(RNN) - In 1999, Americans listed Martin Luther King Jr. No. 2 behind Mother Theresa as one of the most revered persons of the 20th century, Gallup said. The list included John F. Kennedy, Albert Einstein and Helen Keller.
In December 1967, he was nowhere to be found in a Gallup list of 10 most admired men, which included Billy Graham, George Wallace, Ronald Reagan and Harry Truman. He was on the list in 1964, though - behind Dwight Eisenhower and ahead of Robert Kennedy.
Though King earned acclaim and a Nobel peace prize for leading the civil rights movement fighting segregation, he was a controversial figure at some points during his life. Some theorize that King wouldn't be as celebrated a figure if he had lived, as he continued to advocate for issues such as poverty and other social and economic issues.
In 1963, more Americans had a positive view of King - 41 percent - while 37 percent viewed him unfavorably, according to Gallup.
Yet a majority of Americans - 60 percent - took a negative view of the now-historic 1963 march on Washington DC, "stating that they felt it would cause violence and would not accomplish anything," Cornell University's Roper Center for Public Opinion Research said.
Indeed, some Americans were skeptical of civil rights movement, with many at the height of the Cold War fearing civil rights groups had been infiltrated by communists, the Roper Center said.
J. Edgar Hoover's FBI spied on King for 12 years and, despite a lack of evidence, painted him a communist in documents released by the National Archives, the Washington Post said.
By August 1966, King's favorability rating among Americans slipped underwater, Gallup reported - 33 percent favorable and 63 percent unfavorable.
His fall in popularity was blamed on his campaign against housing and economic injustices, thorny issues the nation continues to face.
King called the 1966 Marquette Park march against housing discrimination in Chicago disastrous, as the marchers was met by violent counterprotesters, the Chicago Tribune reported. He was hit in the head by a rock, and at least 30 people were injured.
"I've been in many demonstrations all across the South, but I can say that I have never seen — even in Mississippi and Alabama — mobs as hostile and as hate-filled as I've seen here in Chicago," King told reporters.
The media also criticized King for opposing the Vietnam conflict in a speech delivered exactly a year before he died - April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church in New York City.
"I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today - my own government," he said.
King also blamed the buildup in Vietnam for a lack of progress on poverty: "I watched this (poverty) program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube."
The New York Times condemned King's Riverside speech, saying "To divert the energies of the civil rights movement to the Vietnam issue is both wasteful and self-defeating" because they said the movement needed to turn their attention to "the intractability of slum mores and habits."
King launched the Poor People's Campaign in November 1967, something he considered a "middle ground between riots on the one hand and timid supplications for justice on the other." As part of this campaign, he was in Memphis in support of a sanitation workers' strike when he was assassinated in 1968.
If King hadn't been assassinated, "he would probably be the unpopular social critic he was on the eve of the Poor People's Campaign rather than the object of national homage he became after his death," said Clayborn Carson in a 1987 article.
After King's death, cities began naming streets in his honor. As of 2013, there are more than 900 streets named after him, most in the southeastern U.S., according to research by Derek Alderman, a University of Tennessee professor.
It took a while for the federal holiday to be approved, though.
Four days after King's death, Rep. John Conyers, D-MI, filed a bill to make King's birthday a holiday. The House of Representatives voted on the bill in 1979, and despite lobbying efforts, it was defeated by five votes.
Even in 1983, when the bill was made law, the measure faced opposition by Sen. Jesse Helms, a North Carolina Republican.
He tried to block the bill, the Washington Post reported, and after questioning the holiday's cost, accused King of being a communist - "Dr. King's action-oriented Marxism, about which he was cautioned by the leaders of this country, including the president at that time, is not compatible with the concepts of this country."
Democrats and his fellow Republicans disavowed his remarks, and Americans observed the federal holiday for the first time in 1986.
It wasn't until 2000 that the King holiday was celebrated in all 50 states, with the state of Arizona famously reluctant to do. A statewide proposition failed there in 1990, spurring protests, threats of losing the Super Bowl in 1993 and a Public Enemy song criticizing the state.
Voters in Arizona finally approved the holiday in 1992, the Arizona Republic said.
Though King's legacy is now celebrated with a monument in Washington, no statute to King yet stands in Montgomery AL, where he first targeted Jim Crow laws. One is planned for later this year, though, the Montgomery Advertiser said.
The King statue in Montgomery will join statues for Confederate leaders Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, country musician Hank Williams and James Marion Sims, a doctor who performed dangerous medical experiments on enslaved people.
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