Monday, 17 January 2011 is Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the USA. At the age of thirty-five, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize. During the eleven-year period between 1957 and 1968, Dr. King traveled over six million miles and spoke over twenty-five hundred times, appearing wherever there was injustice, protest, and action--he also wrote five books as well as numerous articles. In those years, he led a massive protest in Birmingham, Alabama, that caught the attention of the entire world, providing what he called a coalition of conscience. He directed the peaceful march on Washington, DC, of 250,000 people to whom he delivered the famous speech, "l Have a Dream".
On the evening of April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was to lead a protest march in sympathy with striking garbage workers of that city, he was assassinated. Martin Luther King Jr. Day was declared a federal holiday in 1983 by President Ronald Reagan. It was first observed on the 20th of January, 1986. In 1992, President George HW Bush declared that the holiday would be observed every year on the third Monday of January.
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