Although Americans see Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as a hero now, that wasn’t always the case

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a civil rights leader and an American hero,. In CBS News polling, almost every American adult (95%) believes he was an important figure in US history.

It hasn’t always been that way. It wasn’t obvious that the fact that King is now beloved and has a national holiday commemorating his birthday was going to happen during his lifetime.

The fight for civil rights is often unpopular at the time, but it only becomes popular retrospectively.

King was a very divisive figure during the 1960s. His unfavorable rating was 63% in the last Gallup poll that asked about his popularity during his lifetime, which was taken in 1966. 39% of Americans gave him a -5 rating on a scale from -5 to +5, with -5 being least favorable and +5 being most favorable.

When King turned his attention from Southern de jure segregation to de facto segregation in northern cities, he received a highly negative rating.

Even though King was liked by many, there were still some people who did not like him. King’s favorable rating in the middle of 1964, when Congress was in the midst of passing many landmark civil rights laws, was just 44%. He had an unfavorable rating of 38%.

In a 1964 Gallup poll, 42% of Americans said they respected King the second-least out of all Americans. This was only slightly lower than the 47% registered by George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama. When asked which three Americans they had the most respect for, only 17% mentioned King’s name.

A lot of White Americans thought King was doing more harm than good for the fight for civil rights, which is perhaps even more revealing. In a 1966 Harris poll, 50% of White Americans indicated that they thought Martin Luther King Jr. was hurting the civil rights effort. Only 36% said he was helping. 27% of them had a favorable rating of King in 1966.

Very differently, black Americans saw things. In 1963, 71% of people thought that his work for equal rights was moving at the right speed, 21% thought it was not moving fast enough, and 8% thought it was moving too fast. In 1966, King had a 84% favorable view among Black adults, while 4% had an unfavorable view.

Many Americans had a negative view of King, even in the immediate aftermath of his death. He brought his 1968 assassination upon himself, said nearly a third (31%). A minority (57%) said they were sad (38%) or angry (5%).

Views toward King became more positive by the mid-1970s. He led protest marches that helped to speed up civil rights legislation, and 67% of Americans believed this.

It was far from a sure thing that King would be celebrated with a national holiday, that said. Opinion was split down the middle early in 1983, the year that legislation to create the eponymous holiday passed Congress and was signed by the president (Ronald Reagan).

Approximately half of the respondents in an ABC News/Washington Post poll indicated that they did not want Columbus Day to be a national holiday, with nearly an equal number saying that it should be. This poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percent. Most Americans favored the national holiday by the end of the year in a Harris poll.

However, some states lagged behind. It wasn’t until 2000 that South Carolina became the last state to make Martin Luther King Jr. Day a non-optional state holiday.

Another state that took a long time to make King’s birthday a state holiday was Arizona. In 1986, the bill failed to pass the state legislature, and in 1990, two ballot propositions failed.

As a result, the NFL decided to move the 1993 Super Bowl away from the state the following year.

This move was favored by only 25% of Americans when asked. 63% said they were opposed to moving the Super Bowl.

The NFL’s move had the intended effect. A law was passed in 1992 in Arizona by voters to make King’s birthday a state holiday. The NFL put the 1996 Super Bowl in the state of Louisiana.

King’s legacy was cemented in the American mind as the 20th century turned to the 21st. In 1999, a near unanimous majority (89%) indicated he was a person they admired.

In Gallup polling from 2011, 94% of Americans had a favorable view of him. The vast majority of those aged 65 and older, born in 1927 or later, had a favorable rating of 89%. In 1966, King had a favorable rating of 41% among that group.

King’s popularity is not only because older generations died out. People’s attitudes changed. King’s popularity increased greatly among many people who didn’t like him when he was alive.

Even though King has become an important part of American culture, Americans still feel there is a lot of work to be done to fulfill his dream of racial equality.

38% of Americans said they were very dissatisfied with the state of race relations in this country this past year, which is more than the 14% who said the same at the beginning of the century, according to Gallup.

A PRRI poll taken late last year showed that 58% of Americans believe White supremacy is still a major problem in the country, including 78% of Black Americans.