Stevie Wonder’s new album, Hotter Than July, had been burning up the charts for months by Jan. 15, 1981. But something bigger than music was on the artist’s mind that day.
Along with other Black cultural giants, the 30-year-old was leading a rally of approximately 100,000 people on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Years earlier, as a teenager, Wonder had attended Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral and joined the fight to turn the slain civil rights leader’s birthday — Jan. 15 — into a federal holiday.
“You know, it doesn’t make much sense / There ought to be a law against / Anyone who takes offense / At a day in your celebration,” Wonder sings on “Happy Birthday,” a track from Hotter Than July that honors King and that Wonder performed at the demonstration.
His efforts eventually paid off: On Nov. 2, 1983, President Ronald Reagan signed a bill recognizing the third Monday of January as Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
“I had a vision of the Martin Luther King birthday as a national holiday,” Wonder told Rolling Stone magazine in 1986. “I mean, I saw that. I imagined it. I wrote about it because I imagined it and I saw it and I believed it. So I just kept that in my mind till it happened.”
But 45 years after Wonder energized the crowd, King’s legacy is facing fresh opposition. The Trump administration has removed the holiday from the list of free national park days. It’s also threatening some of King’s biggest achievements, including the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, by attempting to weaken provisions designed to safeguard Black political power.
Just this month, President Donald Trump told reporters that civil rights protections dating back to the 1960s had resulted in white Americans being “very badly treated.” His remark reflected his long-held belief in “reverse discrimination.”
To many historians, this present-day reality, while sobering, isn’t surprising.
“Sometimes, we delude ourselves into thinking that white supremacy is a thing of the past,” Howard Robinson, the Alabama State University archivist, told Capital B.
“As King said, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” added Robinson, who specializes in Black history and in particular the student protest movement of the 1960s. “We’re moving, I think, toward a more just and humane society. But the forces opposed to that will persistently try to reverse wins we thought were secure.”
A stony road
Even in death, King faced enormous opposition. It wasn’t a foregone conclusion that he would receive a federal holiday. Efforts to establish one dragged on for years.
U.S. Rep. John Conyers of Michigan first proposed a bill on April 8, 1968 — four days after King was shot dead at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. While the bill stalled, Conyers reintroduced it every year, with the support of the Congressional Black Caucus. The bill finally reached a House vote in 1979, but it narrowly failed by five votes.
Despite that setback, public support for the bill steadily increased. In early 1983, 48% of Americans opposed making King’s birthday a holiday, while 47% supported it. By the end of the year, support had risen to 59%.
A similar shift took place in Congress. When the bill came to a final vote, it passed overwhelmingly in the House on Aug. 2, 1983, by a margin of 338–90, and later in the Senate on Oct. 19, 1983, by a vote of 78–22.
This momentum was due in part to the grassroots work of Wonder and other civil rights leaders, according to Crystal Sanders, an African American studies professor at Emory University in Atlanta.
“Wonder’s performance showed the importance of everyone using whatever platform they had to champion issues of social justice,” she said. “And that’s what Wonder did, right? He stuck his neck out there — and he put ‘Happy Birthday’ on Hotter Than July, one of his most popular albums.”
Sanders added that there was great symbolism in what Wonder did: holding the rally in Washington, the same city where King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech during the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. That gathering, which included performances by Marian Anderson and Mahalia Jackson, drew some 250,000 people.
“Wonder went back to the same spot to say, ‘Well, if you’re so excited about what took place here, we should begin to try to understand why there’s so much opposition to having a federal holiday in recognition of this leader,’” said Sanders, the author of the 2016 book, A Chance for Change: Head Start and Mississippi’s Black Freedom Struggle.
As Anneshia Hardy, the founding executive director of the community education organization Alabama Values, sees it, opposition to the holiday, specifically from white Americans, reflected a deeper discomfort with King’s vision itself.
King called for broad economic justice, challenged systems of power, and agitated for institutional reforms that many white Americans found threatening. This enduring hostility to the full scope of his ideas, Hardy told Capital B, helps to explain why commemorating him with a holiday met such visceral resistance.
“That’s what made King a threat to many people, when he began to combine the race fight and the class fight,” she said. “It was OK when he was preaching to Black churches, but when he began going to poor and working-class white folks? Oh, he had to go.”
The older of King’s two sons, Martin Luther King III, said much the same thing in 2025, as Trump was preparing to enter the White House for a second time.
“My father wasn’t killed [just] because he was talking about riding at the front of the bus and being able to sit down at a restaurant. One of the major reasons he was killed was because he was talking about a radical redistribution of wealth,” he told Capital B. “His last campaign was the Poor People’s Campaign. He didn’t live to see it come to fruition, but he was talking about bringing together poor Americans from all walks of life to demand equal opportunity.”
Resistance to the King holiday continued on the state level long after Reagan signed the bill.
In 1990, Arizonans voted against two measures that would have recognized the holiday in the state, prompting the NFL to relocate the 1993 Super Bowl from Arizona to California; the move cost the state millions of dollars. (Arizonans said yes to the holiday in 1992, and the 1996 Super Bowl was held in the state.) And South Carolina didn’t recognize the holiday until 2000 — though it did so through a measure that also created Confederate Memorial Day.
MLK Day sidelined as legacy eroded
Given the many years that it took Wonder and others to establish the holiday, historians are alarmed by how it’s being dismissed — and by how King’s broader legacy is under siege.
The U.S. Department of the Interior, which manages the National Park Service, said in a press release last November that, in 2026, there will be free admission to parks for U.S. residents on June 14 — Flag Day and Trump’s birthday — but not on Martin Luther King Jr. Day or Juneteenth. Both holidays were among the free entrance days in 2025.
And earlier that summer, the Interior Department ordered signs to be posted at National Park Service sites prompting visitors to use a QR code to report information that could be considered “negative about either past or living Americans.” One such sign was at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial near the National Mall.
“Whether we’re talking about the local, state, or federal level, it took a lot of maneuvering to get this holiday,” Sanders said.
She grew up in Clayton, a small North Carolina town about 15 or 20 minutes from Raleigh. She recalled how her father, the first Black American elected to the Clayton Town Council, basically had to trick the council into recognizing the holiday, even after North Carolina had adopted it as a state holiday in 1983.
“After several failed attempts at getting the holiday recognized, my father introduced a motion that the town would observe all holidays observed by North Carolina,” she said. “And many of his colleagues didn’t think twice. They voted in the affirmative. Later, during that same meeting, an elderly white man said, ‘Wait, did I just vote for the King holiday?’ And my father said, ‘You most certainly did.’”
King’s legacy is being jeopardized in other ways, too.
The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to decide a case by the end of June that could severely undermine the Voting Rights Act, which King and other civil rights leaders risked their lives advocating for.
For decades, the landmark law has protected Black voting power during redistricting and helped to increase the number of Black members of Congress. This has been especially true in Southern states, where racially polarized voting is especially prominent.
But last October, the high court’s conservative justices signaled a willingness to weaken the provision — Section 2 — that has been key to ensuring equality at the ballot box. Breaking with past administrations, the U.S. Department of Justice under Trump is asserting that Section 2’s protections against racial discrimination violate the Constitution.
“The Voting Rights Act was designed to address patterns of racial exclusion, but as soon as it was clear that it was working, the question for many white Americans became: Is it working too well?” Hardy said. “These cases aren’t just about voting maps or elections. They’re about whether Black communities are allowed to convert their presence into power.”
That same demand for equality was at the heart of the message that Wonder championed that winter’s day in Washington through his push for the King holiday. It’s a message that remains as resonant today as it was 45 years ago.
“Why should I be involved in this great cause?” Wonder asked the crowd. “As an artist, my purpose is to communicate the message that can better improve the lives of all of us. I’d like to ask all of you just for one moment, if you will, to be silent and just to think and hear in your mind the voice of our Dr. Martin Luther King.”