Digital Collection: 40 Years of Advertising the MLK Holiday

Building on the sample of advertisements featured in the accompanying Advertising & Society Quarterly article "His Light Still Shines: Corporate Advertisers and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday," this digital collection provides a cross-section of MLK Daythemed or inspired advertisements from 1981 to the present found largely in Black magazines. Collectively, these adverts and advertising features showcase the multivalent ways in which American companies—from multinational corporations to local businesses and commercial vendors—have attempted to walk the tightrope between commemorating and commercializing King, and between acknowledging and appropriating his activism and political legacy.