There’s something called the Supreme Court’s ‘anticannon,’ four decisions that everyone agrees were monumentally bad. The person who wrote one of those decisions was in the news last week: Justice Taney. He wrote the majority decision for the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sanford case.
In this decision, the Supreme Court ruled that Black people were not US citizens and could not expect protections from the federal government. He explained that people of African descent “had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race … and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” He also said that the Fifth Amendment protected the rights of slaveholders because enslaved people were property.
Well. Isn’t that some messed up sh*t.
But here’s some good news in the Taney department: Last Wednesday the House voted to remove the bust of Justice Taney on display in the US Capitol. The Senate had already passed the bill, so now it’s heading for President Biden’s desk.
The replacement will be a bust of Thurgood Marshall, the first Black Supreme Court justice. We can only hope that Mr. Taney rolls over in his grave when he learns he’s being replaced by a “being of inferior order unfit to associate with the white race.”
One Response
Thank you for posting this. I can’t wait to see Justice Marshall in his place.