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Mark Dominus

Wow, great news!

Formerly, Philadelphia had a Taney Street, named for Roger Taney, former Chief Justice of the United States and author of the notorious "Dred Scott" decision.

There was agitation in recent years to change the name of the street. Apparently City Council agreed to do it back in November and I missed it.

The street will now be named after Caroline LeCount, the first Black woman to pass Philadelphia’s teaching exam. She was also the fiancée of voting rights activist Octavius Catto.

It appears that the first "LeCount St" signs have started to go up!

cbsnews.com/philadelphia/news/

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Mark Dominus

Here's my summary of the Dred Scott case, in case you don't know about that yet.

Dred Scott was a slave. His owner Sandford took Scott and his family to Ohio to help him with some business, then left him there for three years while Sandford returned to Missouri.

When Sandford wanted him to return to Missouri, Scott said no. He said that there was no slavery in Ohio, and therefore he was no longer a slave from the moment Sandford brought him there.

The case went to the Supreme Court. The decision, authored by Chief Justice Roger Taney, said essentially "No, fuck you, negroes are not citizens of the United States, and you have no rights whatsoever."

(Birthright citizenship is in the news lately. The 14th amendment contains a clause that says as briefly and plainly as possible that persons born in the United States are citizens. Dred Scott is the reason it is there.)

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Mark Dominus

An argument can be made that that the Dred Scott decision made the U.S. Civil War inevitable. Previously, northern whites had been able to close their eyes to the existence of slavery, because it wasn't happening near where they were and they didn't have to see it every day.

But the Dred Scott decision destroyed that illusion. If a slaveowner from Missouri could bring his slaves to Ohio and set them to work, what could it even mean to say that Ohio was a free state? Even people in the north who didn't care about the moral issues had concerns about losing their jobs to slaves. What was there to stop a Missouri slaveowner from buying farms in Ohio and operating them entirely with slave labor?

“The decision of Scott v. Sandford, considered by many legal scholars to be the worst ever rendered by the Supreme Court, was overturned by the 13th and 14th amendments to the Constitution, which abolished slavery and declared all persons born in the United States to be citizens of the United States.”

archives.gov/milestone-documen

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National Archives · Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857)EnlargeDownload Link Citation: Judgment in the U.S. Supreme Court Case Dred Scott v. John F. A. Sandford; 3/6/1857; Dred Scott, Plaintiff in Error, v. John F. A. Sandford; Appellate Jurisdiction Case Files, 1792 - 2010; Records of the Supreme Court of the United States, Record Group 267; National Archives Building, Washington, DC. View All Pages in National Archives Catalog View Transcript In this ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court stated that enslaved people were not citizens of the United States and, therefore, could not expect any protection from the federal government or the courts.
Feb 24, 2025, 11:43 PM·Public·Web
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