Am I not Human Too?
By Camille Thrall
The story of Dred Scott is one piece of American History I cannot be proud of. A man seeks for his freedom and finally catches it, legally, only for it to be stripped from him by the very government that gave him his freedom.
Dred Scott went to trial to sue for his freedom in 1847. Dred Scott was a slave to Peter Blow. Mr Blow migrated from Virginia to Alabama, then from Alabama to Missouri. After moving to Missouri, Peter Blow died, and Scott was sold to a new master, Dr. John Emerson.
Emerson traveled with Scott to Illinois, which was a free state. Because of their seemingly permanent stay in Illinois, Dred Scott took his completely legal chance for freedom to be a freedman instead of slave property. After a decade of appeals and court reversals,Ten years later Scott’s case was brought before the United States Supreme Court. The Supreme Court came to the decision that all people of African ancestry could never become citizens of the United States, and therefore could never sue in federal court. The court also ruled that the federal government did not have the power to prohibit slavery in its territories. Scott remained to be a slave.
Dred Scott was eventually freed by Emerson's decedent, but only after he was quite old and was not useful as a slave anymore.
This court ruling may have been accepted by many southerners and northerners alike, but I find it to be disgusting and hard to comprehend having grown u sheltered from most racism in this democratic California as a mostly white young person in this modern society. It is incredibly hard to comprehend the scale of the impact that the Dred Scott case decision had on the minds of the people as it caused the deepening of racial divides in the United States, where this lead to the reemergence of the north vs south ideas of slavery, eventually leading to heavy segregation which divided the country, and a country divided stands weak. The infamous and haunting Dred Scott Decision is seen as unfathomable to modern minds; how could a human being be treated as property? How could one think that the color of someone’s skin represented that they were less worthy of being a citizen of the United States? I believe all humans should be treated fairly, how could Dred Scott not be treated as a human? The Supreme Court’s decision that people of color could not sue in federal court continues to baffle me.
No comments:
Post a Comment