What are you doing today with your children to celebrate the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday?

I know too many people who don’t do anything to recognize the legacy of the civil rights leader. Instead, it has become a shopping day, a day to sleep late, a day to clean up, or a day to run errands. Don’t waste the holiday, please. We must make sure our children not only understand the role of King and others in ending segregation and other injustices, we must teach them that they, too, must continue the fight for access to higher education and for economic parity.

It took supporters 15 years to win enough votes in Congress to create a national holiday; it was proposed eight days after King was killed in 1968. Three years after it went into effect in 1986, 44 states had adopted it as a state holiday, too. New Hampshire was the last state to adopt it.

While there are usually organized holiday events in most cities, we can figure out our own ways to celebrate. Volunteer today, and the rest of year. Talk to your children about their heritage and take them to an African-American-inspired museum. Go with them to the library and start a reading program of some of the great black authors – James Baldwin, Richard Wright and others. (Unfortunately, these books are not on many school reading lists.)

My daughter and I are going to a couple museums, one featuring African American artists and the other focusing on the South. Along the way, we’ll talk a lot. The King holiday ought to be more than the annual singing of “We Shall Overcome” or the playing of excerpts of King’s famous speeches.

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