I have a dream that one day in Alabama, MLK will no longer share a holiday with Robert E. Lee

A version of this tribute cartoon was first posted in 2020.

“You can kill the dreamer, but you can’t kill the dream.” – Martin Luther King Jr.

Pardon me for tweaking one of my favorite quotes by Dr. King, but here goes …

“You can kill the dreamer (or make him share a holiday with a white supremacist loser) but you can’t kill the dream.”

Only Alabama and Mississippi still combine a holiday honoring Lee and King, though Alabama lists Lee’s name second to King’s in its most recent calendar. Other states, including Florida and Tennessee, set aside a day for Lee but do not combine it with the King holiday – and state offices don’t shut down.

Alabama celebrates three Confederate-related state holidays: Confederate Memorial Day in April, the birthday of Confederate President Jefferson Davis in June, and today – the joint holiday of Robert E. Lee Day and Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Let’s start by doing away with the most embarrassing of the three – today’s shameful joint holiday. Must Alabama always provide a Confederate loser option for those unwilling to recognize a Black civil rights icon?

As a 2017 Smithsonian Magazine article put it, the two men were born 122 years, four days and an ideological world apart.

It’s way past time to put Robert E. Lee out to pasture and respectfully celebrate Martin Luther King on his own day, for crying out loud.

Peace.

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JD Crowe is the cartoonist for Alabama Media Group and AL.com. He won the RFK Human Rights Award for Editorial Cartoons in 2020. In 2018, he was awarded the Rex Babin Memorial Award for local and state cartoons by the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. Follow JD on Facebook, Twitter @Crowejam and Instagram @JDCrowepix.