In my research, I found there were themes around social justice that go all the way back to philosophers like Plato, Thomas Aquinas and Immanuel Kant, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke. There is also a strong current of social justice in many of the world\u2019s major religions.\u00a0<\/p>\n

One of the earliest thinkers in this space was Luigi Taparelli, who was an advisor to the Vatican in 1840. He believed society should not be seen as a monolith, but as a collective of different groups, all of which have rights that needed to be recognized. He is generally credited as the first to use the phrase \u201csocial justice\u201d and saw it as an economic and class issue as opposed to a racial one.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights\u00a0<\/h2>\n

Building on this foundation in part led to the UN Charter in 1945 and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 which focused on political, civil, social, and economic rights. As many African nations were still under colonial rule at this time, they had limited input to the Declaration.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

While this was problematic for a number of reasons, it does explain the anti-racist focus of many social justice programs and initiatives that would come later and how race played a key role in the access to those rights. The UN would start to use the term \u201csocial justice\u201d heavily in the 1960s, and much of the work of the modern Civil Rights movement and much of the work around affirmative action and later diversity and inclusion efforts seemed to focus in this area.\u00a0<\/p>\n