The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

by Jemar Tisby

Three years after the Kansas-Nebraska Act passed, the Supreme Court considered the case of a man named Dred Scott. Scott thought he had a good legal case when he sued for his freedom. Born into slavery in Virginia in 1795, Scott had labored for his master in the free state of Illinois and the free territory of Wisconsin. Scott sued when his mistress refused to let him buy his own freedom and that of his wife and daughter. He took the case all the way to the Supreme Court where the justices ruled seven to two against him. Writing the majority opinion, Judge Roger Taney stated that black people were of “an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race.” Taney went on to explain that the Constitution did not have black people in mind when it outlined the rights and duties of citizens. Instead, black people “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”6 This decision effectively closed courts to enslaved blacks. They could not sue for their freedom or pursue justice through the court system, and once again the American legal system had declared black people to be something less than fully human. The Dred Scott decision left no question in the minds of antislavery activists that the federal government, especially under the leadership of President James Buchanan, planned to extend and protect slavery across the growing nation.