The Civil Rights Movement Revised Edition

The Problem 5

work. Roger Taney, a slaveholding chief justice, tried to end the debate over

slavery. In the Dred Scottdecision of 1857, the US Supreme Court declared

that blacks were ‘beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate

with the white race.’ Blacks, Taney wrote, possessed ‘no rights which the

white man was bound to respect.’

There the matter stood until Abraham Lincoln waged America’s bloodiest

war to preserve the Union and, secondarily, to free the slaves. In the end, the

Union would be preserved, and the rebel government of the master race lay

in ruins. But most whites on both sides could scarcely conceive of equality

between the races. Navy secretary Gideon Welles captured the prevailing

sentiment: ‘Thank God slavery is abolished, but the Negro is not, and never

can be, the equal of the White.’ For a century, blacks wore their skin color as

a badge of inferiority as they remained in the white man’s wilderness. It

would require an epic civil rights movement to exorcize the nation’s original

sin – racism.

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