Why exactly does Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. have his own national holiday? It is a rare thing in America: Now that we compress the birthdays of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln into “Presidents Day,” Dr. King is the only American so honored. Every politician, business, and institution in the nation pays him homage annually. That leads to contentious arguments by those who feel that Dr. King’s memory is theirs alone and should not be shared by others.
Claiming Dr. King only for one particular political ideology skips over the first question of what this holiday honors. If today is simply a day to celebrate racialist leftism, it should not be a national holiday. We could say that today belongs only to African Americans, but that, too, misses the reason why we have chosen this day to elevate the memory of this man, and what we hope to accomplish by doing so. By thinking about what today means as an American holiday, we can reflect more generally on what historical commemoration is all about.
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