From Dred Scott to Ferguson
“No Justice – No Peace”
I was stunned by this historical echo:
We also know that St. Louis, Missouri, was the city where the Dred Scott case was litigated in 1857. That case, you may recall, the United States Supreme Court suggested that black people had no rights that white people were bound to respect, and certainly that was the verdict, if you like, coming out of this grand jury.(emphasis mine) ~~~ GERALD HORNE, CHAIR, HIST. AND AFR. AMER. STUDIES, UNIV. OF HOUSTON
I have no idea how intolerable that fact is to black people in America – none whatsoever.
If it can drive me to rage just reading it, I can’t begin to imagine what living that reality must mean to a black man.
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore–
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
like a syrupy sweet?
like a heavy load.
(A Dream Deferred by Langston Hughes)
And in the midst of this injustice, the best the Nobel Peace Prize winner can do is give out medals?
The Supreme Court’s Dred Scott case – which led to the civil war – was decided 100 years before I was born.
I had hoped that my life would be shaped more by the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision – and I was alive for much of the civil rights movement.
[*But this is the State I live in: NJ’s Apartheid and Intensely Segregated Urban Schools]
A few years back, I decided to go south and try to trace some of that history.
Gave me the creeps –
But Ferguson is not a vestige of the deep south – it is everywhere in the US today.
Nowhere for people of good faith to hide – gotta call this out for the racist outrage that it is – “by any and all means necessary”
Mississippi border, just east of Meridian, near Philadelphia where Schwerner, Chaney & Goodman were murdered by the Klan in 1964