In the fall of 1983 a new federal holiday was born, full of promise and potential. Months later Lloyd Davis was placed in charge of a commission created to imbue the holiday with lasting meaning.
The commission’s theme for the holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr. was simple: “Remember. Celebrate. Act.” Its work was arduous.
“It was step by step, brick by brick, trying to build a holiday that would do justice to everything Dr. King represented,” Mr. Davis said in 2006. “It would not sensationalize, but it would make the holiday part of the American conscience, a day of meaning and character.”
Mr. Davis, a principal architect of the King federal holiday and a longtime employee of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, died of colon cancer Monday at his home in Chevy Chase, Md. He was 79.
“He was a person who worked untiringly to bring about the holiday,” King’s sister, said Christine King Farris, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times this week. “He knew the inner workings of the government, and because of that background he was able to push forward.”
Mr. Davis was born in Chicago and graduated in 1955 from DePaul University with a bachelor’s degree in sociology. Three years later he earned a master’s degree in social and industrial relations from Loyola University Chicago.
In 1979 Mr. Davis left HUD, where he had been employed for many years, to work at the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta, the headquarters of a huge effort to create a King holiday led by King’s widow, Coretta Scott King.
Throughout the nation there were marches, petitions, student walkouts, a groundswell of voices demanding a holiday to honor the late civil rights activist. A long list of celebrities lent their support. Mr. Davis, a close ally of King’s widow, worked behind the scenes.
“He just wanted to orchestrate and be in the background,” said Mr. Davis’ stepdaughter, Tracy Reid of San Anselmo, Calif .
The national campaign paid off in 1983 when then-President Ronald Reagan signed legislation naming a federal holiday in King’s honor.
Years later Mr. Davis remembered those days as a time of constant work and vigilance, protecting the young holiday’s image even before it was born. Supporters pushed to have the bill authorizing the King holiday signed into law at the White House, not at a predominantly black school in Washington, as some in the White House wanted, he said.
“We said, ‘Oh, no,'” Davis told a Times reporter last year. “‘We don’t want this to be seen as a black holiday. It’s not a black holiday. It’s a holiday for the people of America and the world.'”
In 1984 the Martin Luther King Jr. Federal Holiday Commission was established and Mr. Davis was named executive director. The first federal holiday was to be observed Jan. 20, 1986, leaving the commission with less than two years to ready the nation. Early on, the commission decided to promote the holiday as a day to perform community service. Members did not want the holiday to become a day for shopping at the mall or lounging at the park.
In the mid-1990s Mr. Davis returned to HUD, where his long career was distinguished by his work in the fair housing and equal opportunity section, where he created voluntary fair housing agreements.
