Our inheritance from Martin Luther King Jr. includes a number of fundamental principles that are still applied by civil rights campaigners the world over.

Bearing in mind that the United States celebrated Martin Luther King Day on Monday, it is timely and appropriate to re-affirm some of the main aspects of King’s social and political philosophy.

Such a re-affirmation serves to emphasize that his strategic principles are relevant for all countries, not just his own.

That universal nature of King’s legacy is self-evident in one of his most frequently quoted articles of faith: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice anywhere”.

That is why so many of us protest against the use of excessive force by the police. We had to protest here in Canada in order to counter the injustice that would have resulted from the authorities’ failure to properly investigate the police interaction that led to the senseless death of Sammy Yatin, the troubled teenager who was shot at nine times by a Toronto police officer and was hit by eight of the shots.

It was not just an act of good conscience and it was more than a rejection of injustice. We also protested because we knew that we would not enjoy our rights and freedoms if we did not protect the rights and freedoms of others.

At both the national and international levels, we have to fight injustice in order to make our own lives safer from the dangers of injustice.

That logic flows neatly into another of King’s principles, according to which “our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter”.

That argument is of itself the justification for our relentless battle against random police checks, also known as carding. We know that this practice affects mainly Black males.

But we go further. We recognize it as a broader issue that deserves public attention. It is an illegal and unethical threat to freedom of movement and to privacy in terms of the non-disclosure of our personal information to police without cause.

On that basis, our silence in the face of injustice to others eventually endangers our own lives because it weakens the systems that are supposed to protect us. The price of democracy and equal rights is permanent vigilance. Every time we fail to speak up against injustice, we are opening the door to more and more injustices and abuses.

Martin Luther King constantly insisted that racial equality and harmonious race relations are among the highest ideals to which society can and must aspire. It is easy to recall his famous words to this effect: “I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

That dream still remains elusive in the United States. One only has to consider, for example, the numerous systemic and endemic failures of the Chicago Police Department which have been documented in the recent investigation led by the Federal Department of Justice.

Included in the realities and consequences of those structural failures is the “racially discriminatory conduct” that has certainly had a highly negative impact on a cross-section of the approximately 70 per cent of Chicago residents who are Black, Latino, Asian or of mixed race.

Racially discriminatory conduct can manifest itself in surprising places. Our challenge in each instance becomes the strategic issue of how to deal with it.

Responding to that challenge, we endorse yet another cardinal principle for which Martin Luther King Jr. has become famous: the principle of non-violent protest. His inspiration here was drawn from Mahatma Gandhi.

In that regard, we can refer to the strategy used by Black Lives Matter/Toronto at the Toronto Pride Parade last year. For one hour, the group’s participants in the Parade sat down on the road as a form of non-violent protest against the discriminatory treatment they claimed to have suffered in the management and operations of the Pride Parade. They demanded and obtained a detailed, written commitment from the leadership of Pride Parade to end the discriminatory practices.

In the context of our individual and collective responsibility to pursue the dream of just, fair and equitable treatment for all, we wholeheartedly subscribe to the over-arching principle of “a coalition of conscience” that has been passed on to us by Martin Luther King Jr.