Martin Luther King Jr. Day: MLK Day programming services for ERGs.

For Black ERGs, MLK Day sits in a strange spot. It's the one federal holiday tied to a Black leader, and it usually arrives as a single quote in a company-wide email — the same line about the dream, every year, with none of the context. The ERG ends up either grateful the day is acknowledged at all or quietly drafting the programming that the company didn't think to plan.

That's the gap worth naming. King spent the last years of his life on the Poor People's Campaign, sanitation workers' strikes, fair housing, and an explicit critique of economic inequality. Most workplace programming skips straight past that work to a softer version of him. Black ERG members notice — and the gap between the King in the email and the King they grew up learning about is its own form of erasure.

The bar isn't a perfect day of programming. A company that marks the day at all is doing more than many. But there's a meaningful difference between a calendar reminder and an observance that lets the Black ERG choose the framing, brings in voices that speak to King's full body of work, and connects the day to what the company is actually doing on racial and economic equity the rest of the year.