Today, we honour the legacy of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a man who devoted his life to fighting for justice and whose teachings are as relevant today as ever.

While King is best known for his iconic, “I Have a Dream” speech, his vision for the future was much larger than a world where “little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.” King’s vision was, by many accounts, a radical one: a world without war, famine, poverty, or any other forms of oppression.

In service of this vision, Martin Luther King Jr. drew upon his immense intellect, deep conviction, and experiences of attending segregated public schools in Georgia to organize rallies, marches, sit-in, teach-ins and various other demonstrations. Incredibly, between 1957 and 1968, King traveled over six million miles and spoke more than twenty-five hundred times. He was a man who tirelessly pushed for a better world for all or, as his wife Coretta Scott King once wrote, “he spoke out sharply for all the poor in their hues, for he knew if color made them different, misery and oppression made them the same.”

This is why each year, on the third Monday in January, millions of people around the world reflect upon the efforts of Dr. King. In the face of tremendous obstacles, Dr. King found strength in the community and continually showed solidarity with the most oppressed.

In Ontario, we are in an ongoing global pandemic that is disproportionately impacting Black and Indigenous people, people with disabilities, economically oppressed people, seniors, women, and all the intersections therein. Throughout this pandemic, we have seen repeatedly that the current conservative government values some more than others. We must work together to end this injustice and, as we do, we must draw upon the courage and integrity that Dr. King so consistently demonstrated. This June, the provincial election provides us all with another opportunity to use the power of our democratic vote to make change.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day is a reminder to all of us that, while CUPE is made up of different Locals and members from various cultural/ethnic backgrounds and life experiences, we are one family in the fight for justice. Today is an opportunity for us to continue Dr. King’s legacy with a recognition, as he so eloquently stated, that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”