An Iowa bar that was originally planning to host an "MLKegs" event over the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday weekend decided against it after facing backlash on social media.

Deringer's Public Parlor, a bar in downtown Cedar Falls, was planning on hosting the event Sunday and was planning to offer "$10 unlimited kegs, $3 shot specials and $7 pizzas," according to a now-deleted post on the bar's Facebook page.

The event's name drew outrage, with people calling it disrespectful toward Martin Luther King Jr. and his efforts during the civil rights movement.

"This isn’t Saint Patrick’s Day; this is a remembrance day of honor for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a man who was assassinated for helping us stand up for our rights," Joyce Levingston, a 32-year-old African-American woman from Cedar Falls, told the Register. "An 'MLKeg' has no intention of educating, remembering or celebrating anything other than the fact that class is canceled Monday."

Darin Beck, the owner of Barmuda, which owns Deringer's and several other bars in Cedar Falls and Des Moines, said the event was never planned with any ill will in mind toward the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.

Beck said the name came about from an informal tradition hosted by University of Northern Iowa students in Cedar Falls "for a decade." Beck said the weekend historically includes house parties on the Sunday before Martin Luther King Jr. Day because students have the holiday off.

In College Magazine's "Guide to the University of Northern Iowa," published in 2017, a student wrote, "On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, we don’t have classes. People have house parties with crazy keggers and we call it MLKegs Day.”

Beck said a popular Twitter account called "@UNI_Confessions" posted a tweet asking about the event this year and saw others asking where this year's "kegger" would be held. That's when the bar decided to host Sunday's scrapped event.

"We’re sorry if we offended anyone — that wasn’t our intention," Beck said. "I can see how some people would view it as insensitive, but we weren't thinking about it in that light."

In the past, similarly named events have been hosted by other Cedar Falls businesses, like Chad's Pizza.

In honor of the holiday and Martin Luther King Jr., Levingston said that she and her child would be volunteering to fill bags for the local food pantry at the university.

"That is how we, at UNI, really pay respect to the honored holiday," she said.