Forty years after Martin Luther King Jr.’s death, John McCain sought to make amends Friday for originally opposing the creation of a national holiday in honor of the civil rights leader.

In a driving rain, the presumptive Republican nominee stood on the Memphis balcony of Lorraine Motel, where King was assassinated, and told the gathered crowd he had made a “mistake.”

“We can be slow as well to give greatness its due, a mistake I myself made long ago … when I voted against a federal holiday in memory of Dr. King. I was wrong, I was wrong,” McCain said.

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee withstood jeers — and later criticism from the Democratic Party — for trying to take back his 25-year-old position on the holiday. He also received encouragement from someone in the crowd who said, “We all make mistakes. We all make mistakes.”

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, founded by King, invited all the presidential candidates to attend its ceremonies Friday. Hillary Clinton didn’t attend but visited the Lorraine Motel later in the day. Barack Obama marked the anniversary at a campaign stop in Indiana.

McCain’s evolution from an opponent of the King holiday to a supporter took years.

“I’d remind you that … we can all be a little late sometimes in doing the right thing and Dr. King understood this about his fellow Americans,” McCain said Friday.

In his first term in the U.S. House of Representatives, McCain sided with the minority and opposed the 1983 law creating the national holiday, arguing there were enough federal holidays and that it would be too costly. In 1987 when the governor of Arizona rescinded the state’s King holiday, McCain called it the correct move. But then he reversed himself in 1989, as Arizona faced tourism boycotts.

A May 1989 edition of the Phoenix Gazette quoted him as saying: “I’m still opposed to another federal holiday … but I support the Arizona Martin Luther King holiday because of the enormous proportions this issue has taken on as far as the image of our state and our treatment towards not only blacks but all minorities.”

Arizona voters eventually approved a measure in 1992, making it the second to last state to recognize the holiday (before New Hampshire in 1999).

McCain said Monday he reversed his stance on the Arizona holiday because he “learned (King) was a transcendent figure in American history.”

He said he was “not proud” that Arizona was one of the last states to recognize the holiday.

But as late as 1994, McCain voted against federal funds for the MLK Federal Holiday Commission.

“It’s frankly disingenuous for John McCain to try and reinvent himself for the general election by distorting his record of opposing a holiday honoring Dr. King,” Democratic National spokeswoman Karen Finney said in a statement Friday. “John McCain should be honest about his full record of opposing the federal holiday, opposing a state holiday four years later, using divisive language to defend himself and voting to cut off funding for the commission working to promote the King holiday as recently as 1994.”

McCain also took heat for his short-lived support of South Carolina’s right to fly the confederate flag over the state house during the 2000 primary. Not until he was defeated for the nomination did he say that was not his true feeling but an act of political cowardice.

The Democratic candidates also honored King Friday.

Speaking in Memphis, Clinton appeared to get emotional when she talked about King’s death.

“I will never forget where I was when I heard Dr. King had been killed. I was a junior in college. And I remember hearing about it and feeling such despair,” she said, her voice dropping and quivering a bit. “I walked into my dorm room and took my book bag and hurled it across the room. It felt like everything had been shattered. Like we would never be able to put the pieces together again.”

FOX News’ Carl Cameron, Mosheh Oinounou and Aaron Bruns contributed to this report.

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