CHICAGO, IL — Less than four miles from the intersection where Mike Brown was killed—a ten-minute drive down Florissant Ave—is the Calvary Cemetery in St. Louis, where Dred Scott is buried. Visitors have left pennies on his grave—Lincoln faces up—for good luck.
Dred Scott was a slave who sued for his freedom in 1846. Over the course of a decade his case made its way up from local Missouri courts to the Supreme Court, which ruled that Scott, as a slave, “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” The court also moved to expand slavery throughout the nation, catalyzing the American Civil War.
History, it seems, is like a spiral, cycling but moving forward at the same time. (Perhaps this is the meaning of “revolution.”) Every socially necessary cause offers a vision of liberation for which people are willing to struggle, advancing society to a certain stage and setting conditions for the next climactic point, where history repeats itself on a higher level.
Our past, present, and future are inseparably intertwined. Today, it seems, the ghost of Dred Scott is appealing his case, in Ferguson and across the nation. His name has become synonymous with the names Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell, Dominique Franklin, Eric Garner, Oscar Grant, Roshad McIntosh, Ezell Ford, Rekia Boyd, Tanesha Williams, Desean Pittman, and countless others.
With those lost lives in mind, let us consider these words from Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address:
“It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion . . . that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
If we are to take seriously Lincoln’s words, we must ask ourselves: are not the names mentioned above casualties of essentially the same war the slaves fought? And was not that war in a sense a continuation of the Revolutionary War—fought for a vision of “a new birth of freedom?”
The protestors in the #BlackLivesMatter movement are in a very real sense suing for their freedom: asserting that all of our lives matter; that we have rights which the law ought to respect.
But the government acts otherwise. The militarization of the police and the bolstering of the prison industry show that the ruling class is not interested in addressing the systemic roots of the problem, but only in containing inevitable social upheaval, made more imminent by school and clinic closings, water-shutoffs, and mass-privatization of the public sector. It is clear: the people now have no rights which corporations are bound to respect.
The spiral of revolution has brought us here, and what was once our vision is now our cause: “Government of the people, by the people, for the people . . . ”
I see no progress. 🙁