PEOPLE: Black History Month 2023 celebrates people with the courage, integrity, successes, accomplishments and education of many past African Americans
AGN.News Team
February 12, 2023
WASHINGTON (AGN.News) – Black History Month 2023 celebrates the courage, integrity, successes, accomplishments and education of many past African Americans.
The struggles of African Americans who lived in centuries past are being relived in some ways in the 21st century. In this article we will be looking at some of the hurdles faced by African Americans as they display real strength and courage, real integrity and successes, accomplishments and education.
In 1857, African Americans came face to face with the issue of citizenship. Having been on this soil for 238 years (since 1619) should have counted for something, but it did not.
This was an issue Dred Scott faced in the U.S. Supreme Court. The case was argued from February 11–14, 1856 and reargued December 15–18, 1856 – later decided on March 6, 1857.
Dred Scott v. Sandford court case
Dred Scott v. Sandford, was an 1857 landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court that held the U.S. Constitution did not extend American citizenship to people of Black African descent.
The court ruled that African Americans could not enjoy the rights and privileges the U.S. Constitution conferred upon American citizens.
This decision is widely considered the worst ever rendered in the U.S. Supreme Court’s history, being widely denounced for its overt racism, perceived judicial activism and poor legal reasoning, and for its crucial role in the start of the American Civil War four years later.
Who was Dred Scott in this court case?
Dred Scott (c. 1799-1858), was an enslaved Black man whose owners had taken him from Missouri, a slave-holding state, into Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory, where slavery was illegal.
The case centered on Dred and Harriet Scott and their children, Eliza and Lizzie. The Scotts claimed that they should be granted their freedom because Dred had lived in Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory for four years, where slavery was illegal.
When his owners later brought him back to Missouri, Scott sued for his freedom and claimed that because he had been taken into “free” U.S. territory, he had automatically been freed and was legally no longer a slave.
Scott sued first in Missouri state court, which ruled that he was still a slave under its law. He then sued in U.S. federal court, which ruled against him by deciding that it had to apply Missouri law to the case. He then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Dred Scott v. Sandford court decision
On March 6, 1857, the Supreme Court issued a 7–2 decision against Scott. In an opinion written by Chief Justice Roger Taney, the Court ruled that people of African descent “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”.
Who was Chief Justice Roger Taney?
Roger Brooke Taney (1777-1864) was born in Calvert County, Maryland. He was the fifth chief justice of the United States, holding that office from 1836 until his death in 1864.
Although he was an opponent of slavery, believing it to be an evil practice, Taney believed that it was not the place of the court or the federal government to remedy the issue.
Taney announced the ruling that African Americans could not be considered U.S. citizens and that Congress could not prohibit slavery in the U.S. territories. He was the first Catholic to serve on the Supreme Court.
The negative impact of the decision
Taney supported his ruling with an extended survey of American state and local laws from the time of the Constitution’s drafting in 1787 that purported to show that a “perpetual and impassable barrier was intended to be erected between the white race and the one which they had reduced to slavery”.
Because the Court ruled that Scott was not an American citizen, he was also not a citizen of any state. Taney’s majority opinion suited the slaveholding states, but was intensely decried in all the other states.
Historians agree that the Court decision was a major disaster for the nation as it dramatically inflamed tensions leading to the Civil War.
The Supreme Court’s ruling confirmed slaveowners had a constitutional right to own slaves anywhere in the country while permanently disenfranchising all people of African descent.
After the court’s decision, slaveowners felt justified in fighting for their right to keep and enslave Black people. If going to war over slavery was necessary, ‘so be it’ was their attitude.
Lincoln rejected the divisive decision
During the United States presidential election of 1860, abolitionists formed the Republican Party that rejected the ruling as being corrupted by partisanship and non-binding upon the country because the court had no jurisdiction.
Their Presidential nominee, Abraham Lincoln, stated he would not permit slavery anywhere in the country except where it already existed, which directly contradicted the court’s ruling.
His election is considered the final event that led the Southern states to cede from the Union, igniting the American Civil War.
Slaveowners formed The Confederacy
The Confederacy was formed on February 8, 1861, by seven slave states: South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. All seven were in the Deep South region of the United States.
After the Civil War began in April 1861, four slave states of the Upper South—Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina—also joined the Confederacy. Four slave states — Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri — remained in the Union and became known as the border states. The Confederacy nevertheless recognized two of them — Missouri and Kentucky — as members.
White Supremacy and free labor
The south’s economy was heavily dependent upon agriculture—particularly cotton—and a plantation system that relied upon enslaved Americans of African descent for labor.
Convinced that white supremacy and slavery were threatened by the November 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln to the U.S. presidency on a platform that opposed the expansion of slavery into the western territories, the seven slave states seceded from the United States.
The loyal states became known as the Union during the ensuing American Civil War – where slavery would end. All over The Confederacy – where slavery would never end – speeches were given by leaders to promote slavery as a right enshrined in their Constitution.
Slaveowners fought to keep slaves
The secessionist states formed the Confederacy on February 8, 1861 and started the American Civil War in April and wrote their own state constitutions. Collectively, the Confederate States of America issued their newly written Constitution which allowed the enslavement of Black people.
In his Cornerstone Speech or Cornerstone Address given on March 21, 1861 in Savannah, Georgia, Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens described its ideology as centrally based “upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man — that slavery, subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition.”
All of these entities included the right of Confederates to have and own slaves. Unlike the Union, these states declared war against the central government in Washington and attacked federal facilities, murdering U.S. soldiers and citizens to defend their right to own slaves.
These secessionist states and their insurrectionist actions resulted in hundreds of thousands of dead soldiers and civilians all across the south. This civil war had a financial cost as well. Billions of dollars in state and private property losses.
In the end, nearly four million slaves were set free and eventually became U.S. citizens. The Confederacy lost their right to own and enslave other human beings and was dissolved on May 9, 1865.
The Roger Taney court made a monumental mistake by voting to disenfranchise millions of African Americans in their bid to maintain white supremacy in America. He never realize, in advance, the nation would amend the Constitution to right their wrong decision.
African Americans are citizens!
In 1865, after the Union’s victory, the Court’s ruling in Dred Scott was superseded by the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which abolished slavery.
Next came the Fourteenth Amendment, whose first section guaranteed citizenship for “all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof”.
Roger Taney died six months before the war ended. He didn’t live to see Amendments to the Constitution turn his and the court’s ruling turned on its head.
African Americans rights and freedoms
As citizens, born or naturalized, of the United States, African Americans have civil rights, human rights, and all of the protections guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.
Dred Scott did not live to see his rights as a citizen confirmed. However his children and his children’s children did see what he fought for.
Harriet and Dred Scott honored
In 1957: Scott’s grave site was rediscovered and flowers were put on it in a ceremony to mark the centennial of the case.
In 1977: The Scotts’ great-grandson, John A. Madison, Jr., an attorney, gave the invocation at the ceremony at the Old Courthouse (St. Louis, Missouri) for the dedication of a National Historic Marker commemorating the Scotts’ case.
In 1997: Dred and Harriet Scott were inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame.
In 2001: Harriet and Dred Scott’s petition papers were displayed at the main branch of the St. Louis Public Library, following discovery of more than 300 freedom suits in the archives of the circuit court.
On May 9, 2012: Scott was inducted into the Hall of Famous Missourians; a bronze bust by sculptor E. Spencer Schubert is displayed in the Missouri State Capitol Building.
On June 8, 2012: A bronze statue of Dred and Harriet Scott was erected outside of the Old Courthouse in downtown St. Louis, MO, the site where their case was originally heard.
On March 6, 2017, the 160th anniversary of the Dred Scott Decision: On the steps of the Maryland State House next to a statue of Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney, his great-great-grandnephew Charlie Taney apologized on his behalf to Scott’s great-great-granddaughter Lynne Jackson and all African-Americans “for the terrible injustice of the Dred Scott decision”.
Roger Taney’s place in history
Biographer James F. Simon writes that “Taney’s place in history [is] inextricably bound to his disastrous Dred Scott opinion.” Simon argues that Taney’s opinion in Dred Scott “abandoned the careful, pragmatic approach to constitutional problems that had been the hallmark of [Taney’s] early judicial tenure”.
Historian Daniel Walker Howe writes that “Taney’s blend of state sovereignty, white racism, sympathy with commerce, and concern for social order was typical of Jacksonian jurisprudence.”
In 1993, the Roger B. Taney Middle School in Temple Hills, Maryland was renamed for Justice Thurgood Marshall, the Supreme Court’s first African American justice.
In 2020, in the midst of the protests following the murder of George Floyd, the Democratic-led U.S. House of Representatives eventually voted 305–113 to remove a bust of Taney (as well as statues honoring figures who were part of the Confederacy during the Civil War) from the U.S. Capitol and replace it with a bust of Thurgood Marshall.
On June 29, 2021, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution 285 to 120 with sixty-seven Republican Representatives to replace the bust with one of Thurgood Marshall and expel Confederate statues from the U.S. Capitol.
As of February 10, 2023, the bust of Roger Taney has been removed from the United States Capitol. This effort was led by Maryland Senators Ben Cardin and Chris Van Hollen and Maryland Representative Steny Hoyer. It will be replaced by a new work honoring Justice Thurgood Marshall, a champion of civil rights.
Maryland: 2 Black men made history
In an ironic twist, a justice who denied citizenship to Black people, was now overshadowed by two Maryland Black men who made history fighting for the rights of all Americans including Black people. One was an associate justice of the same U.S. Supreme Court.
Justice Thurgood Marshall (1908-1993) was born in Baltimore, Maryland. He was an American civil rights lawyer and jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1967 until 1991. He was the Supreme Court’s first African-American justice.
On November 8, 2022, Maryland voted for it first African American governor and the first veteran to be elected governor since William Donald Schaefer. Governor Wes Moore, a Black man, born in Takoma Park, Maryland, was inaugurated on January 18, 2023.
Black History Month celebrations
Black History Month 2023 celebrates the courage, integrity, successes, accomplishments and education of African Americans. Not only are they citizens – millions are accomplished educators, scientists, lawyers, doctors, architects, politicians, astronauts, plumbers, carpenters, bankers, stock brokers, airline pilots, and many more.
In the spirit of Dred Scott who went all the way to the Supreme Court to get justice which was denied in the end, was an example of not giving up on your dream.
The history of injustices targeting African Americans today will continue because much of this is inspired by ‘leaders’ of movements that are on the wrong side of history. The Dred Scott case shows these injustices can be made right in the end.
Getting justice is sometimes delayed, non-the-less, but justice will come. Eight years after the Dred Scott case concluded, Americans confirmed the civil and human rights of African Americans as United States citizens.
This month, all across America and beyond, people of all faiths and ethnicities will be celebrating the courage, integrity, successes, accomplishments and education of African Americans during Black History Month.
#GoldOverBlack
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