Black History Month | Fania Davis and “Healing Justice”

In honoring Black History Month, The Hartford Community Restorative Justice Center (HCRJC) wants to highlight those who have championed restorative justice and lift up the work they have done in furthering best practices of justice. 

An intersectional activist, civil rights trial lawyer, and restorative justice champion, Fania Davis has spent her life committed to social reform and the search for healing alternatives to adversarial justice. In 2003, she received her Ph. D. in indigenous studies after studying under traditional African healers, and began to push for “healing justice,” founding Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth (RJOY) and co-founding the National Association of Community and Restorative Justice. Healing justice is a framework that integrates restorative practices with racial equity and is deeply rooted in Black culture as a continuation of the restorative practices of communities of the African diaspora.  

For Davis, the ultimate justice, “healing justice,” is restorative justice. And justice that restores is love. 

Answering the question, “What is justice?” in a 2016 interview, Fania Davis quoted Martin Luther King Jr. saying, “Justice is love correcting everything that stands against love.” 

Davis amends this slightly, saying “justice is love correcting that which revolts against love.”

In our system of justice, we have seen historically and are now seeing an increase of attacks on marginalized folks – as a continuation of colonialism, racism, and the idea of ‘might as right.’ 

“Ours is a justice system that harms people who harm people to show that harming people is wrong. So our system replicates that harm. So I learned from [MLK] that restorative justice, instead of perpetuating that endless cycle of harm, seeks to interrupt it. It seeks to heal the harm and repair the damage that’s done to relationships. It‘s a justice that seeks to create more social peace than social conflict.”

At the HCRJC we stand on the shoulders of Black leaders, like Davis, and, through community love and circle-based programs of accountability and healing, strive to carry on the tradition of restorative justice as justice. 

For further reading, check out Fania Davis’s The Little Book of Race and Restorative Justice.