Every third monday of january the Martin Luther King's day is celabrated. This day is important for all americans due to the fact that King was so important to the US history. The campaign for a holiday in his memory started soon after his assassination in 1968.
The congress had an election to decide if they would create the holiday in 1979, and the law was not approved by five votes.
The arguments of the opponents were that it was expensive to create a national holiday and the only two people who had national holidays in the US were George Washington, the first President of the United States, and Christopher Columbus, the man that discovered America. In 1980, a campaign was created and with the help of Stevie Wonder releasing the single "Happy Birthday" to popularize the campaign, they collected six million signatures to the Congress to pass the law. President Ronald Reagan signed the law in 1983 but the first for all fifty states celebrating this holiday was in 2000.