"Bring Back the WPA" sign in the background. Extra credit for those of you who know what WPA means and what bearing it has on the present crisis.
President Ronald Reagan signed the bill into law in November 1983 and the first official Martin Luther King, Jr., holiday was observed on the third Monday of January 1986.
At the time, only 27 states and Washington, D.C., honored the holiday. Most famously, all three Arizona House Republicans including current Senator and former presidential candidate John McCain, voted against the bill in '83. Arizona didn't vote to recognize the holiday until 1992. It wasn't the only state openly contemptuous of federal law. In 2000, 17 years after the law's official passage and the same year it pulled the Confederate flag down from its statehouse dome, South Carolina became the last state to sign a bill recognizing Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a paid holiday.
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