Many Americans are required to work on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Only about a third of private businesses close to observe the holiday, and it wasn't until the year 2000 that every state even recognized the occasion.
The chief executive officer of Slack, a popular online messaging platform, sent a letter to his employees on Sunday underscoring the importance of the holiday and highlighting how much work remains to be done for racial equality in the United States.
While Stewart Butterfield writes from a position of considerable privilege -- he's a white man leading a well-liked technology startup -- the note nonetheless makes a number of points that are well worth considering at this late date.
On the subject of the holiday itself:
Nationwide it is still, frustratingly, not an uncontroversial holiday. Only about a third of private businesses make it a paid holiday while several states mix the observance of Dr. King’s birthday with that of the confederate general Robert E. Lee.
On activism:
Dr. King was unquestionably an important figure and his legacy is worthy of recognition and celebration. He is also part of an historical movement that has included people such as Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, Rosa Parks and Malcolm X. It has also included thousands of other less well-known activists and champions, and millions of individual people across many decades and many generations. This movement continues to this very day in Ferguson and Cleveland and Baltimore and Chicago and all across the country.
On injustice:
These [activists] are people who have been beaten, and burned, and raped, and shot, and hanged because they stood up for their own basic dignity. Not people asking to take something from someone else. Not people threatening harm. People asking for an equal right to vote, to have freedom from violence, access to education and housing, and the right to make a living.
...
Think about how profoundly shameful it is that there even ever had to be a ‘civil rights movement’. There aren’t two ways to look at that.
On Slack's responsibility:
Despite the fact there have been areas of progress great and small, it is still, shamefully, far from finished. And it is on all of us to see it through. There is only us, the people. And if we truly value solidarity at this company it is a good time to recognize, and remember, and recommit to standing with the people who lost their livelihoods, their limbs, and even their lives, merely asking for something as simple and basic and obvious as equal rights and equal protections under the law.
Read the full letter here.
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