Martin Luther King Jr. is one of only individuals to have a national holiday in his honor, and was posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 2004. During the Sixties, King used his charisma and formidable public speaking abilities to fight peacefully for the civil rights movement, most famously in his "I Have a Dream" speech, delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC in 1963.
King was assassinated in 1968, but his memory and what he stood for still live on.