empathyeducates – Like Dred Scott, Michael Brown Was Denied His Right to Live—and to Live as an American

empathyeducates – Like Dred Scott, Michael Brown Was Denied His Right to Live—and to Live as an American:

• 

Like Dred Scott, Michael Brown Was Denied His Right to Live—and to Live as an American

By Blair L.M. Kelley | Originally Published at The Root. August 14, 2014 6:32 PM | Photograph; Michael Brown | Facebook

In Dred Scott’s America—in the same part of Missouri where Brown was killed—black Americans were denied rights and their future. That’s not far off from what happened to Brown.

News out of Ferguson, Mo., has been devastating.

Since unarmed teenager Michael Brown was killed by an as-yet-unidentified police officer, local police have responded to the community’s demonstration of outrage with unprecedented force—using military-style weaponry to suppress peaceful protests, arrest black elected officials and detain journalists. And Brown’s death seems to have unearthed a history of disregard for the rights of black residents.

There is outrage across the country because Ferguson officials have not behaved as though the black citizens of this majority-black town have the same rights as all other Americans. Reporters keep saying that these images do not look like America, but Ferguson is America. And in America, black citizens should enjoy equal protection under the law and the right of a free press to report on what is happening anywhere in the United States.

And this moment in Ferguson, Mo., makes me think about the historic Dred Scott v. Sandford case, an 1857 Supreme Court decision which had its roots in this same part of the country.

Dred Scott was one of the tens of thousands of the enslaved who were born in the Southeast and moved west in the early 19th century. Scott was moved, first to Alabama and then later to Missouri, as his owner sought new fortunes on the American “frontier.” But white settlement required not only wars of displacement against Native Americans but also the violent removal of enslaved African Americans from their communities of origin.

Neither Native Americans nor black slaves were conceived of as having claims to anyplace they could call home. The enslaved were auctioned off and sold, traveling in shackles to the newly expanding Deep South or the new Southwest, while the Indian Removal Act of 1830 opened the door for the violent forced removal and warfare against hundreds of thousands of Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole. The empathyeducates – Like Dred Scott, Michael Brown Was Denied His Right to Live—and to Live as an American: