Stevie Wonder uses fame in Campaign for King Holiday.
Jet Magazine - December 4, 1980
In January 1979, on what would've been Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s 50th birthday Stevie Wonder performed at an event at the Georgia state capitol building, calling for the day to be made a holiday. Wonder told the audience to start taking the day off of work and to contact their congressional representative to ask them to make King's birthday an official observance.
"Happy Birthday" came to Stevie Wonder — who'd met King in the 1960s, when he was a teenager — in his unconscious mind. Remembering enough to compose the song, he then called King's widow and keeper of his legacy, Coretta Scott King, to tell her of the song's creation and intent. "I said to her, you know, 'I had a dream about this song. And I imagined in this dream I was doing this song. We were marching, too, with petition signs to make for Dr. King's birthday to become a national holiday,'" Wonder told CNN in 2011.
After trekking across the country on a four-month concert tour that was really a King birthday holiday awareness campaign, Wonder went into the studio to record "Hotter Than July." It included "Happy Birthday," along with an image of Dr. King and a note imploring listeners to write their representatives to help get the holiday created.
Stevie Wonder spent much of the early 1980s on his efforts to establish a January holiday in Dr. King's honor. He played rallies at the National Mall in Washington, D.C. — a 1981 event on King's birthday attracted an estimated 25,000 people according to The Washington Post that year (though later estimates claimed hundreds of thousands were there) — and also paid for a lobbying office in Washington, D.C., and met with the Congressional Black Caucus. "I had a vision of the Martin Luther King Birthday as a national holiday. I mean I saw that. I wrote about it because I imagined it and I saw it and I believed it. So I just kept that in my mind till it happened," Wonder later told Rolling Stone.
In 1983, with Wonder's public and pervasive argument undeniable, the House of Representatives finally and easily passed the King birthday bill. After some resistance in the Senate, it made its way through that chamber, too, and on October 19, 1983, President Ronald Reagan signed it all into law. The first Martin Luther King Jr. Day was celebrated on January 20, 1986. At the end of that day, Wonder headlined "An All-Star Celebration Honoring Martin Luther King Jr.," a nationally televised concert that concluded with the musician leading a star-studded singalong to "Happy Birthday."
By Brian Boone on grunge.com Jan. 7, 2026
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