If colleges and universities carried defining brand names, surely CDU’ s would be“ Social Justice U.” As our commentators readily concur, Social Justice is the bedrock defining concept central to CDU’ s founding, It is part of the University’ s DNA.
The inclusion of Social Justice as a pillar of the CDU Advantage is integral to convincing the public as a whole and the institutions that provide service of the need to comprehend just how harmful the effects of health care disparities affect people living in a low-income community. The pretext for promoting health care advocacy as an issue of Social Justice is based on an awareness of the need for equity in the availability and delivery of such services regardless of economic status, age, ethnicity, or ability to pay.
Social Justice has a broad interpretation that is implied through a multiplicity of power nexuses. For example, there is the political nexus, which offers the forum for a legislative solution that is tied to influencing popular will. Laws tend to ensure compliance, particularly if intended to guarantee equity of access and to save lives. Then there is the informal power nexus of unelected influential leaders who have led movements that advocate Social Justice as a response to long-held beliefs and legal practices that challenge the prevailing moral order. Those two ideas are consistent with affecting the social change embodied within a humanistic health care equity for all approach.
The additional element is the necessity to develop a coherent, progressive educational process, designed to stimulate active discussion and to foster locally based advocates who will emphasize the message in neighborhood settings that convince disparate segments of society as to the“ right place, right time” nature of Social Justice initiatives. That was the genesis of how the civil rights movement gained air under its wings during the questioning years of the late 1950s, 60s and 70s.
-Editor
The CDU Advantage Pillars: Part I, Social Justice
THE BACKSTORY MLK and Dr. H. Claude Hudson MLK, Ethel and Tom Bradley John Lewis, Making Good Trouble
Los Angeles is the perfect crucible for Social Justice to have been developed and to proliferate. Though founded in 1781 by a group of Spanish colonizers that included at least 25 % men with African ancestry, by the time of the Civil War, there was active support for the Confederacy within many of the city’ s leading citizens.
Slave owners were allowed to maintain slaves if they had brought them from a slave holding state, as we saw in the case of Biddy Mason. Biddy had been born a slave, was transported by her master to the San Bernardino area where she petitioned the Court for her freedom, which she won. She ultimately became one of the first prominent citizens and landowners in Los Angeles in the 1850s and 1860s. She also founded the First African Methodist Episcopal Church in Los Angeles in 1872, downtown at 8th and Towne.
During the Great Migrations of the 20th century, African Americans predominantly from Texas and Louisiana poured into Los Angeles with the same aspirations as their white peers moving to so called“ promise-land” cities further East. By the 1920 and 30s, active protests by LA’ s African Americans regarding opportunities for jobs, included multiple boycotts with the campaign slogan” Don’ t Buy Where You Can’ t Work!” trumpeted through the fledgling Black press, notably the California Eagle and the LA Sentinel. This all happened alongside the backdrop of the severe post- World War I tuberculosis pandemic that claimed many lives and had the effect of drawing lines that introduced the model for health care disparities later experienced by African Americans and Latinos. Black people were locked out of admission to the TB sanitariums devoted to treating whites. The systematic mandated exclusion ultimately became an issue of survival.
An African American hero-healer stepped into the breach. Dr. Leonard Stovall was a remarkable physician and civic leader. There are many laudatory things that can be said about Dr. Stovall. He was the first Black physician employed within the LA City-County health system. With the pandemic raging, he and his wife Yolande purchased land in Duarte, 21 miles to the east of LA to treat all comers who contracted the dreaded disease.
He ultimately organized a group of Black LA’ s most influential citizens who established a nonprofit organization, the Outdoor
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