The NAACP Legal Defense Fund was founded in 1940 by Thurgood Marshall. It was America’s premier legal organization fighting for racial justice. Justice is a legal term as well as a moral term—legal as seen in the statues of Lady Justice found around the world--blindfolded and holding scales--in Frankfurt, Brisbane, Tehran, Hong Kong.
Justice is also a moral term in the sense of the protest chant, “No justice, no peace!” and as depicted in the statue at the entrance of the Rayborn Office Building in Washington, the one with the child standing beside Lady Justice who has her protective hand on his shoulder.
The Civil Rights Movement, from 1940 until 1965, bound together both senses of Justice. Attorneys with the NAACP successfully framed the legal relief they sought from Jim Crow laws (e.g., in public schools) as a way of achieving Justice in the moral sense. Likewise, King, with his speeches, writings and actions melded together the moral and legal meanings of Justice and made of them a single goal.
This is how King put it in his Letter From Birmingham Jail, April 1963: “There are some instances when a law is just on its face but unjust in its application. For instance, I was arrested Friday on charges of parading without a permit. Now there is nothing wrong with an ordinance which requires a permit for a parade, but when the ordinance is used to preserve segregation and to deny citizens the first amendment privilege of peaceful assembly and peaceful protest, then it becomes unjust.”
Sixty years on, King’s vision of that dual sense of Justice, where the legal and the moral reside together, has been lost. The moral underpinnings of Justice have been jettisoned by the Trump administration. Cornell law professor, Joseph Margulies, has observed that “by cloaking naked power in the trappings of the law, the Trump administration . . . channels objections to its behavior into sterile disputes about who has the best lawyers. . .. Law-speak thus substitutes for moral judgment” (Boston Review, Fall, 2025).
Recall Trump’s Crusade in the Caribbean? On September 2, 2026, by Presidential order, the US Navy began a military campaign against alleged drug smugglers. Armed only with footage from missile-mounted cameras and his own designation of the crews as “enemy combatants” for justification, he killed the crews and destroyed their cargo--with no probable cause and no warrants and no presumption of innocence. ICE used the same playbook in Minneapolis. And it was all cloaked “in the trappings of the law!”
No American President and no US Justice Department should be allowed to get away with such blatant violations of the Constitution. But wait! That’s a legal objection, and so far, those arguments have not worked with the American public. I believe it is now time to restore fearless moral judgment to our sense of Justice as we ponder the viability of our democracy.
Like many readers, especially in the South, most of my moral sensitivity has come from my religion, that sliver of mainline Christian Protestantism that looks to the Hebrew Scriptures for guidance on how to live as much as it does to the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.
After a year of Trump’s second term, I am now compelled to look at his actions and words through the eyes of the prophet, Micah. He observes in chapter 6 that we already know what God requires of us, and it is “to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.” And then there’s that Sabbath in Nazareth early in his ministry when Jesus read the scripture. The passage was from Isaiah chapter 61. Luke chapter 4 reports it this way, “The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free.”
The President’s actions are morally despicable. He ridicules kindness and humility, and he cares nothing for the poor and the oppressed. The Justice that will defeat him—the Justice that most of us desire--is the Justice that binds together both moral judgment and legal reasoning. I believe that leading with this richer, fuller concept of Justice is the formula for winning over those who voted for Trump and now see him for what he really is and those who want no part of the world he is creating—a world bereft of kindness and humility; a world where the poor and oppressed are rendered invisible.
