One of the more shocking things you could have told my parents on the day I was born was that, 200 miles or so northeast of where they were holding their infant, there was a 25-year-old Boston University student for whom a national holiday will be celebrated.

Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t a Rev. or a Dr. in April 1954. He was a year away from obtaining his doctorate. He was married for less than a year to Coretta Scott. He wasn’t a father yet – of either his children or a civil rights movement; the Montgomery bus boycott was a year away.

(As an aside, I don’t think the idea of Black History Month, which we’re beginning, would have shocked my parents. There has been a commemoration of African-American history since the 1920s, known as Negro History Week. It was expanded in the early 1970s to all of February – the month in which Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass were born.)

No celebration of Black History Month can be made without considering the legacy of Dr. King. A Nobel Peace Prize winner and an agent of remarkable change in our nation, my parents – especially my Mom – admired Dr. King and were as crestfallen as most of the nation when he was assassinated in 1968.

My parents might have been shocked that someone less than two years older than my father would be the reason millions of Americans have the third Monday in January off. But once you told them about why, they would have understood.