L-J-MLK Day

Martin Luther King Jr. Day passed me by without a parade or any sort of hoopla. I was among the 94 percent of Americans who planned nothing special Monday, according to a CNN.com poll I participated in. Granted, it was an unscientific poll. I went to work like most people and that was that.

It would be different if we lived in Virginia where in 1889 they began celebrating a really big holiday at this time of year with parades and barbecues and fireworks and such. They called it Robert E. Lee's birthday.

In 1904, they tacked "Stonewall" Jackson's birthday to the holiday and came up with Lee-Jackson Day on the third Monday in January. Commonwealth of Virginia employees got the day off, by the way.

Then Virginians began celebrating the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. in conjunction with New Year's Day in 1978. Effectively, just about everybody in Virginia took the day off to honor King.

Things went well until the mandated federal holiday honoring King came along in 1984. In an attempt to obey the federal mandate, Virginians combined all three holidays on the third Monday in January and Lee-Jackson-King Day was born. This gave federal and commonwealth employees the day off, and out of practicality, a lot of others just took the day off, too.

Then in January 2000, Virginia's governor asked an obliging legislature to move Lee-Jackson Day to the previous Friday, giving King a holiday of his own on Monday, just like the federal government wanted. Thus Commonwealth of Virginia employees got a four-day holiday, federal employees got a three-day holiday, and regular employees just got confused.

Virginians have been struggling with this ever since and it has nothing to do with the "race" issue. They had been celebrating King, Lee, and Jackson as great Americans in their own rights before Uncle Sam intervened.

Virginians point out that Lee and Jackson made it well known in their day that they opposed the institution of slavery, and like other West Point graduates, turned down offers to become Union generals. They were statesmen opposed to civil war.

Virginia joined the confederacy out of necessity after the Civil War began, when Union forces crossed into their commonwealth on the way to southern "cotton" states. Virginia was forced into the war when it responded to an invasion.

That's all I know about Lee-Jackson-King Day, a lost holiday in Virginia. It honored great men who believed in non-violence and nobody had a problem with it until politicians "solved" it by force.