We learned this week that the Trump administration is recruiting lawyers for a new front in the battle for civil rights, this one to fix possible discrimination in an elite corner of higher education. The Department of Justice appears to be investigating a complaint that Asian-Americans with strong credentials are not getting a fair shake at Harvard.

As it happens, just when news of this new cause surfaced, I got a couple of reminders that the world has no shortage of less rarefied injustices of long standing.

First, I was visited by Leroy G. Grant and Danny Reyes, two men I had last seen 19 years ago, when they were in hospital beds in Camden, N.J., critically wounded by gunshots.

They had been in a car on the New Jersey Turnpike with two other young men, all from New York City, all in their early 20s, driving to a college basketball showcase in North Carolina one evening. A pair of state troopers pulled them over. I still have the “official news release” issued by the state, dated April 24, 1998, about what happened next. It says their car was clocked by radar going 74 miles per hour, and that on the shoulder, the driver backed into the troopers. The troopers began firing in self-defense, the official news release said.