Richard Young, Brookline Public Schools

Project Director

Defining “Justice”

Notes on the On-Line Journal

In the summer of 2006, I gave a talk at the University of Jena in Germany about our Teaching American History grant program, Pursuing Justice. I talked about the specifics of how we planned and delivered our seminars in the content area of U. S. history. We discussed the program’s philosophy, which is to give public school history teachers recent historiography while they have direct contact with university professors who are with them for all 10 seminars in the summer. This unique feature of such a seminar series has allowed the public school teachers to work on their own curriculum with the direct involvement of professors in the field. An added benefit is that the funding has allowed us to take the unusual step of paying the participants a fair stipend for the time they spend with us, which differs from many programs that simply cannot afford to pay. Finally, we discussed the theme of the program, which is how social justice movements have used the promises made in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to further their cause.

One of the German students then asked me a powerful question: “How do you define justice?”. I’m not sure I did justice in my answer. I said the seminars were based on the theories of John Rawls, the Harvard philosopher whose life work was defining ways of looking at justice. Rawls believed that if we were to determine artificially a perfect system of justice from behind a “veil of ignorance” of our own place in society, our class, religion and race, we would create a system that would adhere to two basic principles: 1) each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others [John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press) p. 60, 1971 edition] and 2) that offices and positions must be open to everyone under conditions of fair equality of opportunity and they the are to be of the greatest benefit to the least-advantaged members of society [Rawls, 1971, pg. 302]. I pointed out that the core of Pursuing Justice was to examine how and why American society has strayed from these ideals and how social justice movements have worked to assuage that.

But, even as I was answering the question, I had doubts about whether those definitions ever came across explicitly during our work or whether such definitions even mattered to those who lead social justice movements. We dig deeply into Justice and Race (both during the 19th Century and during the 20th Century Civil Rights era), Justice and Gender, Justice and the Courts (and how justice movements use those courts to further their cause), but I doubt if we ever have any ambiguity about what movements mean when they use the word “justice” or whether they even bother to define the word. I pointed out that Martin Luther King used the words “injustice” and “justice” eleven times in his famous “I Have a Dream Speech,” knowing that his audience would need no definition of what that word meant in the context of his movement. What complicates this is that both sides in many historic battles claim to have justice on their side--or that the common good trumps the rights of individuals.

I said that what we really try to do is assure that our students know about how injustice can lead to movements in which people work effectively to achieve justice. And that none of this is easy and in fact is often messy, especially when there are those who offer competing justice claims. Finally, that those who were opposed had real reasons and motives for their opposition and that these need to be addressed in order to tell the truth about history.

What we have to do when developing curriculum is to help students move out of the present, try to see both sides of an argument, and then make their own judgment about why justice was or was not served. We do this in the program by placing two documents side by side, for example Jeremiah Evarts as “William Penn” in defense of the Cherokees vs. the argument made by Lewis Cass to justify their removal. Then we do a close reading and discuss the arguments and discuss them some more--and bring in more examples.

I told my German audience that in any discussion of justice in America must begin with what the country has been working out for more than 400 years: race. In this issue of our on-line journal, it is only natural that the subject is Justice and Civil Rights. W. E. B. DuBois stated in The Souls of Black Folk that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line” (p. 16, Everyman’s Library, Alfred A. Knopf, 1993) and that still holds true in 2007. The following articles will give just a few vignettes of how we in the Pursuing Justice program do our work in this one area of the pursuit of justice.

The writers in this online journal include:

•Daniel Kryder is a professor in the Politics Department at Brandeis University and has been a professor in residence with the TAH Justice programs for four years. He writes about how Rosa Parks has been mythologized and how redemptive it is to bring to the forefront her role as an activist in the Civil Rights movement.

•Thomas Barry teaches high school social studies courses at Newton (MA) North High School and was a participant in Pursuing Justice in 2006. His piece for the journal reflects the work he has done with English Language Learner (ELL) students on such difficult issues as the Cherokee Removal.

•Kaylene Stevens teaches U. S. history at Framingham (MA) High School and was a Pursuing Justice participant in the summer of 2006.

•Melissa Shen teaches at Lincoln-Sudbury High School and was also a Pursuing Justice participant in 2006. Their collaboration offers an exemplary series of lessons for high school teachers on researching Civil Rights leaders and their motivations. These lessons allow students to present their finding in a unique and enjoyable forum.

•Geoff Tegnell is the K-8 Social Studies Coordinator, Brookline, MA and has served as Researcher and Curriculum Leader for the TAH Justice programs, working with all of the teachers as they have developed curriculum. He has also taught education courses at Fitchburg, Northeastern University, U Mass Boston, and Harvard. Dr. Tegnell reviews Ira Katznelson’s When Affirmative Action was White for this issue.

•Richard Young is Project Director for the Pursuing Justice project (Teaching American History Grant). He has served as Social Studies Coordinator in Brookline, MA for more than 10 years, has taught for Northeastern University, and spent one year as interim Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum and Instruction in Brookline. In this issue, he offers a short annotation for five of the best web sites to use with Civil Rights lessons.