Women’s History Month: Harriet Robinson Scott and other enslaved black women fought in the courts for their freedom.
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
Today is the anniversary of one of the most horrific decisions ever handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court — which has come to be known as “The Dred Scott decision.” (Dred Scott v. Sandford)
I’ve written about Dred Scott here in the past, however it wasn’t until my trip to St. Louis where I visited the statue shown above that I became curious about Harrier Scott. The State Historical Society of Missouri has a detailed biography on their website: Harriet Robinson Scott (1815? – 1876) and the Dred Scott Heritage Foundation helped discover her burial location. All of this readily accessible information is quite recent. I cannot even remember her name being mentioned when we covered the Dred Scott decision when I was in high school and a college undergraduate.
Due to a shift in how history is now told — thanks to the influence of Black and Women’s Studies, we are beginning to have a body of “herstories” to make up for the male dominated portraits of the past. Such is the case for Harriet Robinson Scott, whose story, along with those of others is detailed in Mrs. Dred Scott: A Life on Slavery's Frontier, by Lea VanderVelde
Among the most infamous U.S. Supreme Court decisions is Dred Scott v. Sandford . Despite the case's signal importance as a turning point in America's history, the lives of the slave litigants have receded to the margins of the record, as conventional accounts have focused on the case's judges and lawyers. In telling the life of Harriet, Dred's wife and co-litigant in the case, this book provides a compensatory history to the generations of work that missed key sources only recently brought to light. Moreover, it gives insight into the reasons and ways that slaves used the courts to establish their freedom.
A remarkable piece of historical detective work, Mrs. Dred Scott chronicles Harriet's life from her adolescence on the 1830s Minnesota-Wisconsin frontier, to slavery-era St. Louis, through the eleven years of legal wrangling that ended with the high court's notorious decision. The book not only recovers her story, but also reveals that Harriet may well have been the lynchpin in this pivotal episode in American legal history.
Reconstructing Harriet Scott's life through innovative readings of journals, military records, court dockets, and even frontier store ledgers, VanderVelde offers a stunningly detailed account that is at once a rich portrait of slave life, an engrossing legal drama, and a provocative reassessment of a central event in U.S. constitutional history. More than a biography, the book is a deep social history that freshly illuminates some of the major issues confronting antebellum America, including the status of women, slaves, Free Blacks, and Native Americans.
More on legal historian Lea VanderVelde.
VanderVelde is the Josephine R. Witte Professor of Law at the University of Iowa College of Law. She writes in the fields of employment law, property law, 19th century legal history, and constitutional law.
Her latest book is Redemption Songs: Suing for Freedom before Dred Scott (Oxford University Press 2014)
is based upon the discovery of almost 300 freedom suits brought by slaves in the St. Louis courts. Those files are now available on the web. An article describing her role in their discovery can be found in the Los Angeles Times, March 18, 2003. Additional data about the lawsuits, arranged by family and by entry in the day book, can be found here.
Redemption Songs follows her 2009 book, Mrs. Dred Scott: A Life on Slavery's Frontier (Oxford University Press 2009) which is a full-scale biography of Harriet, the hidden protagonist in the infamous Supreme Court decision, Dred Scott v. Sandford. This work is a biography which many said couldn't be written and is one of the first of its kind to be published because Harriet was illiterate and left no letters in her own hand. Instead, the book meticulously reconstructs her life from hundreds of documents documenting the context in which she lived as well as the agendas of the masters she served.
Before the full-scale biography, Lea VanderVelde a law review article, with the same title, Mrs. Dred Scott. Mrs. Dred Scott (with Subramanian) is a feministic analytic demonstrating how the double subordination of marriage and enslavement masked the pivotal role that Harriet played in bringing and sustaining the significant law suit.
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Several of her works focus on gender to demonstrate how women's legal history resulting in more probative understandings of established areas of law. Her works on contract doctrine, The Gendered Origin of the Lumley Doctrine and intentional tort and rape, The Legal Ways of Seduction, are thought to be path-breaking and comprehensive.
Here are a short interview with Vandervelde and a longer lecture presented in the African American Experience Lecture Series of the State Historical Society of Missouri — plus a link to a presentation on C-Span “Slavery and Freedom Trials.”
In years of researching enslavement in Virginia, I became very familiar with Chancery Court filings — which thankfully are now digitized — see the Race and Slavery Petitions Project. The discovery of the Missouri cases opened up new ground for a better understanding of history.
I was fascinated to learn about cases like Winny v. Whitesides.
In 1795, Winny, the slave of Phoebe Whitesides, was moved from Kentucky to the Indiana Territory with her owners and held as a slave there. The 1787 Northwest Ordinance, however, prohibited slavery in the Indiana Territory. The Whitesides later moved to the Missouri Territory, where Winny sued for freedom, stating she was freed by living in free territory. Justices Mathias McGirk and George Tompkins stated in their majority opinion that ".this court thinks that the person who takes his slave into said Territory and by the length of his residence there indicates an intention of making that place his residence & that of his slave and thereby induces a jury to believe that fact does by such residence declare his slave to have become a free man." This 1824 decision set Missouri's long-standing precedent of "once free, always free" in determining the outcome of slave freedom suits.
Even so, by the 1850s, pro-slavery judges elected to the Missouri Supreme Court were willing to discard legal precedent to further the political end of aligning Missouri more closely with southern states. The 1852 majority opinion in the Dred Scott case, written by William Scott and concurred in by John Ryland, ended the ability of slaves in Missouri to sue for their freedom based on residence in a free state or territory. Scott did not mention the precedent-forming Winny v. Whitesides. Instead, he wrote, "Times are not now as they were when the former decisions on this subject were made."
The history of Native American enslavement joins with black enslavement in the case of Marie Jean Scypion (which is meticulously detailed in Redemption Songs)
Although it was not unusual for a case to drag on for several years, one family's struggle lasted three decades. In 1805, the children of Afro-Indian slave Marie Jean Scypion filed the first suit for freedom in Missouri with the Territorial Superior Court. Indian slavery was common in territorial Missouri until Spanish officials ordered an end to the practice in 1769.Unhappy slaveholders resisted the order, but some slaves, including Scypion's descendants, saw in it a chance for freedom. Scypion's children asserted in their petition that Marie Jean's mother was Indian, and that ancestry, the plaintiffs argued, precluded their enslavement. The initial judgment in their favor was reversed in a later trial and over the next thirty years, Scypion's descendants, most notably her daughters Marguerite,Celeste, and Catiche continued to press their claim. Encouraged by the Missouri General Assembly's passage of a state statute allowing persons held in slavery to sue for their freedom, Marguerite renewed her claim in 1825 and filed suit against her owner Pierre Chouteau, Sr., in the St. Louis Circuit Court. Although the judgment and subsequent appeal to the Missouri Supreme Court went against Marguerite, her attorney's persistence brought about a review of the case in 1834 and a new trial was ordered. After a change of venue to St. Charles County, and then Jefferson County, and delays on the part of Chouteau's legal counsel, the case finally came to trial on November 8, 1836.4 The jury's unanimous decision in favor of the plaintiffs withstood appeals by the defense to the State and U.S. Supreme Courts, thus officially ending the practice of Indian slavery in Missouri.
Black History and Women’s History intersect in these cases from the past — and should be explored year round. For me, as a black woman — every day is my day.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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When you make it about ignorance, you’re also making it about individual people and you’re not making it about power and policy and structures and systems.” The Guardian: How should the media cover America's racist extremists?
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Charlottesville made clear that far-right groups were a serious, violent threat. But it did not put an end to the debates over media coverage of these groups – and the fierce criticism when news organizations produced coverage that readers saw as too “normalizing”.
The episode brings together historians of American racism with seven reporters who have covered the far right over the past year. Together, they weigh in on the common mistakes journalists and editors make – and the false assumptions about racism at the root of many of these errors.Guardian US and WNYC’s On the Media have collaborated on a radio episodelooking at these debates over the coverage of America’s emboldened racist extremists. How should news organizations cover neo-Nazi and white nationalist groups? What does it take to cover them accurately – without simply giving them a platform for their ideas?
“I found myself at this fancy party in New York and there were all these fancy liberals and they wanted to talk to me about Charlottesville,” said Elle Reeve, a correspondent for Vice News Tonight, which produced the acclaimed 2017 documentary Charlottesville: Race and Terror, documenting the August Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
“No matter how many times I told them that these guys were not poor, they kept saying: ‘Well, you know, whatever economic suffering has caused them to adopt racism, that’s unfortunate.’ No, these guys are like you. They are like you. They are from New Jersey. They went to prep school. They live on the Upper East Side. And it’s very hard for white liberals to accept that.”
Dr Ibram X Kendi, the founding director of the Anti-Racist Research and Policy Center at American University and author of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, said the assumption that racism grows out of ignorance is an old trope – and a false one.
“The reality is actually quite the opposite. Those who are producing racist ideas were doing so to justify existing policies that typically benefited them,” Kendi said.
But blaming racism on ignorance has continued to be a popular move – even for some anti-racist activists.
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Originally, the posters were just a private effort among a group of teens who were tired of seeing black faces shut out of British media. But their designs—movie posters of popular films and TV shows remixed to show primarily black casts—became a major moment in London this week, as their posters were displayed prominently in bus stops around South London.
As the Guardian reports, the posters were the work of the group Legally Black, an activist group formed by four Brixton teens: Liv Francis-Cornibert, Shiden Tekle, Bel Matos da Costa and Kofi Asante. On an assignment from Advocacy Academy, a group that helps channel youth anger into political activism, Legally Black decided to make the posters to vent their frustration about the lack of black representation in British media.
The Guardian writes that the posters were originally supposed to line the walls of their rooms, until the “subversive advertising organization,” Special Group Patrol found the posters online. The group, which had previously run campaigns targeting police corruptions, love the posters and wanted to amplify Legally Black’s message. The enlarged the posters to mimic real movie billboards and, on Wednesday, placed them throughout bus stops in London’s Brixton neighborhood.
They were a huge hit.
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AS A middle-class Senegalese man, Salou (not his real name) was rather proud of his roundness in 2002. But by 2003 his clothes were falling off. He got tested and found he had AIDS. His pregnant wife was also infected with HIV. They went to Dakar, Senegal’s capital, and she was put on antiretroviral drugs to prevent the infection of her unborn child. “When my son was born he tested negative, thank God,” exclaimed Salou.
The hopeful tale of Salou’s baby is far from universal. Although west and central Africa have long had a lower prevalence of HIV than the south and east (see map), the region still has a stubbornly high rate of new infections. In south and east Africa close on 20m people have the virus, almost four times more than in west and central Africa. From this high base, the number of new infections each year in the south and east has fallen by 29% since 2010, to 790,000. Alas, new infections in west and central Africa have fallen just 9%, to 370,000. Moreover, about 310,000 people die from HIV-related illnesses each year in west and central Africa, compared with 420,000 a year in east and southern Africa. This high toll is prompting urgent calls from global bodies such as UNAIDS and UNICEF for a new approach.
An example of that may be found in Senegal, which has cut new infections by almost three-quarters since 2010, leaving it with one of the least-afflicted populations in Africa. Whereas 4.3% of people in sub-Saharan Africa are HIV-positive, the prevalence in Senegal is just 0.4%.
Senegal may be poor but its HIV prevention and treatment system punches above its weight. It was the first country in sub-Saharan Africa to start a government-backed programme to treat people with antiretrovirals in 1998, not just prolonging the lives of those with HIV but reducing the chances that they would pass it on. In a bold move in 2003 it made the treatment free, several years before the World Health Organisation recommended that countries do so.
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The project is Beijing’s big experiment in outsourcing, and a $10 billion shot in the arm for the African nation—if there isn’t a civil war first. Bloomberg: China Is Turning Ethiopia Into a Giant Fast-Fashion Factory
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Standing in a sunny office in Indochine International’s brand-new factory, Raghav Pattar, vice president of this Chinese apparel manufacturer, is ebullient. It’s November, barely six months since the Hawassa Industrial Park opened, and already he has 1,400 locals at work. Pattar is shooting to employ 20,000 Ethiopians by 2019. “Twenty-four months ago, the land we’re sitting on was farm fields,” he says. “What country can change in 24 months? That is Ethiopia!”
Pattar is a bright-eyed émigré from India, with apparel experience in Bangladesh and Egypt. He keeps his pens neatly clipped in the pocket of his blue button-down oxford, and right now he’s gazing out the window toward the factory floor, where scores of women are sewing seams, stamping logos, and pressing out wrinkles for Warner’s underpants, a brand sold mainly at Walmart. “The government is very committed to us,” he says. “They had workers here 24 hours, day and night, to build this place. And there is no corruption. None!”
Hawassa Industrial Park did go up quickly, thanks to a state-owned Chinese construction company that banged out 56 identical hangar-size, red-and-gray metal sheds devoted to textile production in nine months, for $250 million, according to the Ethiopian Investment Commission. But Pattar is effusing this way because he has a visitor, Belay Hailemichael, the soft-spoken park manager who runs the “one-stop” help center. Belay enables companies to snap up import and export licenses and executive visas and processes prospective workers. These are mostly women, who’ve taken long, dusty bus rides here from small villages and waited for hours to apply for jobs with a base salary of about $25 a month. The help center gives them a dexterity test and divides them into three categories: gifted “ones,” fated to work the sewing machines, and less talented “twos” and “threes,” who will pack boxes and sweep floors.
We’ve arrived at a new moment for the global apparel industry. This drought-afflicted, landlocked country of 100 million on the Horn of Africa is transforming itself into the lowest rung on the supply chain that pours out fast fashion and five-for-$12.99 tube socks. Lured by tax incentives, promises of infrastructure investment, and ultracheap labor, countries the Western world once outsourced production to, particularly China and Sri Lanka, are now the middlemen ramping up production here for Guess, Levi’s, H&M, and other labels. These industrialists like Ethiopia because the government wants them as much as they want cheap labor and tax breaks. The Hawassa Industrial Park’s inauguration is only the most recent part of a vast centralized scheme: Since 2014, Ethiopia has opened four giant, publicly owned industrial parks; it plans eight more by 2020.
The industrialists who set up shop here are exempt from income tax for their first five years of business and absolved from duties or taxes on the import of capital goods and construction supplies. Ethiopia can swing such largesse because it gets lots and lots of money from China: $10.7 billion in loans from 2010 to 2015, according to the China-Africa Research Initiative at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. Right now much of the money is being spent on lucrative contracts for Chinese companies that, with help from Ethiopian labor, are building dams, roads, and cellular networks. This infrastructure, the Ethiopian government says, will allow the country to join the global middle class. “The plan is to create a total of 2 million jobs in manufacturing by the end of 2025,” says the Ethiopian Investment Commission’s Belachew Mekuria. “We are an agrarian nation now, but that will change.”
If there isn’t a civil war first. At the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro in 2016, marathon runner Feyisa Lilesa drew the world’s attention to a crisis brewing in his country. As he crossed the finish line to win silver, he raised his arms in an “X”—an antigovernment symbol. Feyisa belongs to the country’s largest ethnic group, the Oromo. Since 2015 the Oromo have been staging mass protests to decry, among other things, what they say are land grabs from farmers for an autocratic government’s planned factories. The Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) controls every seat in Parliament and claims to represent all of Ethiopia’s 70-plus ethnic groups, but its power is largely held by the Tigray, who constitute only 6 percent of the population. In the years of unrest, hundreds of Oromo have died, factories have been burned, and many dissidents have been imprisoned.
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Ivory pirates, slave traders, and naturalists alike have long sought out the Zanzibar archipelago, a biodiverse group of islands lying off the coast of Tanzania in East Africa. One of these islands, Misali, is surrounded by a six-mile coral reef. It teems with rare life: hawksbill turtles, flying foxes, coconuts crabs—and lots of octopuses.
This island is special to Muslims, who form the vast majority of Zanzibar’s population. According to a local Islamic myth, Misali was once visited by a saintly man known as Prophet Hadhara. When he asked fishermen for a prayer mat, they had none to offer, but he said it didn’t matter: The teardrop-shaped island, whose northern beach faces Mecca, was like a prayer mat itself. In fact, “Misali,” in the local Kiswahili language, means “prayer mat.”
Misali sustained generations of Muslims; the octopus catch, in particular, kept them fed for centuries. But overfishing, climate change, and oil exploration began in recent years to threaten the ecosystem. The octopus population dropped dramatically. Government regulations did little to curb the problem. And so, some residents decided to try a different strategy: appealing to the community’s Islamic consciousness and using verses from the Quran to promote conservation.
“Whether you catch small-size fish, damage coral reefs, or use drag nets in seagrass areas … [it] is forbidden in the Islamic point of view,” said Ali Said Hamad, a field officer at local nonprofit Mwambao Coastal Community Network who began using the religious strategy in a few villages in 2016. “We should use our resources in a wise manner. That’s why there is mizan—an Arabic word which means balance, but balance in the sense of sustainability.”
Since 2016, Mwambao has been assisting villages’ shehia, or fishery committee, with closing 436 hectares of fishing grounds in intervals of three months per year, to allow the octopus population to regenerate. Some closures coincide with Ramadan, when fishermen will feel discouraged from entering the water, “because when water gets into your ears and nose it means that you’re breaking your fast,” said Ali Thani, the country coordinator at Mwambao. When the area re-opens toward the end of Ramadan, when celebrations require villagers to splurge, “they can sell the [bigger] octopus, get money for Eid, and buy clothes for their kids,” he added.
While foreign nonprofits and words like “sustainability” can evoke distrust in the population, the Quran does not: “We say, ‘It’s not from Europe—it is in your faith; it is in your religion; it has been there for a long time,’” Thani said. “[T]his is making the people to start trusting things.”
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Voices and Soul
by
Black Kos Poetry Editor
Justice Putnam
The true beginning of Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man," is the protagonist recalling the humiliation he endured in the awarding of his "scholarship." An eloquent public speaker, after his eloquent speech, the protangonist was then led to a smoke filled room for a little blind folded Battle Royale boxing before being forced to scramble across an electrified rug and grasp for fake gold coins.
I sometimes stumble upon those cage fight matches on those certain sports channels while scrolling through the cable media guide. I'm often reminded of the Battle Royale scene in "Invisible Man," but I'm also reminded of Ancient Rome, and blood lust and pawns on a blood stained three acre chessboard. I'm reminded of Jack Johnson and Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali on a hot Philadelphia night.
And I am reminded of a concrete hardened city I saw once, a city of steel security and camera corners, a city of ballistic glass refracting a sharp light dulled by the tears of mothers and daughters and fathers and sons. Maybe I saw it in a dream, or maybe I saw it in a museum in France, or maybe even, in a dance club in Tribeca, of a city encased within a lace work of crumbling concrete interchanges and overpasses, and a people blind folded in a Great Battle Royale on a blood stained chessboard that is a three acre electrified rug, scrambling for fake gold coins, and for heart attacks and diabetes, while the Climate heats up, and the seas evaporate in a roiling, steamy cloud, and yet, a steam engine belches steam continually across a bleak railroad earth of gun stores, used washing machine dealerships, pay day lender barred window tithing, sidewalk chess matches and broken doll glass works bleeding blue glass blood at the funeral home mourning, while a sad dirge is played by a sad marching band marching in place in a sad newspaper alley off Main Street, USA.
Tell me how you entered this poem, how you even got in
here. Where my parentals come from is where I’m coming from
and where where I’m coming from is from we lock the front door
and the back and the side and can’t spare a single extra key. Where
where I’m coming from is from we shut all the windows tight like
our eyes to an ugly view: a jail if I ever saw one, and maybe I did,
and maybe that was enough for me. Maybe you made the mistake,
by coming here. Unannounced. Uninvited. It takes a lot of talent
to step in someone’s crib and be welcomed without any alarms
going off, so shake your ass something dangerous if you can,
sing me a song real sexy-like or be suck out of luck if I feel
like shooting strangers today. If home is where the heart is
then four red bullet wounds across the chest of the city’s flag
say everything there is about my feelings toward you and
the whole damn world right now. Because it was my own
blood this time and yet I’m still here, and the funny thing
about that town and this one is that they both burned down
once. And down the hall they’re burning bud and I want some
kinda sorta but without the friends. Which makes you foe,
I suppose, as if you are the presence of all colors and I am
the absence of said colors. But maybe I got it backwards,
twisted it all up. It just hurts to have my hair pulled even if
it’s by my own hand. My mind is spinning blanks inside every
chamber; everywhere I turn on the TV they’re shooting boys
like what I used to be before I wasn’t anymore and when did that
happen? And what am I now? Are you the phantom or me, me
or none of the above? The last shadow I cast on a sunny Sunday
stole my wallet and bought this gun and all the rounds and all
the rounds at the bar, too. Where I’m coming from, when in love:
squeeze. When lonely, loan yourself some time and don’t pay it
back. Beware, because I’m both lonely and in love like the living
embodiment of the code switch. I’m polluted air and poisoned water
and whatever else they say except when I say I’m not and I’m not
one to play for a fool for the record. Fear me. I’m godly and I’m just
and just get the hell out demon and do come again. Come again:
it’s my igneous ire toward you that keeps me a live wire, and alive.
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WELCOME TO THE TUESDAY’S PORCH