Activists in Arizona Renew Campaign for King Holiday

Civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks was the guest of honor Friday at a city-sponsored breakfast honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as activists kicked off another campaign to create a paid state holiday honoring the late civil rights leader.

“Like Dr. King, we will never give up,” Phoenix Mayor Paul Johnson proclaimed.

Arizona is the only state in the nation without a King Day paid holiday. Earlier attempts, both at the state Capitol and at the polls, to establish the holiday have failed.

But voters will have another chance Nov. 3, when they will decide on a measure based on the federal model--establishing King Day on the third Monday in January and merging the Lincoln and Washington birthday commemorations into a single holiday in February.

Johnson told those at the Phoenix Civic Plaza breakfast event that if this ballot measure fails, the issue will be placed before voters again and again until it passes.

“Every year our resolve will get stronger, every year our numbers will get greater,” he said.

Attendance at the annual breakfast, now in its sixth year, has grown from 75 to nearly 5,000. The seventh annual King Day march in downtown Phoenix is expected to draw thousands on Monday.

Parks, 78, whose refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Ala., in 1955 sparked the modern-day civil rights movement, told the breakfast crowd to “be courageous and be persistent and be diligent” in pursuit of a holiday honoring King.

Since January, 1987, when then-Gov. Evan Mecham rescinded the holiday he said was illegally proclaimed by his predecessor, the state has been fighting a national image problem. The most recent attack has come in “By the Time I Get To Arizona,” a music video by the rap group Public Enemy that at one point declares that “the whole state’s racist.”

More serious blows have come to the pocketbook. Officials say the lack of a King holiday has caused the cancellation of 152 conventions, resulting in a loss of $171 million in revenue and sales taxes. In addition, an estimated $200 million was lost when the National Football League stripped Phoenix of the 1993 Super Bowl after voters failed to approve the holiday in 1990.

Supporters of a King Day believe the new measure will pass. While two previous propositions offered voters choices of a King Day at the expense of Columbus Day or a King Day as an additional paid state holiday, this one is designed neither to offend Italian-Americans or to cost extra money.

With a new poll showing just 56% of voters favoring a King Day, backers say this year’s campaign must be a careful one.

“As long as we focus on King and what he stood for and don’t let the Super Bowl and convention business become an issue, it will pass,” said Arnie Zaler, founder of Unity, a group that has actively supported the paid holiday. “If we let this become an economic issue, we are going to lose.”