For my third reflection I researched the question “How do you define laws that are unjust?” It was fascinating to research all of the times they had to do this and how they did it and I boiled it down to a three step process and chose two examples that I thought showed it well.
How do you define laws that are unjust? It is a fascinating question, because there is such a thin line, and you have to take your personal feelings out of it or else nobody will take you seriously. But the Civil Rights workers, from top to bottom, took their personal feelings and desires out of it and nonviolently campaigned for desegregation.
In Montegomery, the busses are segregated and unlawful, with laws against black people sitting where they want. Civil Rights leaders identify this as a good thing to attack for being unjust, and with many people fighting back it’s easy to find a test case to show all of them. They choose a woman named Rosa Parks, a mixed race part African American woman, married to a white man, with a job, and overall a very well respected person. They took this test case, just a woman wanting to sit on the bus, and brought it to court, and won. They used all the previous cases, but most of all they used the phrase “separate but equal,” because this was inherently unequal. They defined the unjust law, showed it was objectively, and got it changed.
Back to our question, how do you define laws that are unjust? You have to really make a case that almost no one can deny, so a half white, well respected woman that just wants to sit on a seat on a bus, that’s a case almost nobody but the worst racist can deny. Another example of this is Brown vs. Board of Education. A family in Virginia lives very near a white school, but has to send their children to the crowded unfunded black only school. They’re fed up, so they apply and get rejected, so they sue. It’s such an unbalanced and ridiculous case that the NAACP take it and use it as a flagship case for stuff like this, and win a unanimous decision.
It’s a land mark case for civil rights and against segregation, but only happens because they identified what was unjust. So to define laws that are unjust you first, find a law that could be unjust, second, find an example of it being grossly unjust or misused, and thirdly, present the case that it is unjust.
Thanks for reading, see you next time.