In the Dred Scott decision of 1857, the Supreme Court turned down a
petition for freedom from an enslaved African American. The author of
the court's ruling, Chief Justice Roger B. Tawney, declared that blacks
could never be granted equal protection under the law or civil rights,
because they were inherently inferior to whites, and forever would be.
Tawney observed that "the unhappy black race" had always "been excluded
from civilized Governments and the family of nations, and doomed to
slavery. Negroes were beings 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."
The infamous Dred Scott decision reaffirmed the fundamental legal
condition of African Americans, not as citizens or human beings, but as
property. Black people were to be treated by law enforcement officers
and the courts primarily based on the color of their skin. Yet despite
the nearly 150 years since the Dred Scott decision, African Americans
still encounter nearly identical racist attitudes from the police and
the courts.
Among thousands of cases in recent years that make this point, one of
the best is provided by certain bizarre events in Oneonta, New York, in
1992. A 77-year-old white woman phoned the Oneonta police that she had
been attacked by a burglar. She was unable to see the man's face, but
she thought the assailant was a black man who may have cut his hand or
arm with the knife used in the robbery.
This was all the "evidence" the police needed. Every African American
male in the town was to be stopped and checked.
African American men and boys waiting for public transportation were
all stopped and interrogated. Black men found riding in automobiles
were pulled over and questioned. Local and state police then demanded
that academic officials at the State University of New York at Oneonta
campus turn over a list of all black male students. Students were
interrogated, and checked for wounds. Finding no suspects, the cops
began questioning every African American they could find both in and
around the city of Oneonta. Everyone stopped was innocent, and the
assailant was not apprehended.
Civil rights and civil liberties groups were appalled by these police
state tactics, and the state's Governor at that time, Mario Cuomo,
apologized for this official misconduct. Several black people filed a
legal suit, charging that cops had blatantly violated their civil
rights.
Late last year, a three-judge panel from the U.S. Second Circuit Court
of Appeals heard arguments in the case, and made a decision-in favor of
the police. In its ruling, the judges declared that the racial dragnet
used to identify, stop and interrogate only black men did not violate
their Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure,
nor their Fourteenth Amendment Rights to equal protection regardless of
race. The court recognized that the hundreds of innocent people who had
been humiliated and violated by the police might feel a "sense of
frustration." Nevertheless, the court declared that the police sweep
was not racially discriminatory because the cops were acting on a
physical description of the suspect that included more than racial
identity.
The Oneonta decision of 1999 was so outrageous that even the New York
Times editorialized that the federal appeals court's decision could mean
that "police are free to treat every black person they see on the
streets as a potential suspect, so long as there is a pending complaint
that a black person committed a crime." In effect, this ruling gives
police the right to stop, question and harass any black person, anywhere
and anytime, if they have an allegation that a black person somewhere
committed a crime.
However, the Oneonta case is also representative and indicative of the
hundreds of indiscriminate and routine stops and searches that happen to
blacks and Latinos in every U.S. city everyday. A recent report of the
New York Attorney General's office on racial disparities in street
searches by the New York City Police Department provides more evidence.
The study was based on a thorough review of 175,000 documented cases in
which individuals were stopped by the New York police over a 15-month
period in 1998-1999. The study found that African Americans were
stopped six times more often than whites, and Latinos were stopped four
times more frequently than whites. Blacks comprise 25 percent of New
York City's total population, but are one half of all the people police
stopped.
Dred Scott is unfortunately still alive and well in America's racist
criminal justice system. Despite all the legal and legislative reforms,
apparently African Americans still have "no rights whites must respect."
Dr. Manning Marable is Professor of History and Political Science, and
the Director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies,
Columbia University. "Along the Color Line" is distributed free of
charge to over 325 publications throughout the U.S. and
internationally. Dr. Marable's column is also available on the internet
at
www.manningmarable.net.
