Charles Brown
Tue, 25 Jan 2000 07:39:42 -0800
January 2000
Along the Color Line
No Rights Whites Must Respect
By Dr. Manning Marable <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
In the Dred Scott decision of 1857, the Supreme
Court turned down a petition for freedom from an enslaved
African American. The author of the court's ruling, Chief
Justice Roger B. Tawney, declared that blacks could never be
granted equal protection under the law or civil rights,
because they were inherently inferior to whites, and forever
would be.
Tawney observed that "the unhappy black race" had
always "been excluded from civilized Governments and the
family of nations, and doomed to slavery. Negroes were
beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to
associate with the white race, either in social or political
relations; and so far inferior that they had no rights which
the white man was bound to respect."
The infamous Dred Scott decision reaffirmed the
fundamental legal condition of African Americans, not as
citizens or human beings, but as property. Black people
were to be treated by law enforcement officers and the
courts primarily based on the color of their skin. Yet
despite the nearly 150 years since the Dred Scott decision,
African Americans still encounter nearly identical racist
attitudes from the police and the courts.
Among thousands of cases in recent years that make
this point, one of the best is provided by certain bizarre
events in Oneonta, New York, in 1992. A 77-year-old white
woman phoned the Oneonta police that she had been attacked
by a burglar. She was unable to see the man's face, but she
thought the assailant was a black man who may have cut his
hand or arm with the knife used in the robbery.
This was all the "evidence" the police needed.
Every African American male in the town was to be stopped
and checked.
African American men and boys waiting for public
transportation were all stopped and interrogated. Black men
found riding in automobiles were pulled over and questioned.
Local and state police then demanded that academic officials
at the State University of New York at Oneonta campus turn
over a list of all black male students. Students were
interrogated, and checked for wounds. Finding no suspects,
the cops began questioning every African American they could
find both in and around the city of Oneonta. Everyone
stopped was innocent, and the assailant was not apprehended.
Civil rights and civil liberties groups were
appalled by these police state tactics, and the state's
Governor at that time, Mario Cuomo, apologized for this
official misconduct. Several black people filed a legal
suit, charging that cops had blatantly violated their civil
rights.
Late last year, a three-judge panel from the U.S.
Second Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments in the case,
and made a decision-in favor of the police. In its ruling,
the judges declared that the racial dragnet used to
identify, stop and interrogate only black men did not
violate their Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable
search and seizure, nor their Fourteenth Amendment Rights to
equal protection regardless of race. The court recognized
that the hundreds of innocent people who had been humiliated
and violated by the police might feel a "sense of
frustration." Nevertheless, the court declared that the
police sweep was not racially discriminatory because the
cops were acting on a physical description of the suspect
that included more than racial identity.
The Oneonta decision of 1999 was so outrageous that
even the New York Times editorialized that the federal
appeals court's decision could mean that "police are free to
treat every black person they see on the streets as a
potential suspect, so long as there is a pending complaint
that a black person committed a crime." In effect, this
ruling gives police the right to stop, question and harass
any black person, anywhere and anytime, if they have an
allegation that a black person somewhere committed a crime.
However, the Oneonta case is also representative and
indicative of the hundreds of indiscriminate and routine
stops and searches that happen to blacks and Latinos in
every U.S. city everyday. A recent report of the New York
Attorney General's office on racial disparities in street
searches by the New York City Police Department provides
more evidence. The study was based on a thorough review of
175,000 documented cases in which individuals were stopped
by the New York police over a 15-month period in 1998-1999.
The study found that African Americans were stopped six
times more often than whites, and Latinos were stopped four
times more frequently than whites. Blacks comprise 25
percent of New York City's total population, but are one
half of all the people police stopped.
Dred Scott is unfortunately still alive and well in
America's racist criminal justice system. Despite all the
legal and legislative reforms, apparently African Americans
still have "no rights whites must respect."
Dr. Manning Marable is Professor of History and Political
Science, and the Director of the Institute for Research in
African-American Studies, Columbia University. "Along the
Color Line" is distributed free of charge to over 325
publications throughout the U.S. and internationally. Dr.
Marable's column is also available on the internet at
www.manningmarable.net.
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