Andrew K. Diemer. The Politics of Black Citizenship

On the eve of the Civil War, Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney articulated as clearly as anyone the nineteenth century’s white republic ideology in his majority opinion in Dred Scott v. John. F. A. Sandford (1857). His rendering of the African American’s place in American citizenship flowed from one ostensibly basic question: “Can a negro whose ancestors were imported into this country and sold as slaves become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution of the United States”? Taney responded in the negative: “We think they [blacks] are not, ... and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States. On the contrary, they were at that time considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings” possessing “no rights which the white man was bound to respect” (https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/60/393, 403, 404–405).

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