Worse and Better Days Ahead

In 1857, the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision was issued by the SCOTUS, with the majority decision being penned by Chief Justice Roger Taney. It stated in no uncertain terms that people of African descent could not be citizens of the United States, that they were property, and that Congress had no authority to regulate such property in the northern reaches of the Louisiana Purchase.
On January 1, 1863, a mere six years later, President Abraham Lincoln issues the war measure known as the Emancipation Proclamation that legally freed all slaves in states in rebellion. While it did nothing to aid the plight of those black people in border states like Maryland and Delaware, and was symbolic in nature since the states in rebellion were not under Federal control as of the date of the act, it set the stage for Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in 1865, that made slavery illegal throughout all of the United States.
Eight years.
Eight years span the difference between the Dred Scot decision marking black people as property and the Thirteenth Amendment that granted full emancipation across the United States, and the amendments that followed granting suffrage to all males and specifically including black men, and established equal protection under the law.
I imagine that the moment of Dred Scott’s announcement felt a lot like what it feels like today, living in a United States dominated by the flurry of orders from the White House that are discriminatory, racist, fascist, bigoted, and frankly, just grotesque. Trump and his regime are putting into action orders that are violating the civil rights and civil liberties of Americans, and more dreadfully, the very human rights of people in the US who are the most vulnerable.
He’s threatened friends and allies. He’s spuriously tried to rename the Gulf of Mexico and Mount Denali. He’s suggested that it is in America’s best interests to invade Greenland and annex it. He’s overseen the dismantling of Federal DEI programs seeking to ensure equitable treatment of minoritized groups– an act echoed by corporations that had no need to do so and have shown their true colors in the process. He’s released violent criminals onto the streets because they supported him in his first bid to overthrow the constitutional government of the country. And that’s just the literal tip of the iceberg. It strikes me as likely that this is an active effort to bury us in outrage and make fighting back against their authoritarian and fascist actions seem impossible.
But… eight years. And it’s not impossible.
Eight years between “black people can never be citizens” to “black people are citizens, can vote, and are afforded equal protections under the law.”
I know. It feels like an eternity. And in the era of the 24 hour news cycle, it rather is– at least by comparison. Likewise, I am well aware that the fight for the promises of the 13th through 15th Amendments continued through the Civil Rights era right up to today– when we may well need to fight those same battles all over again. But we can fight. And if we allow history to be our guide, in the end, we will win.
The historian in me feels like the Trump era will be a black spot in American history, like the suppression of Shays’ Rebellion in 1787, the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, the Indian Removal Act of 1830, Dred Scott, The War of the Rebellion from 1861-5, the failure of Reconstruction to remediate the south, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the actions of the Massachusetts government against the Bread and Roses Strike of 1912, the Sedition Act of 1918, MacArthur’s decimation of the Bonus March in 1932, the Nazi-affiliated German-American Bund and its successors, the original Klan and its successors, the Indian Wars forcing natives onto reservations– concentration camps by other name, the imprisonment in concentration camps of Japanese American citizens during WWII, the McCarthy hearings…
The list goes on and on.
I don’t think it’s surprise the reactionary right doesn’t want these things taught in classrooms, either. They show that the US government can and does do wrong. It has committed terrible acts. And they have been and can be resisted. And should be. It’s in the best interests of the nation and its people, regardless what Trump and his oligarchs desire.
It might take eight years.
There will be darker times before the dawn.
But an immutable fact is that dawn will come.
Never give up hope.
Never stop fighting.
I close with a quote that has rung true for me for decades, and seems all the more poignant now.
“G’Quon wrote, “There is a greater darkness than the one we fight. It is the darkness of the soul that has lost its way. The war we fight is not against powers and principalities; it is against chaos and despair. Greater than the death of flesh is the death of hope, the death of dreams. Against this peril we can never surrender. The future is all around us, waiting, in moments of transition, to be born in moments of revelation. No one knows the shape of that future or where it will take us. We know only that it is always born in pain.””
Posted on January 28th, 2025 by Jay Law
Filed under: History, Politics