WBAL.com

A civil rights activist from Topeka, Kansas said that America grew up on November 4, 2008 and looked past race and gender, and to recognize the significance of the election, President-elect Barack Obama needs a paid holiday in his honor.

Sonny Scroggins, who heads a group called Bias Busters of Kansas, wants to see the first Tuesday in November named Barack Obama Day.

“A lot of Third World countries, when they open their polls up and people go to vote for their favorite candidate, they get off,” he said. “One thing has always been since ‘69 to get more people involved in the electoral process, so this would be one way of increasing voter participation.”

Scroggins said he has over 5,000 emails from interested individuals across the nation and a number of those emails are from people in the Baltimore area.

He added with the inauguration coming up, he wants Obama supporters in Maryland to start forming coalitions now to start planning their own Obama Day promotions.

Scroggins, who also called himself a community organizer, said although Obama has not yet been in the position to show any presidential leadership skills, just the fact that he was a community organizer and activist qualifies him for a national holiday.

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The holiday would be slightly different from Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and Presidents’ Day.

“[It would be] along those same lines, but while that’s honoring individuals, this is honoring the movement – - people who have moved past race and gender,” he said. “How can we go out into Third World countries hollering liberty, justice, freedom, and equality, and by our actions and attitude, we have something different.”

Last week, a small central Alabama county where Obama received more than 70 percent of the vote on Election Day, created an annual holiday in honor of the president-elect.