Congress repeatedly defeated a King holiday bill until 1983.

Evidence

On a picturesque autumn day in the White House Rose Garden, President Ronald Reagan signed the Martin Luther King Day bill into law. As if engaged in a ritual act of penance, each year after his death until 1983, Congress had entertained legislation seeking to honor Dr. King with a federal holiday. Each year the bill had failed. Some congressmen argued that it was too expensive to create a new federal holiday. Others, like Senator Jesse Helms, just outright hated the idea of celebrating someone he believed was a communist agitator. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 282

Categorization

• XREF: Anchors the historical premise of how the value gap manifests — low white enthusiasm for honoring a civil-rights leader — for Glaude’s post-1983 argument about national racial atonement rhetoric.