This Monday we celebrated Martin Luther King Jr. Day, commemorating the civic rights leader’s birthday with a national holiday, which to most people, unfortunately, really just means another day off from work or school.
The creation of an MLK national holiday in 1983 was intended to remember and honor the work of Dr. King. In 1991, President Bill Clinton signed an updated law, the King Holiday and Service Act, which challenges Americans to transform the King Holiday into a day of citizen action volunteer service in honor of Dr. King. Only two other individuals have national holidays in their honor; George Washington and Christopher Columbus.

But the real memory of Dr. King we should all celebrate is his fight for equality regardless of the color of one’s skin. His great “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington D.C. in 1963 imagined a world where our children “would not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”. Oh, what a wonderful world that would be.

Now, in 2016, we are still working to live that dream. In the past few years, we have all seen the images of white police officers assaulting or shooting black men in circumstances that later prove to be unjustified. We have seen thousands protest in the streets for equal treatment in the justice system. And we have seen long-time prisoners, mostly minorities, released when new evidence overturns wrongful convictions by biased prosecutors and overzealous juries. None of these scenarios would exist in Dr. King’s dream world.

Our American past is a complicated history of racial and economic conflict. Our entire history is based on a new immigrant group taking the lands of others, and the original sin of slavery ripping blacks from their homeland to use them as chattel here. Native Americans, Blacks, Latinos, Asians, and now Muslims have all borne the brunt of discrimination throughout the evolution of what we call freedom in America.

Today, we have immigrants from every country here, and some in large enough numbers that now whites are a minority group in California. The color and texture of the country continues to change and our attitudes toward each other should change, too.

Yet today we still fight for equality more than 150 years after the abolition of slavery and over 50 years since the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s.
Latinos sometimes forget that our community also benefited from the civil rights struggles, and others forget that Latinos actually fought a great part of the fight.

The Mendez v. Westminster School District case in 1947 was the first desegregation case in the US and outlawed separate “Mexican schools” in California by challenging the separate but equal concept of racial segregation.
Thurgood Marshall, who wrote the NAACP’s friend of the court brief for Mendez v. Westminster, used the decision as precedent when he later argued the Brown v. Board of Education case in front of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954 that finally ended all segregation of schools, restaurants, bathrooms, and the workplaces in the United States.

Although Latinos have fared well when comparing access to education and economic empowerment, those strides have only been possible because of the combined successes of Cesar Chavez, Rosa Parks, and Dr. King, and all the others that have taken up the struggle against racism and discrimination. They fought
for us all.

Dr. King himself summed it up best when he said “We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now.” Let’s row together toward that dream that Dr. King laid out for us.
In some states, MKL Day is referred to as Civil Rights Day, reflecting the broader achievements of the civil rights struggles Dr. King embodied.

We should all celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr. Day to honor the past accomplishments of those that came before us, and gave us the platform to live more freely.
Although we have not yet fully realized the dream, we are closer than we ever have to seeing it become a reality.
Only together, unified toward the goal of equality, can we all finally get there.