Reagan’s holiday embraced only a sanitized, posthumously rehabilitated King

Evidence

With this particular embrace of the King holiday, Reagan put the final nail in a coffin for King that conservatives had been building since his death, part of a deliberate pattern that defined modern conservative approaches to the issue of race in America. In a letter in response to King’s assassination, penned in 1968, Young Americans for Freedom, a leading conservative group whose youthful members would go on to play important roles in the presidencies of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush, questioned King’s approach to civil rights and his emphasis on race and direct action: If the law can be disregarded, and if a lawbreaker can receive a Nobel Peace Prize and White House recognition, then why should the law be respected by the man in the street? — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 296