Dred Scott? Really?
Commentary by Chitown Kev
Perhaps I’m neither shocked nor surprised that a group called the National Federation of Republican Assemblies (NFRA) would cite the infamous 1857 U.S. Supreme Court decision Dred Scott v. Sandford in its bid to deny Vice President Kamala Harris the eligibility to run for President of the United States.
But I should be. We all should be.
Allison Gaines/Level Man
For those unfamiliar with the case, Dred Scott and his wife, Harriet, sued for their freedom in the St. Louis Circuit Court in the spring of 1846. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court halted their efforts. Since “his ancestors were imported from Africa and sold as slaves, he is not a citizen of the State of Missouri,” and as such, “not entitled to sue,” justices argued. Their decision extended to “any free Negro of the African race, whose ancestors were brought to this country and sold as slaves.” While some enslaved people successfully sued for their freedom, such as Elizabeth Key Grinstead in 1656 and Elizabeth Freeman in 1781, the Dred Scott v. Sandford case was a brutal legal attack on the abolition movement, a setback that meant courts would not consider Black people citizens.
Despite the first Africans arriving in the Spanish colony of Florida in 1513 and the British colony of Virginia in 1619, their enslaved status initially excluded the group from citizenship. However, the interpretation shared in Dred v. Stanford broadened that exclusionary interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, suggesting that neither one’s freedom nor birthplace made someone a citizen, especially when the status of one’s parents was concerned. Simply by virtue of having enslaved African ancestors was sufficient to deprive someone of citizenship, according to Chief Justice Roger B. Taney. In the case of Kamala Harris, some Republicans believe she’s ineligible because of her parents’ status. Of course, Taney’s exclusionary citizenship ended generations ago with the passage of the 14th Amendment. This Reconstruction Era legislation declared that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States” are “citizens of the United States and the State wherein they reside, making Black people, even those with enslaved African ancestors’ full-fledged citizens. To the ire of some, this legal status also extends to the children of immigrants.
Debates continue about who should be included and excluded from citizenship. For instance, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Lindsey Graham, and former President Donald Trump each signaled they want to see the end of birthright citizenship. Of course, the irony shouldn’t be lost on us that Donald Trump’s mother, Mary Anne MacLeod, was a Scottish immigrant who only became a citizen a few years before his birth. Then, there’s the fact that Trump’s wife, Melania, did not become a citizen until July 28, 2006, months after giving birth to Barron Trump, their son. Their standard would mean even Trump’s youngest son couldn’t become president — an apparent but unintended contradiction resulting from efforts to exclude some Black and ethnically diverse candidates. This oversight is likely because of the preferential treatment often extended to white, European-descendant immigrants. As author and civil rights organizer Charles Kamasaki noted, “from the early 1900s through the 1960s, millions of predominantly white immigrants entered the country unlawfully but faced virtually no threat of apprehension or deportation.” His article in Brookings suggested the U.S. immigration policy is a “classic, unappreciated example of structural racism.”
First of all, the home page of NFRA’s website claims to be “the home of Frederick Douglass Republicans.”
Really?
You will readily ask me how I am affected by this devilish decision—this judicial incarnation of wolfishness? My answer is, and no thanks to the slave- holding wing of the Supreme Court, my hopes were never brighter than now.
I have no fear that the National Conscience will be put to sleep by such an open, glaring, and scandalous tissue of lies as that decision is, and has been, over and over, shown to be.
Frederick Douglass, “The Dred Scott Decision” May 14, 1857
Considering the Earth-2 status/timeline that we seem to have found ourselves in for the past decade, I am neither surprised nor shocked.
But I should be. We all should be.
I look forward to the day when that ability returns.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Haywood Park Community Hospital was the closest hospital for many in Brownsville, Tennessee, a rural city in the western part of the state.
Some residents believe it kept their loved ones alive. But others in this majority-Black city said they drove to a hospital miles away or skipped care completely. The facility eventually closedin 2014 after a decline in patients.
“Despite my ill feelings or experiences I had in that environment,” said Alma Jean Thomas Carney, who described the hospital’s white staff as unwelcoming, “you have indigent people living in Haywood County who need to get to the closest facility available.”
It’s more common for people in rural areas to die earlier than urban residents from things like heart disease, cancer and stroke, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But hospitals have closed throughout rural America in the last decade, leaving some of the 46 million people who live in these areas fewer options to get the care they need when they need it.
Advocates, hospital and health clinic administrators and rural residents say changing disparities in health outcomes and health care services in rural America needs to start at the local level — especially in communities of color that may lack trust in the medical field.
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When I say, ‘because’, you say: ‘Black people invented it,’” Renee Scott Best told a class of predominantly Black students one Monday last month. The call and response from the kids grew louder as they read a fictional story about a dystopian world without African Americans and their inventions. A folding bed, tricycle, clock, toilet, heating furnace, thermostat and air conditioner were among the innovations that no longer existed because, “Black people invented it,” the students shouted.
“Because we were brought here as slaves, they try to make us think we’re not very smart,” Best said toward the end of the lesson. She stood beside a poster that displayed the cover of her poetry book about 50 Black inventors, Black Inventors Poetry in Motion, which inspired the day’s lesson plan. She said: “We know that’s not true, because without all of the Black inventions in and around your home, you’d be in a cabin!”
The class Best teaches is part of an educational initiative launched in 2023 by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), a Black heritage academic club founded in 1915 by historian Carter G Woodson. Known as a “freedom school”, the class was formed in response to what critics call an assault on Black history in Florida public schools launched by Ron DeSantis. The Republican governor’s Stop Woke Act prohibits schools from teaching about structural racism or using educational material from The 1619 Project, and he’s also banned advanced-placement African American history courses.
While state statute still requires the teaching of African American history in Florida’s public schools, only 11 out of more than 60 districts have a Black history teaching plan advertised in curriculum guides, according to the state board African American History Taskforce. And since last year, the state’s social studies standards have included instruction that enslaved people learned skills that “could be applied for their personal benefit”. Some students and instructors say that the governor’s policies have sowed a culture of fear.
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It started a couple of years ago when Juliana Pache was doing a crossword puzzle and got stuck.
She was unfamiliar with the reference that the clue made. It made her think about what a crossword puzzle would look like if the clues and answers included more of some subjects that she WAS familiar with, thanks to her own identity and interests — Black history and Black popular culture.
When she couldn’t find such a thing, Pache decided to do it herself. In January 2023, she created blackcrossword.com, a site that offers a free mini-crossword puzzle every day. And Tuesday marked the release of her first book, “Black Crossword: 100 Mini Puzzles Celebrating the African Diaspora.”
It’s a good moment for it, nearly 111 years after the first crossword appeared in a New York newspaper. Recent years have seen an increasing amount of conversation around representation in crossword puzzles, from who’s constructing them to what words can be used for answers and how the clues are framed. There’s been a push to expand the idea of the kinds of “common knowledge” players would have to fill them out.
Each puzzle on Pache’s site includes at least a few clues and answers connecting to Black culture. The tagline on the site: “If you know, you know.”
The book is brimming with the kinds of puzzles that she estimates about 2,200 people play daily on her site — squares made up of five lines, each with five spaces. She aims for at least three of the clues to be references to aspects of Black cultures from around the world.
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Who would’ve thought we’d see the day comedian D.L. Hughley actually admits he was wrong?! The actor is known for his strong and divisive takes, but on the final night of the Democratic National Convention (DNC), Hughley sang a different tune about Vice President Kamala Harris.
“If you told 15-year-old me that [I’d] be on stage supporting a prosecutor and a teacher... there’s no way that I would’ve believed you,” Hughley said during his Thursday night speech. The actor went on to say he made unfair “assumptions” about Harris without actually doing any research first.
Like many of Harris’ critics, Hughley often repeated the false claim that as district attorney, Harris sent thousands of Black men to prison for marijuana offenses, according to an interview with DJ Vlad. The actor said he was simply repeating what he heard instead of taking the time to fact check.
The truth is out of the total 1,956 convictions for misdemeanor and felony marijuana offenses during Harris’ run, only 45 were sent to prison, many of whom weren’t even Black.
The “Soul Plane” actor told the DNC “I was wrong” about Harris. Apparently, the vice president invited him to her house where “...she put her hand on my shoulder, and she asked me to do some research,” he recalled on stage.
D.L. Hughley, George Clooney, and Don Cheadle
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Darnay Cockrell called authorities for help, but he was instead handcuffed and forced to the ground by responding officers. The audio and bodycam footage from the Aug. 6 incident has been released to the public, and in response, Cockrell is facing consequences.
Footage taken by a bystander shows two Mesa, Ariz. police officers trying to detain Cockrell. The 52-year-old asks officers to “just put my hands” in cuffs instead of also forcing him to the ground.
In a GoFundMe page set up by Cockrell’s neighbor, Lenair Tucker wrote, “Despite no crime having occurred, the officer persisted with these demands. Darnay refused to get on the ground due to a recent surgery and ongoing knee issues.”
The bystander and Cockrell repeatedly told the officers about Cockrell’s condition, but their pleas were ignored. The two responding officers eventually subdued Cockrell to the ground before handcuffing him.
A statement by the Mesa Police Department wrote Cockrell had a “high level of emotion, which is understandable; however, because emotions were so high, he was not following reasonable directions given to him by the officer and made comments that spiked concern for officer safety.”
Officers repeatedly told Cockrell to “calm down,” but the father was clearly in distress throughout the entire incident. Once he was seated on the ground, Cockrell repeatedly asked officers “how would you feel?!” if their child had been kidnapped.
“It makes me feel less than a person,” Cockrell said during a Zoom call with ABC15. “What do you expect the next time - for me to call the police? I won’t do that no more in my lifetime.”
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The government of Trinidad and Tobago wants to remove a depiction of three ships used by Christopher Columbus from its coat of arms, in a move hailed by a historian as important in addressing historical inaccuracies and shrugging off colonial identities.
The Caribbean country’s prime minister, Keith Rowley, announced a plan on 18 August to replace the ships with a representation of Trinidad and Tobago’s national instrument, the steelpan.
The ships depicted are those used by Columbus in his expeditions to the Caribbean, which paved the way for centuries of European colonial rule and enslavement in the region.
In recent years, Caribbean countries have pushed back against what they see as a false narrative that Columbus discovered their islands, which, in fact, were populated when he arrived. Some have even removed references to the Italian explorer’s discovery in national holidays.
But there has been public concern that removing the ships from the coat of arms would erase important moments from Trinidad and Tobago’s history.
Dr Claudius Fergus, a historian who chairs the National Committee on Reparations, said: “This is not an attack on the history of the Caribbean. It’s not an attempt to erase but rather to correct … Every generation has an obligation to reinterpret their history and to correct the falsehoods on which some of that history would have been written.”
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