On Nov. 2, 1983, President Reagan signed into law a bill designating the third Monday of January each year as a federal holiday to honor the late civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

The ceremony in the White House Rose Garden was attended by Mrs. Coretta Scott King and family, members of Congress, Civil Rights Movement veterans, educators and business and religious leaders.

During the signing President Reagan said:

"All right-thinking people, all right-thinking Americans are joined in spirit with us this day as the highest recognition which this nation gives is bestowed upon Martin Luther King Jr., one who also was the recipient of the highest recognition which the world bestows, the Nobel Peace Prize.

"America is a more democratic nation, a more just nation, a more peaceful nation because Martin Luther King, Jr. became her preeminent   more »

First issue of Ebony magazine published on November 1, 1945.

John H. Johnson, who was born in poverty and who rose in one generation from the welfare rolls to the rolls of Forbes 400 richest Americans, was the most honored of all publishers. He was a member of the Publishing Hall of Fame, the National Business Hall of Fame, the Advertising Hall of Fame and the Arkansas Business Hall of Fame, and he received the Spingarn Medal, the highest award of the NAACP, and the Salute to Greatness Award, the highest honor of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center, for his contribution to civil rights. In 1972, he was named Publisher of the Year by the Magazine Publishers Association. In 1974 he was named “The Most Outstanding Black Publisher in History” by the National Newspaper Publishers Association. In 2003, he was named “The Greatest Minority Entrepreneur in U.S. History” by Baylor University. In the same year, Howard University named its journalism school the John H. Johnson School of Communications.   more »

Richard Arrington Jr. born in October of 1934 in Livingston, Alabama  was the first African American mayor of the city of Birmingham, Alabama  serving 20 years, from 1979 to 1999. He replaced David Vann and, upon retiring after five terms in office, installed then-City Council president William A. Bell as interim mayor. Bell went on to lose the next election to the current mayor, Bernard Kincaid.

Arrington's father moved his family to the steel-town of Fairfield from rural Sumter County, Alabama when Richard Jr. was five years old to take a job with U.S. Steel. The steady work was an improvement over sharecropping, but Richard Sr. still had to supplement the family income by working off-hours as a brick mason.   more »

Dr. Alonzo G. Moron, a 1932 Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Brown University and member of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, served for three years as commissioner of public welfare in the Virgin Islands, his birthplace. He was the first African-American head of public housing in the city of Atlanta.

On October 29, 1949, Dr. Alonzo G. Moron becomes the eighth president of Hampton Institute and the first African American to hold the position at the school. He served from 1948-1959. A 1927 graduate of the school, he administered the dormitory additions, changed the curriculum, phased out agricultural and the trades, established the academic program, addressed ideological conflicts, and provided an intellectual voice regarding school desegregation in Hampton. Dr. Moron is also recognized as the first Hampton Institute graduate to become President of the school.   more »