On the holiday that celebrate's America's greatest civil rights leader, we turn to Taylor Branch, author of the Byliner Original The Cartel, whose areas of expertise extend beyond the NCAA. In fact, Branch wrote a three-volume history of the modern civil rights movement that earned him a Pulitzer Prize for his insights into Martin Luther King and his legacy.

Back in 1986, Branch explained the origins of today's commemoration. "Ironically, the creation of the holiday owes something to a negative trend in contemporary race relations. In 1983 the Reagan administration was proposing tax exemptions for segregated schools, delaying an extension of the Voting Rights Act, and mounting an attack on all affirmative action programs as 'quotas,' which exacerbated antagonisms between blacks and Jews. Some Republican leaders, fearing that their entire party was headed toward extinction among black voters, resolved to make amends for these injuries with a holiday," he wrote. "The leaders of the King Holiday Commission are aware of such limitations to their support. They know they are not riding an unmixed tide of national sentiment, and that some of King's admirers and detractors alike regard his new day as a political gesture, a throwaway holiday for blacks. In death as in life. King's followers struggle for recognition while King himself reaches for something deeper and almost unfathomable. All this makes for an uneasy new holiday, mysterious in origin and meaning."

And in 2008 he reminded us about one part of King's legacy that has been lost. "Many of Dr. King’s closest comrades rejected his commitment to nonviolence. The civil rights movement created waves of history so long as it remained nonviolent, then stopped. Arguably, the most powerful tool for democratic reform was the first to become passé," he writes. "It vanished among intellectuals, on campuses and in the streets. To this day, almost no one asks why.

'We must reclaim the full range of blessings from his movement. For Dr. King, race was in most things, but defined nothing alone. His appeal was rooted in the larger context of nonviolence."