[News] No Rights Which the White Man Is Bound to Respect

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  No Rights Which the White Man Is Bound to Respect

Walter Johnson - Sep 27, 2017
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The spectre of Dred Scott is haunting St. Louis.

In March of 1857, Chief Justice Roger Taney issued his majority opinion 
in the case of /Scott v. Sanford/. The case concerned the legal 
condition of Dred Scott, who had been held as a slave in Missouri before 
traveling with his owner to Wisconsin and then returning to Missouri. 
Because slavery was outlawed in the Northwest Territory, Scott claimed 
that his time in Wisconsin had effectuated his legal emancipation: 
having been free, he could no longer be held as a slave. When he filed 
his case in the Missouri courts in 1846, he was on good legal footing. 
Decades of legal precedent suggested that erstwhile slaves conveyed to 
the Northwest Territories by their owners would be held to be legally free.

For Chief Justice Taney and the six other justices who concurred with 
his decision to deny Scott’s petition, the principal issue at stake was 
the question of whether Dred Scott had any right to sue in the first 
place. The chief justice’s opinion defined the right to seek redress in 
federal court as the sole prerogative of “citizens” of the United 
States. He argued that the framers of the Constitution never intended 
that the “class of persons . . . whose ancestors were Negroes of the 
African race, and imported into this country, and sold and held as 
slaves” could “become entitled to all the rights and privileges and 
immunities” guaranteed to citizens of the United States.

More than a century after the Dred Scott decision argued that black 
people lived in Missouri by the grace of white people, we are seeing the 
outline of an actually existing police state.

And for Taney, who was an early exemplar of the school of thought that 
would come to be known as constitutional originalism, the question of 
the founders’ intentions in writing the Constitution could be boiled 
down to the question of how they would have thought about the role of 
black people in politics and in public. Would the founders have exempted 
members of the “African race” from the “special laws” that regulated 
their behavior? Would they have allowed them to travel from state to 
state “without pass or passport,” and “go where they please at every 
hour of the day or night without molestation?” Would they have allowed 
them to “hold meetings upon public affairs and to keep and carry arms 
wherever they went?”

Of course not, he answered. Reasoning backwards from the fact that 
African Americans had no political rights, Taney concluded they had no 
rights at all. On the contrary, he argued, they were “of an inferior 
order and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in 
social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no 
rights which the white man was bound to respect.” No rights which the 
white man was bound to respect: ten of the most notorious words in the 
history of the United States.

Blocks from the courthouse in St. Louis where Dred Scott filed suit 160 
years ago, we can once again see the malign logic of Justice Taney’s 
opinion expressed in full martial array. As protestors took to the 
streets this September, police officers indiscriminately arrested crowds 
of people, including protestors, journalists, spectators, and passersby. 
They responded to peaceful protests with overwhelming force—deploying 
riot police on the ground and snipers on the roofs, tackling and body 
slamming protestors, and macing and pepper-spraying people as they 
kneeled, awaiting arrest. An elderly woman was trampled by an advancing 
line of heavily armed, armored, and shield-baring police. A grandmother 
was choked by an officer as she tried to protect her grandson. 
Subsequently, she was charged with felony assault under Missouri’s “Blue 
Lives Matter” law by Robert McCulloch, the very same prosecutor who 
refused to indict Darren Wilson for the killing of Michael Brown. After 
making their arrests, the police chanted “Whose streets? Our streets” in 
celebratory mockery of the protestors whose constitutional rights they 
were violating.

And yes, it is true, on one of these nine nights of rage in the city of 
St. Louis, several shop windows were shattered by protestors on the 
Delmar Loop.

The most recent round of protests against police misconduct in St. Louis 
follows the acquittal of former St. Louis PD Officer Jason Stockley, who 
was accused of the 2011 murder of Anthony Lamar Smith. After an initial 
confrontation with Stockley in a restaurant parking lot, in which 
Stockley wielded his personal AK-47, Smith fled in a car. During the car 
chase that followed, Stockley was recorded by the dashcam in his police 
cruiser saying he was “going to kill this motherfucker,” minutes before 
he made good on his promise. Stockley fired five shots into Smith’s 
vehicle after his partner had crashed into it on the street. Stockley 
was then captured on film searching through a personal duffel bag in the 
trunk of his cruiser, entering the car where Anthony Lamar Smith lay 
dead, and emerging seconds later with a handgun that he claimed to have 
found in the car, but was later revealed to have only the officer’s DNA 
upon its handgrip.

‘No rights which the white man was bound to respect’: ten of the most 
notorious words in United States history.

In justifying his decision, the judge in the case noted that Stockley’s 
promise to kill Smith was made in “the heat of the moment,” and 
therefore could not be considered evidence of intention. Moreover his 
thirty years of experience on the bench made him certain that the gun 
found in the car must belong to Smith, because people like Smith, an 
“urban heroin dealer” in his words, almost always have guns.

It was this bald-faced example of racist reasoning and police impunity 
that spurred the protests that have roiled St. Louis over the past week 
and a half, protests which have revealed, well, more of the same.

After his officers chanted “Whose streets? Our Streets!” on the night of 
September 18, St. Louis Police Chief Lawrence O’Toole went on television 
to proclaim, “The police owned tonight.” St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson’s 
reaction to the out-of-control police has been tepid at best. In 
response to the officers’ chant she said, “I wish they wouldn’t have 
said that.” Asked about O’Toole’s response, she observed what was 
empirically true, that it was “inflammatory,” before reiterating her 
“confidence” in the chief and cancelling town hall events where she was 
scheduled to appear.

Missouri Governor Eric Greitens, for his part, has cheered the cops on. 
On Twitter the governor enthused 
<https://twitter.com/EricGreitens/status/909324446003007488>, “Saturday, 
some criminals broke windows & thought they'd get away. They were wrong. 
Officers caught ‘em, cuffed ‘em, and threw ‘em in jail.” His tweet was 
accompanied by a video showing four police officers carrying a protestor 
handcuffed, face-down, and suspended between them. Nevermind that the 
man in the video turned out to be a college student who intervened when 
he saw the police rushing at black protestors.

It goes without saying that those who seek to exercise their 
constitutionally protected right to assemble in the street and speak 
their minds will find no support from Jefferson Beauregard Sessions’s 
Justice Department, or from police brutality’s cheerleader-in-chief, 
Donald Trump.

What we have seen in St. Louis over the last fortnight is the outline of 
an actually existing police state. There is no apparent check on the 
actions of police officers but the limits of their own energy and the 
dictates of their own conscience.

The Dred Scott decision effectively argued that black people lived in 
Missouri by the grace of white people. It made clear that there would be 
no legal limit to what white people—either individually or constituted 
as the local or state government—might do to them. For black protestors, 
their white supporters, and anyone else unlucky enough to be standing 
nearby, St. Louis today represents a frightening image—part fulfillment, 
part portent—of the world according to Chief Justice Roger Taney.

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 https://freedomarchives.org/
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