Opinions | The enslaved families who went to court to win their freedom Alison LaCroix Descendants of people once enslaved by the Jesuits who founded Georgetown University are buried in the Saint Joseph’s Parish Cemetery in Morganza, Md. In 1838, the Jesuits sold hundreds of enslaved people to settle debts.(Photo by Michael S. Williamson/The 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 fr