Holy Cross Celebrates Martin Luther King Jr. Day

The Holy Cross community will celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day on Monday, Jan. 15, from 12 p.m.- 4 p.m. in the lobby of the Hogan Campus Center.

Videos depicting the life of King will be shown continuously from 12 p.m.- 3 p.m. These films will be followed by student readings from 3 p.m.- 4 p.m. Various students will read aloud the significant speeches of King in 10-minute intervals. The following speeches are scheduled to be read: "I Have a Dream;" King's Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech; and King’s eulogy for the martyred children in Birmingham, Ala.

There will also be a display of books by and about King at the event, courtesy of the College's Dinand Library. Members of the community will be able to add quotes and thoughts on the life of King on a poster in front of the Office of Student Programs and Leadership Development (Hogan 229).

Martin Luther King Jr. was a Baptist minister in Alabama when he became involved in the civil rights movement. In 1955, in response to the arrest of Mrs. Rosa Parks, King organized an African-American boycott of the bus company that ended when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the bus segregation laws of Alabama illegal.

At this time, King became the undisputed leader of the civil rights movement and led a march of 37,000 people in Washington, D.C., in 1958. The following year, King and his wife, Coretta Scott King, went to India, the homeland of Mahatma Gandhi, where King studied Satyagraha, Gandhi’s principle of nonviolent persuasion. This became King's main instrument of social protest.

This method of peaceful protest was made manifest on August 28, 1963, when 200,000 people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation; it was here that King delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech.

In 1964, King received the Nobel Peace Prize; he divided the prize money among various civil rights organizations. That same year, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law. After a controversial march for voting reforms, a voting rights bill was passed allowing African-Americans to vote in 1965.

Toward the end of King's life, he had become associated with the antiwar movement as well as the civil rights movement and the rights of the underprivileged. On April 4, 1968, while supporting the sanitation workers' strike in Memphis, Tenn., King was shot and killed.