ABSTRACT
We begin this chapter with an excerpt from Chief Justice Taney’s remarkable opinion in Dred Scott v. Sanford. The Dred Scott decision is historically important because the case marks the first time in the then 70-year history of the Court that it squarely addressed the rights of the African people in
the United States, holding that they had no rights-none whatsoever-except those that white people might choose to give them.2 For the next 70 years of its history, the Court ignored the rights and freedoms of Africans, in spite of the adoption of the Civil War amendments to the Constitution, which granted citizenship to blacks and guaranteed universal rights and freedoms.3 Then, beginning in the 1940s and lasting until the 1980s, the Supreme Court in a series of cases began slowly to enforce the Constitution’s guarantees of universal rights and freedoms. Except for this remarkable 40-year period-1940s to 1980s-the Supreme Court historically has been a racist institution, refusing to support universal freedom for African Americans. On the contrary, as in the Dred Scott case, for much of its more than 200 years, the Court has taken the position that the rights of African Americans were not universal but rather existed only as whites might “choose to grant them.” It now appears, as the Court approaches its third century, that it may once again be reverting to its racist past.4
