The United States observed the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday Monday with parades, prayer services and volunteer events in honor of the late civil rights icon.
President Joe Biden volunteered at Philabundance, a Philadelphia nonprofit food bank, where he stuffed apples into donation boxes and struck up casual conversations with workers at the hunger relief organization.
In South Carolina, Vice President Kamala Harris encouraged people to use their voices to continue fighting for justice and against attacks on fundamental freedoms.
“Consider in states across our nation, extremists attack the sacred freedom to vote,” Harris said. “They pass laws to ban drop boxes, limit early voting and restrict absentee ballots.”
At the annual Martin Luther King Day pancake breakfast in New Hampshire, Democratic Senator Maggie Hassan told the crowd that “one of most enduring lessons of Martin Luther King’s life is that each of us has the capacity to make a difference.”
Every year on the third Monday in January, Americans honor King, who in the 1950s and 1960s organized nonviolent protests against southern segregation, the struggle for Black equality and voting rights. He was assassinated in 1968.
