﻿Hi! I’m Clint Smith and this is Crash Course Black American History.
When you think of US citizenship, you might think of your blue passport, or placing your
hand over your heart and saying the pledge of allegiance, or waving an American flag
as you watch fireworks during the 4th of July with a plate full of barbecue.
Citizenship is something that matters to people. Not only is citizenship a source of pride for
many, but it has vast implications for how someone can live their life. It can determine
where you work, where you can travel, whether or not you can vote, and even if you’ll be allowed
to stay in the country with your family. But the very concept of citizenship--who
should be a citizen of the United States and how people should be allowed to become one--has
been at the center of US political debates for centuries. It was happening in the 18th century,
and it’s still happening today. Today, in the US, according to the law,
if you’re born in this country you’re considered a citizen. Shout out to the 14th amendment. But
it wasn’t always this way. For Black people in the 19th century,
the question of whether they were, or could ever be, citizens of the United States, was part of
a decade-long court battle that centered on the circumstances of a Black man named Dred Scott.
Though Scott’s case, which ultimately ended up in the Supreme Court as Scott v. Sandford,
was initially about whether one man would be able to live his life as free or enslaved, it became
something much larger, centered on the very prospect and possibility of Black citizenship.
Let’s check it out. INTRO
The person at the center of this case, Dred Scott, was an enslaved Black man who was
living in Missouri. Historians estimate that he was born into slavery around the start of the
19th century in Southhampton County, Virgina, and his enslaver was a man named Peter Blow.
Scott was eventually purchased by an army surgeon named John Emerson,
who moved Scott from the enslaved state of Missouri, to the free state of Illinois
and then again to the free territory of Wisconsin. There, Scott met and married his wife, Harriet
Robinson, and they started a family. By 1840 John Emerson’s wife Irene returned to St. Louis
along with Dred Scott and his family. And in 1843, John died suddenly,
and Scott and his family became the sole property of Irene. It’s possible that Dred Scott attempted
to buy he and his family’s freedom from Irene, but from what historians can tell, she refused.
In 1846 Dred Scott filed a suit for his freedom in a St. Louis district court. His claim was based
on Missouri law and precedent that if an enslaved person was relocated to a free state or territory,
they were then considered free, and thus they couldn’t be re-enslaved
upon entering a slave state. And since John Emerson had taken Dred Scott to live
in both Illinois and the Wisconsin territory at various points--both of which were free domains--
it seemed like they had a pretty good case. After a bit of back and forth
Dred Scott eventually did win his family’s freedom in 1850.
But the case got appealed to Missouri’s Supreme Court, which ruled against the lower court’s
decision while noting, quote "Times now are not as they were, when the former decisions
on this subject were made.” Dred Scott and his family were sent back into slavery.
But Scott kept going. He received assistance from local abolitionists who helped him file suit in a
federal court. By then Irene had left Missouri and remarried, and for reasons historians have
never quite figured out, the focus of the case went to her brother, John Sanford. The case
eventually found its way to the US Supreme Court. But once the case got there,
things, to put it mildly, did not go well. The moment this case arrived at the Supreme
Court was a pivotol one in the larger context of US history, because it was a time in which
the issue of slavery hugley animated the political debates in Washington as the country expanded.
At the beginning of 1820, the United States was composed of 22 states – a big jump up from the
original 13 colonies. The Louisiana Purchase had doubled the landmass of the country
which meant that there were new states to admit. And what this did was created some real tension
between the north and the south on the issue of slavery. Would the new states be free states?
Slave states? Would they get to decide for themselves? Let’s go to the thought bubble.
The entire nation was dependent on slavery to some extent, but some states, as we’ve discussed,
were more directly involved than others. So, with predominately northern states pushing to
end slavery, and southern states pushing to keep it in place, it became a bit of a
moral and economic tug-of-war. This dispute led to the Missouri Compromise
which designated part of the Louisiana Purchase as free territory and part of it as slave territory,
which would balance congressional power as more states entered the Union. This compromise, though,
came at the expense of Black people’s lives. But as the United States expanded,
more individuals wanted to travel across state lines,
and that created some unique legal issues. The core of Dred Scott’s legal argument was that he
had lived in free areas of the country with his enslaver – Illinois and the Wisconsin territory.
The federal government, at this time, did not have specific legislation
addressing the issue, so the United States Supreme Court was left to sort things out. If
an enslaved person is moved from a slave state to a free state, is that individual now free?
What if you’re riding on a train leaving a slave state, and pass through a free state?
Is that Black person free on the train while it’s in the free state but enslaved again when
it passes back into a slave state? These were big questions that the country was wrestling with.
And the stakes couldn’t have been higher. Thanks, Thought Bubble.
The Supreme Court ultimately did not buy Scott’s arguments and justices sided 7-2 with Sanford.
Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote in the majority opinion
that Scott did not, because he didn’t have the standing to sue because enslaved African-Americans
were not citizens of the United States. And if that wasn’t enough,
Justice Taney stated that even free Black people in the north could never be considered
citizens. He wrote that Black people "are not included, and were not intended to be included,
under the word 'citizens' in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and
privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States."
And in outlining the rationale for his decision he stated that when the Constitution was framed and
adopted, Black people “had no rights which the White man was bound to respect."
I have a lot of feelings about Taney that aren’t appropriate to say in this video.
So let’s keep going before I get in trouble. What’s more, Taney’s decision declared that the
ban on slavery was unconstitutional in territories that were part of the Louisiana Purchase and it
also upheld that neither Congress nor territorial governments had the power to ban slavery.
This ruling infuriated abolitionists who perceived this an an attempt
to prevent any debate and discussion about how and where slavery would exist in the United States,
and further exacerbated the already high tensions on the issue. Historians point to the decision as
one of the factors that more directly set the country on the path towards Civil War.
This was a consequential, and deeply shameful moment in American history.
Many historians consider it to be the worst Supreme Court decision
ever. And it’s hard not to agree. This decision created a new legal precedent
that solidified Black Americans’ status as an underclass. It kept them from being able to vote,
from being able to defend themselves against explicit discrimination or even domestic terrorism
at the hands of white Americans. Black Americans were sometimes successful in court after Scott v.
Sandford, but that wasn’t the norm, AND Black people were now legally barred
from filing suits at the federal level. What this did was limit the mobility of their cases.
Even after the ratification of the 14th Amendment – which overturned Scott v. Sandford by upholding
birthright citizenship – African-Americans were still treated in accordance with the ideas that
had been espoused in the case. And later in this series we’ll cover the experiences of
Black Americans between the 14th Amendment and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
They were not great. The Scott v. Sandford decision
also hung like a shadow over US immigration policy for decades. Scott v. Sandford – though
eventually overturned – perpetuated this idea that if you were not considered a white American
then you were not entitled to dignity or safety. These ideologies pushed immigrants to start
proving in social settings and in court that they were White enough
to have the benefits of citizenship, just to get basic opportunities in the United States.
And this created deeper divisions between Black Americans and many immigrant populations.
According to “The Historical Construction of Race and Citizenship in the United States” – a
2003 report done by the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development:
“Harder to imagine is conferring on African-Americans the degree of respect
and recognition that would make them full and equal citizens in substance as well as in law.
No other ethnoracial group was enslaved for two-and-a-half centuries
in what became the United States, or, despite the attainment of de jure citizenship in 1868,
was subjected to such an elaborate and comprehensive system of legalized discrimination
and segregation. There is a long history of the incorporation of groups that initially inspired
hostility and discrimination but which were able to exploit their putative whiteness to gain
entry at the expense of the perennial Other: the African-Americans who remain to the present day
the principal negative reference group against which white--or
non-black--America persists in defining itself.” This is a powerful quote and a sobering one.
And what it shows is that while there has most certainly been discrimination against
many different groups of people throughout US history-- discrimination that must be
taken seriously--there is a specific sort of insidiousness to the nature of anti-black racism
that is important for us to understand if we are to fully account for our history.
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