The children of racism and reconciliation
Descendants of players in key court cases talk about healing ahead
In 2017, Charlie Taney waited outside the Maryland State House in front of a statue of his ancestor, Roger Taney. His great-great-greatuncle led the U.S. Supreme Court during the 1850s and crafted one of its most divisive rulings.
That March 2017, Taney stood next to Lynne Jackson on the 160th anniversary of that decision and did something his relative never would have. He apologized.
In 1857, Roger Taney ruled against Jackson’s great-greatgrandfather Dred Scott, an enslaved man who was suing for his freedom.
African Americans could not be citizens and thus could not sue, Taney wrote. They were so inferior, he said, that “the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.”
Taney apologized for how the decision impacted Jackson’s family, and consequently, the country. Jackson accepted with a hug. Taney said last week that the apology was necessary to start healing centuries of racial injustice. He, Jackson and others will lead a discussion at Norfolk State University on Tuesday.
The panel, “Dred Scott Presents: Sons and Daughters of Reconciliation,” will mark the fourth annual National Day of Racial Healing and is sponsored by the Hampton Roads Community Foundation, Norfolk State University, Old Dominion University and Virginians for Reconciliation.
Panelists will explain how the legal system promoted racism and will include descendants and relatives of Homer Plessy and John Ferguson. Plessy, a New Orleans resident, challenged a Louisiana law that segregated blacks and whites on railway cars; Ferguson was the presiding judge. An 1896 Supreme Court ruling upheld that segregation was not discriminatory and bolstered “separate but equal” laws in the country.
Henry Chambers Jr., a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law, will moderate. These two cases, Chambers said, supported an America that crippled its African American citizens for decades. Even though new laws eventually prohibited racial discrimination, Chambers said the damage remains.
He sits on the Governor’s Commission to Examine Racial Inequity in Virginia Law, which looks for legislation that has implicit and explicit bias and remains on the books. Laws that state, for example, that blacks and whites can’t marry or can’t go to the same schools that are still in the legal record although they are no longer enforced. They will be repealed, finally.
“The way I look at issues of reconciliation and issues of moving forward is to recognize what the laws were to the extent that a number of those laws memorialize the flat-out racism and segregation of past general assemblies,” Chambers said. “It’s only fair to remind folks of that and take the simple steps of formally repealing them.”
Lynne Jackson lives in St. Louis where her great-great-grandfather lived and his case tried.
The Dred Scott case was so controversial that it is considered one of the causes of the Civil War.
Jackson grew up hearing Scott’s story. He was born enslaved in Southampton County around 1799. His owners moved to St. Louis in 1830, and Scott was later sold to John Emerson, a military doctor, who took Scott to Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory, areas that didn’t allow slavery. Scott still worked for Emerson, though. He also married and had two children.
Emerson moved back to St. Louis in 1842. He died the next year leaving the Scott family to his widow. In 1846, Scott and his wife filed separate lawsuits to be freed. The Scotts argued that they should be emancipated since they’d lived in free territories.
The cases went through various courts and rulings until the 1857 decision. The Supreme Court ruling fed growing tensions among states that were for and against slavery. Pro-slavery Southern states started to secede three years later, ushering in the Civil War in 1861.
The 14th amendment passed in 1868 granting citizenship to all born or naturalized in the United States.
For the 150th anniversary of the Dred Scott decision, Jackson started The Dred Scott Heritage Foundation to promote the Scott story. One pillar of her foundation is reconciliation.
“From the beginning, I always thought it would be great to meet,” she said in a phone interview about wanting to connect with a member of the Taney family.
She did not know that one of Charlie Taney’s daughters, Kate Taney Billingsley, had a similar idea. A playwright, Billingsley had written, “A Man of His Time,” based on the fictional meeting of two descendants.
Billingsley found Jackson’s contact through the foundation’s website and called. In 2016, she invited Jackson to come to New York to see the play.
Jackson and Charlie Taney met, and they have been talking to groups about the importance of talking about racism and its impact on everyone, not just African Americans.
Phoebe Ferguson and Keith Plessy, who will take part in Tuesday’s event, have established a similar group in New Orleans, the Plessy and Ferguson Foundation.
Taney grew up also aware of his relative’s legacy. The man’s portrait hung in his family’s dining room. Some relatives regarded him with pride, others disdain, some a mixture of both. Roger Taney was considered an effective judge and is still one of the high court’s longestserving chief justices. He held the seat from 1836 until his death in 1864.
A young Charlie Taney cringed when the Dred Scott case came up in his history classes in junior high and high school.
“You would sit in your chair and hoped no one would connect the dots from him to you,” Taney said in a phone interview from his Norwalk, Connecticut, home. “You kind of carry that around as a Taney.”
Taney said that talks of reconciliation are important, and people listen when they see how he and Jackson have become friends.
“Peopleneedtotalkaboutit,getit out in the open and not pretend that racism is dead in America,” he said, “but realize that it’s alive and well and that it has to be dealt with. We can do that together.”