How Harold Washington fought for MLK Day — and paid the price

By Kim Janssen 

Whether you plan to spend Monday’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day honoring the great man or simply enjoying a day off work, you can thank the late Chicago Mayor Harold Washington for making it happen.

Illinois can proudly claim to have been the first state in the nation to honor King with a state holiday, largely because of Washington’s efforts — but it wasn’t a straightforward fight, and not all Illinois politicos covered themselves in glory.

Washington, a state senator at the time, began pushing for a state holiday soon after King’s 1968 assassination. By 1971, he had successfully pushed a bill through both houses in Springfield that would have made Jan. 15 a state holiday, but the bill was vetoed by Republican Gov. Richard B. Ogilvie, who said he would only go along with a federal holiday.

The election of Democratic Gov. Dan Walker in 1972 gave Washington a fresh chance. Though 16 state representatives, including Judge Harry Leinenweber, who currently sits as a Ronald Reagan appointee in the U.S. District Court in Chicago, voted against a new bill brought by Washington, it again passed both houses. This time Walker signed the bill into law — but on the very same day, the governor also sent a more ambiguous message about equality by signing a law that banned the state from ordering busing to achieve racial balance in schools.

Washington became a leading national advocate for a federal MLK Day, but paid the price for attending a celebration in 1981. Determined to spend King’s birthday at a service in Chicago, he was not in Springfield for a crucial vote at which opportunistic Republicans took advantage of his absence to grab minority control of the Senate presidency.

Fellow Democrats were not happy, but an unrepentant Washington said, “I got a call from the Democrats in Springfield urging me to come there to help them in a struggle for the control of the Senate, but I told them I had something more important to do.”

President Reagan was against establishing MLK Day as a federal holiday, writing in a letter that King’s reputation was “based on an image, not reality.”

But in 1983 — just months after Washington had been elected Chicago’s first black mayor — Reagan reluctantly signed a federal MLK Day into law.