ABSTRACT
Although social justice education in the U.S.A. is frequently historicized in terms of the Civil Rights Movement and twentieth-century protest movements, it also is historically tied to the twentieth-century’s human rights initiatives. These human rights pioneers-the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the UN’s Human Rights Commission members-are social justice ancestors usually ignored in our American context but whose efforts have indelibly influenced and shaped social justice efforts in the U.S.A. In fact, this history makes clear that the mid-century human rights initiatives were part of a transnational movement for social justice. Reframing social justice education in terms of human rights gives clarity to our work as social justice educators: It strengthens a vision of education as central to promoting human rights and social justice, it refocuses attention not only on civil rights but also social and economic rights, and it explicitly contests our current context of globalization and neoliberal educational reform.
