize MLK Day by name in 2000 and South Carolina, becoming the last state to make MLK Day a paid holiday for all state employees in 2000, removing the choice of celebrating MLK Day or one of three Confederate-related holiday's.
