Martin Luther King Jr. Day

When it falls

The third Monday of January every year, near King's birthday on 15 January, a federal holiday since 1986.

The Phala almanac gives the exact day for your own city; the lunar and solar rules above are what it computes from.

The story

Martin Luther King Jr. was a Baptist minister of Atlanta who led the American civil-rights movement by non-violence: the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955, the Birmingham campaign, the March on Washington of 1963 where he gave the I Have a Dream speech from the Lincoln Memorial, and the Selma marches of 1965 that brought the Voting Rights Act. He was shot dead in Memphis on 4 April 1968, at thirty-nine.

He took his method from Gandhi, whose work he had studied and whose India he visited in 1959; the two are the century's pair for non-violent change. The holiday took fifteen years of campaigning after his death, and the last state to keep it, South Carolina, did so in 2000.

How the day is kept

• A national day of service, since 1994: volunteering in food banks, schools and parks under the words a day on, not a day off.
• The service at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where he and his father preached, and a wreath at his tomb at the King Center.
• Marches and parades, the largest in San Antonio; readings and broadcasts of the speeches; the King Memorial on the Mall in Washington.

More national days