As people across the country remember the legacy of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., we remember his visits to and influence on Michigan.
Here are six historical nuggets about King and Michigan, ranging from his visits to the state to how a Michigan congressman and musical artist helped make the holiday a reality.
1. MLK Day support: U.S. Rep John Conyers Jr., D-Detroit, helped establish the national holiday commemorating MLK. Conyers introduced legislation four days after King's assassination in 1968 for a federal holiday honoring King. The bill, however, did not move. In the following decade, Conyers reintroduced the bill several times. Supporters of the holiday worked to gather support, from gathering petitions to asking states and cities to pass similar designations. The bill was reintroduced in 1983. It passed the House 338-90 and the Senate 78-22. President Ronald Reagan signed the bill into law on Nov 2, 1983.
2. Stevie Wonder's "Happy Birthday": As part of the campaign for a national holiday, Michigan native Stevie Wonder released the song "Happy Birthday" to gain support.
Released on the 1980 album "Hotter Than July" album, Wonder sang:
And I'm sure you would agree
It couldn't fit more perfectly
Than to have a world party
On the day you came to be
The late Gil Scott Heron has a great account of how the song became the anthem of the campaign for the national holiday in a memoir published after his death. Heron below describes a 1980 rally in Washington DC for King:
My respect for Stevie Wonder expanded in every direction that day. I was following his lead like a member of his band, because seeing as he had envisioned was a new level of believing. It was something that seeped in softly, and when you were personally touched by someone's effort and genuine sincerity, your brain said you didn't yet understand but your soul said you should trust.
3. "I Have a Dream" in Detroit: Two months before his famous "I Have a Dream" speech, King gave an early draft of the speech in Detroit. On June 12, 1963, King led a crowd of 125,000 people down Woodward Avenue as part of the "Walk to Freedom." At the time, the Detroit Free Press said it was "the largest civil rights demonstration in the nation's history," according an article by the Michigan DNR. He gave the speech outside of Cobo Hall:
I have a dream this afternoon that one day right here in Detroit, Negroes will be able to buy a house or rent a house anywhere that their money will carry them and they will be able to get a job.
King had been to Detroit as a child. His father, Rev. Martin King, Sr., would preach at Second Baptist Church in the 1940s, said LaNesha Gale DeBardelaben, director of archives and libraries at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History.
4. Ann Arbor speech: On Nov. 5 1962, King spoke to students at the University of Michigan's Hill Auditorium. “It wasn’t a big crowd, it appears to be somewhat small,” Karen Lee Jania, an archivist at Bentley, told the Ann Arbor News. “I don’t think it was of campus-wide interest at the time… it’s conceivable that it was maybe a last minute kind of thing, so publicity didn’t get out.”
The speech was not well documented, but several photographs of the visit were found in 2012.
5. Kalamazoo speech: King spoke at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo on Dec. 18, 1963, four months after the March on Washington and weeks after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. About 2,000 people showed up during a snowstorm to hear King speak.
At the end of the speech, King said:
I believe that we will be able to emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice. My faith is that somehow this problem will be solved. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation to a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.
Read more about the speech from the Kalamazoo Gazette.
6. East Lansing speech: More than 4,000 Michigan State University students heard King speak on Feb. 11, 1965. King was there to kick off a fundraising campaign for the All University Student Government-sponsored Student Education Program* (STEP).
According to MSU's summary of the speech,
King issued three challenges to the audience that must be met for people to survive. First, people must achieve a world brotherhood perspective. Second, the notion of superior and inferior races must be abolished. And last, massive action programs must be developed to rid the world of segregation.