The United States Supreme Court has served as the ultimate arbiter of legal disputes in the country. Until fairly recently, most Americans have either ignored it, or honored its authority.
Recently, the statue of Supreme Court Justice Roger B. Taney, who wrote the infamous Dred Scott decision, was removed from the grounds of the Maryland State House in 2017.
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Jonathan Daniel Wells’ The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War exposes the role of Wall Street, powerful judges, politicians, lawyers and police officers in kidnapping African-Americans and sending them South to enslavement, showing the way that New York’s powerful kept slavery and the slave trade alive.
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Showtime’s The Good Lord Bird uses the events around John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry to weave a fictional tale incorporating some basic insights and arguments about the nature of race in America. It did its most impressive work in presenting the wide spectrum of diverse African American responses to slavery and, in the process, offering a better sense of their humanity.
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Our series of interviews with authors of new books in labor and working-class history continues with Alexandra Finley, author of the new book An Intimate Economy: Enslaved Women, Work, and America’s Domestic Slave Trade, which UNC Press published this month.
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At the recent LAWCHA conference here in Washington, D.C., I was among those applauding heartily when Empire of Cotton: A Global History, Sven Beckert’s sweeping study, received the Philip Taft Labor History Book Award. It’s worth taking a look at how the “empire,” carries on today, as Beckert asserts.
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Reflections about the importance of workers power in American aspirations seem particularly appropriate at the approach of this President’s Day–that holiday formed by the compressed birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and George Washington. In my life, I cannot recall when they’ve ritually chanted their rhetoric about opportunities in circumstances as dire as these for working people.
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