Neptune woman helped turn Martin Luther King's birthday into a national holiday

NEPTUNE - Today, celebrating Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday is a normal tradition, a standard nationwide event on the third Monday of every January.

But just a few decades ago, people were marching and mobilizing to get legislators to honor the murdered Civil Rights leader.

Dr. Susan Robertson-Alston, 65, was one of those people. She has called Neptune home since 1976. Prior to that, she attended middle school and high school in Germany, where her father worked as a military postal inspector. She said she was always "aware" why her parents were there.

"We were occupying Germany to keep (Germany) safe and our country safe. So to have the opportunity to do something significant in school, such as making Martin Luther King's birthday a holiday, it all tied in to where my head was at the time," Alston said.

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She attended Spelman College and Morehouse College in Atlanta from 1976 to 1980. She earned a bachelor's degree in psychology from Spelman and a bachelor's degree in German from Morehouse.

"I went to school with both of his sons, Marty (Martin Luther King III) and Dexter (King). Marty was ahead of me by I think two years and Dexter was behind me. Dexter is the one who had all the parties, he would DJ and stuff like that. Marty was very quiet, very cool, very standoffish," Alston said.

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Getting organized

While a student, she marched every year to make King’s birthday a national holiday.

"I worked out of the Martin Luther King Center for Social Change with my sorority — (King's widow) Coretta Scott King, she's an AKA (Alpha Kappa Alpha) — and I taught adults to read at night; they had an adult literacy program," Alston said. "And Spelman encouraged students to volunteer in the community to do things for practical experience, but also to help you to grow and mature."

She added "every year before we went home for Christmas time it was organized that when you came back in January they were going to do a march to get Martin Luther King's birthday made into a national holiday."

"After those marches, we were very involved in getting citizens registered to vote. We had a list of candidates for different positions that were sympathetic to that cause, in order to get them in place to vote the right way," Alston said.

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Students who had cars would drive people to the polls, and others would get taxis to go register, all while collecting signatures from people who supported turning King's birthday into a national holiday.

"So it was a lot of boots on the ground from January until the end of the school year for us. I know the fight continued even when we weren't there, but the students were used to a great extent for making those events happen," Alston said.

She added "it meant a lot to me personally."

"I was very proud. … I was involved in something that was greater than myself," Alston said.

Bigger than the Jackson 5

At the time, Maynard Jackson was the mayor of Atlanta and he often hosted what Alston refers to as "Black dignitaries," leaders of the Civil Rights Movement.

"So we got to rub shoulders with those people. I knew John Lewis, and I knew Julian Bond and Andrew Young," Alston said. "They were very visible. I used to think that the Jackson 5 were like, 'Wow!' until I realized what this movement was all about. Then those (Civil Rights leaders) became 'Wow!' to me. They listened to us, our message mattered and they saw us as valuable."

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Unlike today in the age of social media and instant political divisiveness, she was unaware of any fight against their goal to establish the new national holiday.

"I was not aware of (opposition). Everything I was involved in was positive toward that end. Everyone that I saw speak, from Stevie Wonder to Martin Luther King's daughter, Malcom X's daughter, Roscoe Lee Brown, it was all positive," Alston said. "I guess at the time I really wasn't aware of the fact there might be some people in the Senate and legislature that might be against it."

She added "the only thing I ever heard against it was that if it was a national holiday, it would be on a Monday (not necessarily King's actual birthday of Jan. 15) so they wouldn't have to turn the heat on then off (at schools and businesses)."

"When I was growing up we use to celebrate (George) Washington's birthday on Washington's birthday (Feb. 22). So if it came on a Wednesday you went to school Monday and Tuesday, which meant on Wednesday they would turn off the heat in the building, and then turn it back on Thursday," Alston said.

King's holiday

The holiday honors King, the Baptist minister who advocated the use of nonviolent means to end racial segregation. King first came to national prominence in 1955 during a bus boycott by African Americans in Montgomery, Alabama.

King founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957 and led the 1963 March on Washington. He was arguably the most influential of many African American Civil Rights leaders during the 1960s and was instrumental in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination in public accommodations, facilities, and employment, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. King was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1964. He was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968.

Four days after his death, U.S. Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., was the first to introduce legislation for a federal holiday honoring his birthday. After years of debate, it was approved by Congress and signed into law by President Ronald Reagan in November 1983, taking effect in 1986, per the King Center, the Atlanta organization founded in his name.

When the first national Martin Luther King Jr. holiday was observed in January 1986, 17 states had already enacted King holidays, according to the King Center, including New Jersey, which approved it in 1977.

Even then, it faced an upward battle for all states to recognize the holiday, with New Hampshire as the last state to name the day for King in 2000 and South Carolina the last to make it a paid holiday for all state employees.

To this day, it collides in Alabama and Mississippi with Robert E. Lee Day, which honors the Confederate general.

The only other two people with federal holidays honoring them are George Washington and Christopher Columbus.

Charles Daye is the metro reporter for Asbury Park and Neptune, with a focus on diversity, equity and inclusion. @CharlesDayeAPP Contact him: CDaye@gannettnj.com

This article originally appeared on Asbury Park Press: Neptune woman helped make Martin Luther King's birthday national holiday