Frederick Douglass and his grandson, Joseph Source: Historical / Getty
It’s been just over two weeks since a majority of Americans apparently declared that a racist crook and rapist who is likely in serious cognitive decline was the better choice for president than a Black woman who had made ending sex trafficking a cornerstone of her career.
For many, including me, it was a painfully stunning moment, made ever more painful when it became clear that Latinos (and white women, but that was not shocking), who are in the president-elect’s direct line of fire, were key in ensuring a white man who, by word and deed said they don’t matter to him, was named the victor in the 2024 presidential contest.
After the initial shock abated some, I began considering periods in history where white people were intent on burying Black hope forever, but Black people created hope anyway. That’s what brought me to 1857, the year when what has routinely been considered the worst Supreme Court decision in history was handed down.
In 1857, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States was a commonly wretched white supremacist named Roger Taney. On March 6 of that year, at his direction, the Court issued notice: an opinion had been rendered on a case that originated in St. Louis, Missouri, some 11 years prior: Dred Scott v. Sandford.
Roger Taney Source: Heritage Images / Getty
White people, regardless of political identity, have always compromised on Black lives
Dred Scott was born into slavery in Missouri, one of the five states in 19th century America that bordered the Northern (Union) states and the Southern (Confederate) ones. Because the non-slaveholding Union decided that they needed Missouri on their side–and because white people as a group, regardless of political identity, had been compromising on Black lives before the United States was even the United States–the Union/Slavery/Missouri challenge was resolved with, predictably, a compromise.
Missouri, a state that Southern slaveowners had claimed sovereignty over, was allowed to keep their slaves if they stood with the Union against the Confederacy.
That compromise would shape nearly all of Dred Scott’s life.
Missouri refused to part with even one slave.
The man who enslaved Scott traveled with him to another Union state: the free territory of Wisconsin. They would stay in Wisconsin for months and months at a time. In fact, Scott met and married his wife, Harriet, in Wisconsin, and the couple had two daughters.
But after four years of living for long stretches in free Wisconsin, only to be returned to slaveholding Missouri, Scott filed for his and his family’s freedom. Wisconsin state law declared that enslaved Black people brought to the free territory and kept within its borders for an extended period were to be freed.
Scott’s case should have been relatively simple. It wasn’t precedent-setting.
But Missouri refused to part with even one slave, let alone set an example for others. The case, Scott v. Sandford wound its way through multiple lower courts for more than a decade until the Supreme Court of the United States granted certiorari.
The Declarations of the Deranged
Missouri in the 21st Century Source: Fair use photo / Fair use photo
Chief Justice Taney, a staunch white supremacist, although no longer a slaveholder himself, was certain he was the one to put an end to the debate about slavery that was raging in the nation.
In delivering the 7-2 majority opinion on Friday, March 6, 1857, Taney said, in part, that before the founding of the nation, Black people had been considered “beings of an inferior order.”
In advocating for generations of European-descent thieves, kidnappers, rapists, torturers, and killers, Taney argued that Black people–the victims of perhaps the longest continual and deadliest holocausts ever visited on a designated group of human beings–were characterized as somehow the ones “…unfit to associate with the white race either in social or political relations.”
Using language that seems to have inspired the Trump / MAGA / SCOTUS language of today and encouraging the sort of cognitive dissonance specific to white Americans (what everyone else calls gaslighting), Taney declared that Black people were somehow:
“…so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect…”
Taney argued:
“…the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold, and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever a profit could be made by it.”
It’s the same sort of sociopathic, white supremacist, deranged, and dishonest illogic used by MAGAs today–people who continue to support the call to execute innocent young Black men, willingly lie about Haitians, putting them in deadly crosshairs and whose antihuman legislation has upticked the rate of maternal deaths by more than 10% across the nation, and more than 50% in states like Texas.
A note: until 2022, Taney’s name adorned a building at the University of Pennsylvania, Trump’s alma mater.
The devil is alive…but so are we!
Taney’s was a “devilish decision…” said Frederick Douglass, who was probably the most well-known abolitionist of the time. He was outraged by it. Yet, seemingly conversely, two months after the opinion was handed down, Douglass addressed the American Abolition Society in New York. What he said surely came as a huge surprise to the audience:
“My hopes were never brighter than now.”
Douglass continued, contextualizing his remark. The Supreme Court and the Chief Justice himself, he said, “can do many things,” but there was something neither they nor he could do. Neither could:
“…change the essential nature of things—making evil good, and good evil.”
Douglass viewed the Taney Court’s decision as so vile that it would catalyze revolutionary change. It would catalyze the end of slavery.
He was right.
In June of 1857, Mr. Scott and his family were privately manumitted. Sadly, Dred Scott died of tuberculosis the next year, on Sept. 17, 1858. But four years to the day following his death, on Sept. 17, 1862—and with the Civil War raging–the Battle of Antietam was fought in Washington County, Maryland.
It was the deadliest single-day battle in American military history. The Union Army took heavy, heavy losses–as did the Confederacy. But Lincoln viewed it as a strategic success–and critically, finally listened to Douglass’ advice: If you want to win, allow Black people the ability to fight in the Union Army.
It was something that had never been done. Black people had fought in all wars but had never been officially part of the military. Arming Black people seemed a dangerous prospect. And it was—for the Confederate States of America.
For Black people, there was quite another outcome, also based on Douglass’ demand to Lincoln: If Black soldiers fought in the Union army, slavery must be ended everywhere in the nation.
On Jan. 1, 1863, President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
Here and Now
This is a moment, like so many others, to understand the power of our own history and leaders as we consider which way forward. “Progressive” scholars, white and Black, most often direct us toward European or Latin American philosophers and revolutionaries in the search for a freedom map for Black Americans.
It’s not that there is no use in learning the work of Marx or Che Guevara.
It’s that not even equal time is devoted to truly studying the Douglass strategy or the Tubman strategy. Acknowledging them as leaders is not the same as knowing the details of their leadership. And they architected the end of slavery, as Black international relations and political science scholar Dr. Errol Henderson makes abundantly clear in his meticulously documented work, The Revolution Will Not Be Theorized (which can be downloaded free of charge).
Black people–during slavery led the overthrow of an entire political and economic system –the Confederate States of America–on this land. They led a revolution for Black freedom right here.
Europeans didn’t conceive that. Black people in America did. There’s no ending of slavery or the Union winning the Civil War without Black people creating the strategy and conditions for them to happen. Even Lincoln said that.
Similarly, the battle to establish human rights in the 20th century—particularly as they relate to children of former slaves—is likely better located in the work of DuBois and Ida B. Wells. We have the wisdom of people who are One of One: Malcolm X, Ella Baker, Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, Sekou Odinga, Assata Shakur, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde and Fannie Lou Hamer.
“White supremacy doesn’t only tell you what to think, but how to think.”
Dr. Henderson argues that what Black people need to achieve their own liberation, lives in work done by Black foremothers and Black forefathers. Answers we need to best navigate current events reside in our own blood memory, our own DNA, our own bones and sinew, our own minds and imaginations. And they are documented by our own thinkers and scholars, people qualified to undertake that research. They may not be commercially known, but they’re known to librarians. Ask them.
Study the work done at the highest level by us and allow it to help us envision a fuller, perhaps even fullest idea of possible. Allow it to inform and grow our fundamental critical thinking skills. As Dr. Henderson has often instructed, “White supremacy doesn’t only tell you what to think, but how to think.”
White supremacy, including that which is self-labeled progressive, sets not only the definition of freedom but also the tools that can be accessed in pursuit of freedom, the battle plan, the generals, the very color of freedom. It defines what is even progressive and what is not.
SNCC leader Diane Nash Source: Leigh Vogel / Getty
But if any one of us is told to study Marx, for example, to understand Black people’s condition in America–while not demanding the same level or greater understanding of the specific and brilliant Black American strategies of Douglass or Tubman, Revs. Ralph Abernathy or Martin Luther King, or Diane Nash, a living master strategist!—it’s a license to stop listening.
There was absolutely no end to slavery in the works until we demanded that be the case. There was no end to slavery in sight without our masterful social and military strategies and cultural norms actualizing it.
Because at the end of the Civil War, it was never only the 190,000 Black people who went into battle, at work. It was the Black preachers who had passes to move among communities and spread the really Good Word.
It was the artisans, Dr. Henderson shows us, who created passes for other slaves to move about as needed. It was the crafts workers who could make bullets and weapons. It was all the Black people who worked the fields and just stopped planting, Henderson said, echoing a point DuBois made in 1935’s Black Reconstruction.
Dr. Henderson has often said, “Armies move on their bellies,” so if there was no food, there was no viable army. Not for the Confederacy, anyway.
Today, in our moments of anxiety and fear
This is the moment to come back home to ourselves. It’s the moment to read and appreciate what Dr. Henderson documents in The Revolution Will Not be Theorized, and the moment to remember the women weaving coded freedom messages into their hair and into quilts. It’s the moment to remember the codes in the great Negro spirituals: Wade in the water, children. God gonna trouble the water, and Swing low, sweet chariot, comin for to carry me home!
Listen to this sister discuss the misappropriation of the original Gullah Geechee version of “Kumbaya.”
Hear the Black prayer song in that song. Set aside the lie that it was meant to be a camp song.
Listen to it here, in the tradition and truth of us: Come By Here My Lord. Come By Here.
Close your eyes and try to see your ancestor there in Charleston, that busiest of slave ports, or the ancestor of someone you love unified around the issue of a whole and realized Black freedom for we Black women, we Black men, we straight Black people, we LGBTQIA+ Black people, we young Black people, we old Black people and we 60 is the new sexy Black people. We who are impoverished, we who are resourced, we who are saddened and angry and scared and confused and clearheaded, Black people. We Catholic and Baptist and Atheist and Muslim and Ifa and Pentecostal and we Mother Emmanuel Black people in Charleston, in Brooklyn, in Detroit, in Atlanta, in Ferguson, in Houston, in Oakland–we Brick City Black people. We Black of many colors Black people. We lovers of Black children Black people. We lovers of our own selves Black people. All Black everyone of us Black people.
On this day, like the day 167 years ago, we have been endowed with the ability to hold fast to our legacy of power and triumph, reject the temptation to lose ourselves in blame, and choose to hold a mirror, rather than point a finger, the legendary Essence magazine Editor-in-Chief, Emerita, Susan L. Taylor, has instructed.
We have the power to look into our beautiful minds, memories and history, cast aside the sociopathic leanings of the white supremacist American “right” and the nihilism of the white supremacist American “left,” and be free to be guided by the very North Star wisdom that is our inheritance.
SEE MORE:
Juneteenth: The Civil War Was A Black Revolution
Amid Juneteenth, The Legacy Of Slavery Is Still Enshrined In The Legal System
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