Early-'90s MLK discord recalled
Back in the late 1980s, Al Jernigan had thought Arizona was taking large steps forward on the national scene.
The state's former governor, Bruce Babbitt, had campaigned for the presidency, although unsuccessfully. Arizona State University's football team had just gone to the Rose Bowl and won it.
Then in November 1990, Arizonans, including a majority of Yuma County voters, rejected a ballot measure that would have established a paid state holiday for civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.
"That gave us a bad mark," said Jernigan, pastor of Second Baptist Missionary Church in Yuma and a former president of the Yuma Chapter of the NAACP. He remembered wondering, "How can we present our state as forward-thinking when this happened?"
Many of the participants in Monday's MLK Day march and service in Yuma were too young to remember the events nearly two decades ago. But for Jernigan and others in Yuma County, memories of vote and the controversial aftermath remain vivid.
The vote made the state a focal point for scorn from around the country. National organizations boycotted previously planned conventions in Arizona in protests of the vote. The NFL pulled an scheduled Super Bowl game from Arizona.
Jernigan remembers being asked a recurring question from family members and acquaintances from other parts of the nation that already recognized King with a holiday: "What's happening in Arizona? What's wrong?"
Actually, the state had had a King holiday prior to the vote. In the 1980s, then-Gov. Babbitt created the a paid holiday for state workers by executive order, only to have it rescinded by his successor, Evan Mecham.
Mike Shelton, a Yuma resident who at the time was a producer for the "Horizon" program on the PBS Phoenix affiliate, KAET, recalled Mecham's actions prompted huge protest marches in Phoenix and around the state.
"We began to understand what Dr. King meant to the country and to the world," said Shelton, who later came to Yuma to become assistant to the Yuma city administrator.
Mecham did designate a Sunday in January as a King Day. But in the minds of many, that action tended to minimize King, given that the day Mecham designated did not fall during the workweek, recalled former Yuma Mayor Larry Nelson.
At the time, Nelson was Southwest Division manager of Arizona Public Service, which had already given its employees a paid King Day holiday. Nelson recalled taking part in a behind-the-scenes campaign to win area employers' support of the holiday, both in the weeks leading up to the 1990 vote and then prior to a second statewide vote in 1992 when the holiday won approval.
Nelson recalled that the boycotts aimed at the state after the first vote created a backlash from many in Arizona and Yuma County, who felt they were being blackmailed into supporting the holiday.
"It created a lot of disharmony in the state," he said. Arizonans "wanted to (create the holiday), but they didn't want to be blackmailed."
Although Arizona voters approved the holiday in the second vote, most of Yuma County again rejected it in 1992.
For Shelton, the 1990 vote was a source of embarrassment for the state.
On the other hand, Shelton added, the 1992 vote should be a source of pride for Arizonans. The second time around, he said, Arizona became the only state in the country to have its King holiday established not by politicians elected by voters but by the voters themselves.
