Frederick Douglass’ Message About Rights and Resistance

Frederick Douglass, Roger Taney and Dred Scott.

 

This article was originally published on Daily Kos.

By Alan Singer

When circumstances look dire, in an era when the federal government is seeking to deny fundamental constitutional rights to legal residents of the United States, as we celebrate Juneteenth it is important to remember formerly enslaved abolitionist Frederick Douglass’ response to the Supreme Court’s 7-2 majority decision against plaintiff Dred Scott in Dred Scott v. Sandford.

Speaking for the court majority, Chief Justice Roger Taney asserted that Scott was not a citizen of the United States under the Constitution and was not entitled to legal redress because Africans 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; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.”

Douglass delivered his speech at the annual meeting of the American Abolition Society in New York City two months later on May 14, 1857. He opened, “While four millions of our fellow countrymen are in chains — while men, women, and children are bought and sold on the auction-block with horses, sheep, and swine — while the remorseless slave—whip draws the warm blood of our common humanity — it is meet that we assemble as we have done to-day, and lift up our hearts and voices in earnest denunciation of the vile and shocking abomination.”

Douglass next responded to the “Eminent men, North and South, in Church and State” who “tell us that the omens are all against us. Emancipation, they tell us, is a wild, delusive idea” and “that slavery never reposed upon a firmer basis than now . . . We are now told, in tones of lofty exultation, that the day is lost — all lost — and that we might as well give up the struggle. The highest authority has spoken . . . This infamous decision of the Slaveholding wing of the Supreme Court maintains that slaves are within the contemplation of the Constitution of the United States, property; that slaves are property in the same sense that horses, sheep, and swine are property” and “that colored persons of African descent have no rights that white men are bound to respect; that colored men of African descent are not and cannot be citizens of the United States.”

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Alan Singer is a historian and teacher educator at Hofstra University, Hempstead, New York. His most recent books are Social Studies for Secondary Schools, 5th edition (Routledge, 2024) and Class-Conscious Coal Miners (SUNY Press, 2024). Blogs, tweets, essays, interviews, and e-blasts present his views and not those of Hofstra University.