Monday 15 is Martin Luther King Jr. Day
Martin Luther King Jr. Day, in the United States, is a holiday (third Monday in January) honouring the achievements of Martin Luther King, Jr.
A Baptist minister who advocated the use of nonviolent means to end racial segregation, he first came to national prominence during a bus boycott by African Americans in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955.
He founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957 and led the 1963 March on Washington. The most influential of African American civil rights leaders during the 1960s, he was instrumental in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination in public accommodations, facilities, and employment, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. King was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1964. He was assassinated on April 4, 1968.
Almost immediately after King’s death, there were calls for a national holiday in his honour. Beginning in 1970, a number of states and cities made his birthday, January 15, a holiday.
The day is usually celebrated with marches and parades and with speeches by civil rights and political leaders.
