A lifetime may pass without an individual having been personally addressed by government. For millions, government is a remote venture, conducted by quasi-representatives in their name, with their silence oftentimes taken as acquiescence. Never is an individual as personally involved with government as when faced by the power of a court, when their freedoms and very lives are at stake, at the tender mercies of the state. And rarely has a case been clearer than when a Black man actually sued in a United States court for his freedom from slavery. The case? Dred Scott v. Sandford, 1857.
Perhaps you’ve heard of the case, but have you ever read it? It is an eye-opening piece of African and American history, running over a hundred pages, with the opinion of Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney, a bony, stooped slave owner from Maryland, who wrote, “The question is simply this. Can a Negro, whose ancestors were imported into this country and sold as slaves, become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution of the United States, and as such become entitled to all the rights and privileges and immunities guaranteed by that instrument to the citizen? The plea applies to that class of persons only whose ancestors were Negroes of the African race and imported into this country and sold and held as slaves.
We think they are not, and that they are not included and were not intended to be included under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States. On the contrary, they were, at that time, considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings, who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privileges, but such as those who held the power in the government might choose to grant them. They had, for more than a century before, been regarded as beings of an inferior order and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect, and that the Negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.” Dred Scott v Sandford, U.S. Supreme Court.
In these words, uttered by one of America’s most brilliant jurists, the face of U.S. racist oppression was made plain. The plaintiff, the slave, Dred Scott, who sued for his freedom in U.S. courts, and that of his wife Harriet and his daughters Eliza and Lizzie, 14 and 7, respectively, found a court of law, but not of justice, which rejected his claim, saying, since he wasn’t a citizen, the rights guaranteed in the Constitution, including the right to sue, didn’t apply. 136 years after Scott, and still we find courts of law, but not of justice. From death row, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
These commentaries are recorded by Noelle Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
