Stevens could not eliminate American racism, but that was not his aim. He wanted to topple as many of its supports as he could and link it to a failed past. The doctrine of a “white man’s government” was a sibling of deceased Chief Justice Roger Taney’s ruling in the Dred Scott decision that black men 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.” That “infamous sentiment,” Stevens said with characteristic bluntness, had
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