Evolving Injustice: Martin Luther King Jr.

Evolving Injustice

Throughout history silence, social standards, and ignorance have formed a toxic coalition that has enable injustice to remain a prevalent and evolving problem in modern society.

Injustice and silence go hand in hand. A solution to an injustice will never be found if people refuse to simply talk. American culture, in specific, has a cowardly tendency to shy away from difficult and uncomfortable conversations when, in reality, these are the conversations that will make the biggest difference and are the most important in relation to justice. For example, racial and gender injustices were a very harsh reality for Katherine Johnson, an African-American mathematician whose calculations of orbital mechanics as a NASA

It was not until her supervisor brought to attention her long absences, that she had an opportunity to find a solution to her situation by simply breaking the silence. Katherine Johnson is not alone in her experience with segregation, her and many other African-Americans have very similar accounts. Throughout the civil rights movement in America, blacks had to endure racism in many forms including, the Jim Crow laws which stated ‘separate but equal.’ The most influential person during the civil rights movement was Martin Luther King Jr. One of his greatest attributes was being able to respectfully convict people without condemning them and he achieved this by breaking the silence around the ugly truth that consumed America at the time. There are countless examples of silence enabling injustice laced throughout our history books and unfortunately these same injustices are not a thing of the past. Women all around the country today are breaking the silence around the highly stigmatized topic of sexual assault. The ‘Me Too’ movement is a paragon of how silence aids injustice. Society tiptoes around sexual assault because it is a topic that is uncomfortable and sensitive, but it is foolish to infer that silence is the solution. The testimony of the

Society has a huge impact on everyone’s day to day lives whether we see it or not. The most obvious manifestation of society’s influence is in things like fashion, art, and music. However, society can also dictate people’s perception of social standing and subsequent capability. This is another injustice that Katherine Johnson faced within the workplace. Being a women, she felt the constant and unrelenting pressures of having to prove herself as equal to her male counterparts. Despite being more than capable to do her job, society dictated her white male co-workers’ perception of her. Not only did the color of her skin influence her perceived intelligence, due to the segregation of schools, but her gender was another opportunity for her to ‘fall short’ in comparison the her cohorts. During her work with NASA in 1953-1958 society told women that their primary role was in the house supporting their husbands and raising their children. This perception of what a women ‘should be doing’ translated into lesser pay for women in the workplace. Throughout Johnson’s career struggles with unfair payment and reward. In Katherine Johnson’s case, society aided injustice and put her in a position of inferiority where she had to work much harder that her male counterparts to achieve the same goal. Unfortunately, this injustice still resides with us today. Although America is in the midst of major progress for women’s