Far too many White Americans are totally stunned and caught clutching their pearls at this nation’s history of racism. I’m not talking about them red-meat, red hat, red-necked folks that follow Donald Trump. That crew could give a sh!t about anything non-white.
My concern and empathy are for God-fearing White brothers and sisters who empathize with our struggle. I can’t blame them, because 98% of Americans have been, in the words of Carter G. Woodson, “Mis-Educated.”
The other day, when Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch took to the lectern to declare the innocence of the police officer who killed Kohen Wiley, Black America gasped, sighed, and shook their heads.
As the words dropped from her mouth, an eerie sadness overtook many of us. “In this incident, the Attorney General’s Office found the use of force was justified.” Well, I just be damned.
Now, for those of you who are Black history-challenged, it was an outrage. For those of us who record, regurgitate, and remember history, it was no shock. This level of racism follows the continuum and course we have watched since 1619.
If you knew anything about American history, you understand the State of Mississippi’s conclusion. Let me take you back to the 1857 Dred Scott v. Supreme Court ruling. Although it was later struck down, it lives in the minds, thoughts, and souls of White folks in America.
Roger Brooke Taney was born to a rich family who made their wealth on the backs of Black enslaved people. He was born into a Catholic family whose commitment to their tobacco plantation was obviously stronger than their religious beliefs.
Taney went on to study law at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania and became a very successful lawyer. He married Anne Phoebe Carlton Key, his friend Francis Scott Key’s sister, and they had six children together.
Francis, of course, authored the Star-Spangled Banner. And don’t forget that line that they leave out. “No refuge could save the hireling and slave from the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave.”
Dred Scott sued for his freedom after his owner absconded with him and forced him to live in Illinois, a free state under the Missouri Compromise. Attorneys for Scott argued that “living on free soil made him a free man.”
The SCOTUS, Taney served on, ruled that African Americans were not U.S. Citizens, and that Congress could not abolish slavery in federal territories. Their ruling voided the Missouri Compromise (Google, it, I ain’t got but 600 words here) and eventually declared that Dred Scott had no legal standing.
This 7-2 decision had far-reaching effects. Thank God for the spirit and compassion of jurists Benjamin Curtis and John McLean. They were in the minority, but that minority has historically been our only and last hope. You can’t talk about the positive aspects of Black history without calling the names of courageous Whites.
Some of us were disgusted, but not caught off guard, by the news that Mississippi showed no justice to this one-year-old child. We understand what Taney wrote in the Dred Scott ruling. He essentially said that Black people, enslaved or free, were beings of an “inferior order.” Further, he states that the Black man “had no rights for which the White man was bound to respect.”
The other day, when the State of Mississippi came to the microphone and professed that the senseless killing of a one-year-old child was justified by the actions of a duly sworn agent of the state, what they repeated was the same reverberation we have heard since we have been in this country. Kohen Wiley was much too young to comprehend, but he had no rights that White Mississippians, and Americans for that matter, were bound to respect.
