The Enslaved Families Who Went to Court to Win Their Freedom Alison L. LaCroix Washington Post
In 1857, the chief justice of the United States, Roger Brooke Taney, declared in his infamous
Dred Scott v. Sandford opinion that since the nation’s founding, African Americans whether free or enslaved had “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Taney’s opinion was not only inflammatory but based on bad history. It ignored the rights that some Black people had exercised in some states as far back as the Revolution, including the right to vote. More damning, Taney’s words denied what he knew from his own legal practice: Black Americans used the legal system to fight for freedom. And sometimes, they won.