Social Justice Applications and the African American Liberation Tradition

Social justice is amiable formal, informal interaction and the impartial distribution of resources for a community. Nondiscriminatory social practices and equitable resource distribution may minimize the mistreatment of African Americans who have endured the profuseness of social injustices in this country as exemplified by the Trayvon Martin incident and the numerous police killings of unarmed African Americans. Social justice is also the recognition, preservation of an ethnic group's cultural identity, and it interrelates with the African American liberation tradition. This tradition began on the West African Coast where inhabitants resisted the European captivity system and its repercussions in the Americas that educators describe as Maafa or disaster. The resilience of Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King, Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, and Molefi Asante's Afrocentric theory characterizes social justice applications of economic, political, cultural strategies within the context of the African American liberation tradition.