Miscellaneous- Assassination attempts, election results, civil rights
Jimmy Carter was president for only one term, from 1977-1981. He was the 39th president and was a democrat. He ran against Gerald Ford, who was the president at the time. Carter won 297 electoral votes and Ford won 240. He ran again for president in 1980, but was beat by Ronald Reagan.
There was only one “assassination attempt” for Jimmy Carter. In May of 1979, Raymond Lee Harvey was arrested by the Secret Service at the Civic Center Mall in Los Angeles. He had a starter pistol with blank rounds in it. The police investigated his claim to be in a group to assassinate Carter. He was working with an illegal Mexican immigrant.
During and after Carter’s presidency, MLK Day was being made a national holiday. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day is on the third Monday of January. King’s birthday was January 15, so it usually falls around his birthday. It was officially made a holiday in 1986, but it took about 15 years before all the states to consider it a national holiday.
Martin Luther King Jr. was a leader of Civil Rights for African Americans. His famous speech is “I Have A Dream” from 1963. He was assassinated in 1968. Ever since he was assassinated, many people in the government had pushed to make Martin Luther King Jr Day a national holiday. His widow, Coretta, had tried to get Congress to make it a bill but never fully convinced them until Carter’s presidency.
Carter had strongly supported Coretta. This had motivated her to go before Congress to ask for the bill multiple times. Finally, in 1980, Congress had approved the bill because Coretta had a petition with 6 million signatures. Because it was harder to get the bill passed through the Senate, it wasn’t signed until 1983 while Ronald Reagan was president.
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