Wisconsin’s 21 special observance days are part of state statutes governing general school operations (Wis. Stat. sec. 118.02). Federal law has moved the celebration of many legal holidays to Monday, however, state law recommends that each Wisconsin Special Observance Day be held on the day itself. When an observance day falls on a Saturday or Sunday, it should be observed on the preceding Friday or the following Monday. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day in Wisconsin is an observance on January 15.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a leader of the American civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. Before his assassination in 1968, he received the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to use nonviolent resistance to achieve equality for African Americans. His efforts contributed to passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
(Wisconsin Public School Observance Days. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day Enacted May 3, 1976, from the 1975 Laws of Wisconsin, Chapter 219.)
The church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society.
Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man’s sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true.
Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars... Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.
Wisdom born of experience should tell us that war is obsolete. There may have been a time when war served as a negative good by preventing the spread and growth of an evil force... If we assume that life is worth living, if we assume that mankind has the right to survive, then we must find an alternative to war.