KSEEB Class 9 · English (2nd language) · KTBS Revised 2024-25
Justice
Chapter summary, hard words and model exam answers for Karnataka Board Class 9 English.
Free online summary and notes (Karnataka Board Class 9 English). Read it here, no PDF download needed.
About the author
Langston Hughes (1902–1967), Harlem Renaissance poet. Hughes gave voice to African-American experience; "Justice" is a bitter short poem on delayed freedom and equality.
Summary
The poem asks when freedom and justice will arrive for those who have waited longest - tone of impatience and pain.
The poem asks when freedom and justice will arrive for those who have waited longest - tone of impatience and pain.
Justice is imagined as a figure that should protect all but has been blindfolded or wounded in American society.
Justice is imagined as a figure that should protect all but has been blindfolded or wounded in American society.
Centuries of slavery and segregation echo - promises of equality without fulfilment feel like mockery.
Centuries of slavery and segregation echo - promises of equality without fulfilment feel like mockery.
Hughes packs outrage into few lines; brevity mirrors how long the oppressed must compress their speech.
Hughes packs outrage into few lines; brevity mirrors how long the oppressed must compress their speech.
Though rooted in Black experience, the poem speaks to anyone denied fair treatment by law or custom.
Though rooted in Black experience, the poem speaks to anyone denied fair treatment by law or custom.
Readers are left asking not when justice will come but what they must do to remove the bandage from its eyes.
Readers are left asking not when justice will come but what they must do to remove the bandage from its eyes.
Hard words & meanings
| justice | just behaviour or treatment |
| freedom | the power to act and speak without oppression |
| oppressed | subjected to unjust treatment or control |
| segregation | policy separating racial groups unfairly |
| personification | giving human qualities to abstract ideas |
| deferred | put off to a later time |
| equality | equal status, rights, and opportunities |
| conscience | inner knowledge of right and wrong |
| Harlem Renaissance | 1920s–30s African-American cultural flowering |
Model exam answers, grammar & audio
You have read the summary. The board-ready model answers, grammar notes, one-touch audio and writing practice for this chapter are part of Lipi.
Sign in to unlockSee it, understand it, hear it read aloud, then write the exam answer with confidence, for a fraction of a tutor cost.