“The Life and Witness of Roger Taney and Dred Scott”

WESTMINSTER PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH
February 25th 2007
Rev. Mark R. Bradshaw-Miller
“The Life and Witness of Roger Taney and Dred Scott”
Revelation 3:14-22

During this month we have celebrated a couple of anniversaries which occur in 2007. The first one was the two-hundred and fiftieth anniversary of African Americans membership in the Presbyterian Church. The second was the hundredth anniversary of the first African American Presbyterian congregation; the “First African Presbyterian Church” in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. However, this year is also another anniversary. However, this anniversary is not one we want to celebrate. This year, in fact next month, marks the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision on the Dred Scott case. Since this event will put Saint Louis in the spotlight, we must face the question: What is the enduring legacy of something many people would simply like to forget? In order to understand the legacy of the Dred Scott decision, we must spend a few moments revisiting this period in American history.
In looking at this landmark decision, I want to focus two people involved in the case. This first is Dred Scott who was born into slavery in 1795 in Virginia. In 1830 the family who owned Dred Scott moved to Saint Louis, MO. Shortly after their move, the family sold Dred Scott to Dr. John Emerson because they needed money. When Dr. Emerson died, Dred Scott sued the widow of Emerson for his freedom. Dred Scott won his case in the local court but lost the battle in a Missouri state court.
At the time of the defeat in state court, Dr. Emerson’s widow had remarried. Her new husband was an abolitionist who had convinced her of the moral obligation to release Scott from slavery. However, when the case was lost in state court a strategic decision was made to put a hold on those plans. The goal was to push this case all the way to the Supreme Court. They seemed to believe that the state case would be overturned and a victory gained for the abolitionist movement. However, things turned out different than expected. Roger Taney, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, surprised all by his ruling. But before we get to the decision, let us turn to the person of Roger Taney.
Roger Taney was born in 1777 to a wealthy slave-holding family in Maryland. His rise to the highest court in the land was almost derailed by the objections of Henry Clay, John Calhoun, and even Daniel Webster. However, despite their objections Taney was confirmed and served the second longest tenure of any chief of the court. Despite a number of memorable opinions on the court, he is most commonly known for his opinion on Scott case. And, when many in the abolitionist movement expected a victory in the Scott case, they were shocked by the outcome.
Using what some have called a ‘strict constructionist’ reading of the constitution, Taney came to the conclusion that the, “Constitution permitted unrestricted ownership of black slaves by white U.S. citizens.” Not only this, but he ruled the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional and as such permitted and encouraged the expansion of slavery in the new territories. Finally, and most shocking, was the decision that slaves and even free blacks could not be full U.S. citizens. As such, they had no right to sue in federal court. Despite loosing the case, Dred Scott was released from slavery. He spent the remaining part of his life here in Saint Louis, a free man but not a citizen of the United States.
While it would be easy and understandable to believe Roger Taney was pro-slavery through and through, it would be wrong. Surprising as it may seem, in his private writings he wrote about the evils of slavery. He believed that the institution needed to come to an end. However, Taney believed that the Federal Courts did not have the jurisdiction and that it was an issue of state’s rights. Taney believed that the end of slavery, the institution he believed was evil, would have to be ended through moderate steps so as not to cause social unrest. In fact, Taney actually believed that his decision would help to bring calm to a divided nation. It turns out, that he could not have been more wrong.
It may seem odd to mention the life and witness of Roger Taney in the same breath with that of Dred Scott. In fact, it may even seem reckless on my part. After all, Roger Taney was not only on the wrong side of history, but he foolishly believed that slavery would be brought to an end without a struggle. However, we must include him because Taney’s decision and his calls for moderation were not unique in the history of our nation. In fact, the call for moderation and the belief that slavery would end without social unrest was part the nations’ history since its founding.
Many of the founders of the nation believed that slavery should come to an end. However, instead of acting on their beliefs in decisive ways, they compromised their beliefs. And it is true whenever people have sought to remove the bonds of oppression. The call for moderation in the face of oppression is, like it or not, part of our national narrative. It is one which we might prefer to forget but it is ours nonetheless. While the anniversary of the Dred Scott decision brings this back into our national consciousness, it is not the only example in our nations’ history.
Nowhere in our history has this reality been brought to light than with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. letter from a Birmingham Jail. While his letter is quite powerful we must remember that it was written in response to a statement known as; “A Call for Unity.” It was written and signed by eight clergymen from different faith communities. Throughout the one page statement from the clergymen was a call for moderation on the part of those seeking justice. While history allows us the opportunity to condemn those on the wrong side of justice we must take a moment to remember that these clergymen were not too different from many of us. The eight clergy were not rabid segregationists, they were a moderate group comprised of; The Bishop of Alabama, the Auxiliary Bishop, Diocese of Mobile, Birmingham, the Rabbi from Temple Emanu-El, Birmingham, the Alabama Bishop of the Alabama-West Florida Conference, the Bishop of the North Alabama Conference of the Methodist Church, the Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Alabama Pastor, a pastor from First Baptist Church, Birmingham, Alabama and finally the Moderator, Synod of the Alabama Presbyterian Church in the United States. These church leaders were not members of the Klan but people of “good will” who believed that the moderate course was the best course for justice.
In his letter, Dr. King challenged the right of these men to “set the timetable for another man’s freedom.” Yet, even as Dr. King challenged these church leaders, he believed they were men of good will who simply could not undertand the suffering they were asking others to endure for the sake of law and order. His letter brought to light, for his time, the reality that the greatest hindrance to justice is not those of ill will, but those who will not act decisively in the in the face of injustice. As we prepare to come face to face with the anniversary of the Dred Scott decision let us remember this lesson from our history.
As a people of faith let us also remember the challenge to the privileged church in Laodicea who had become lukewarm in the faith journey because of their privileges positions. Like Roger Taney who believed slavery was evil but chose moderation over decisive action or the Alabama Clergymen who chose law and order over justice, we too are not immune for the risks and challenges inherent in the places of our privilege. May God give us ears to hear the knock of Christ who stands at the door and invites us to become extreme for the ways of God! And as the scripture says: “Let anyone who has an ear to listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches.” Amen.

“The Life and Witness of Lucy Craft Laney”

WESTMINSTER PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH
February 18th 2007
Rev. Mark R. Bradshaw-Miller
“The Life and Witness of Lucy Craft Laney”
Deuteronomy 6:1-14

I believe it is impossible to measure the impact of a teacher upon lives of his or her students. I say this not to flatter the many professional educators in our midst but because it is true. I am sure the each one of us remembers those teachers who have impacted our lives. Some of these teachers have been professional educators but there are many other teachers who have taught us important life lessons. Parents, grandparents, family and even the family of faith have an important role to play in the lives of children. They look to us for guidance and direction. Each child is affected by the way we nurture them and welcome them in the family of faith.
Historically, in North American churches, the role of education is something which was often done by an apparatus of the state. Most commonly this was done in the schools. As our public education system came into being, it used the protestant interpretations of the bible to guide moral teaching. While this worked well for those in the protestant churches, it proved rather detrimental when our privileged system came to an end. Many of us in the church are simply unprepared to take on the role of passing along the stories of faith and our faith to the next generation. The fight over how to respond to the “taking God out of school,” is one for which I am not interested. I am not interested because as we wage this fight the next generation of our children is left to fend for themselves. It is those of us in the church that bears the responsibility of nurturing faith in all children with whom we can have an impact. Unless we take up this challenge our children will be unable to claim faith in Jesus Christ and the stories of our faith for themselves.
This morning we come face to face with an educator who took this challenge to heart. In time when education was simply unavailable to her people, she did whatever it took to educate the children with whom she had contact. Lucy Craft Laney was born on April 13th 1854 in Macon Georgia. Though it was eleven years before the end of slavery, Lucy was born free. Her father, the Reverend David Laney, a noteworthy Presbyterian minister and carpenter had purchased his families freedom before her birth.
Throughout her life, Lucy had many teachers. Her parents taught her the importance of dedication, hard work and generosity towards all people, particularly to those in need. By the time Lucy was four years old, she could read because someone noticed her keen interest in books. Because those around her took notice of her, Lucy’s significant intelligence was nurtured.
By age of nineteen, Lucy Craft Laney graduated with the first class to ever graduate from Atlanta University. After graduation Lucy focused her full attention to teaching. After a few years of moving from town to town, Lucy finally settled in Augusta, Georgia. It was there that she partnered with the Christ Presbyterian Church to form a school. The first year Lucy only had six students and very little money. By all appearances it was a venture that was doomed to fail. However, two years later the school had graduated its first class and had 234 students. In fact, in order to serve all the students seeking an education, a new facility and more money was needed.
The scale of this project meant she would have to find a more suitable partner. That year, Lucy Craft Laney saved all the money she could and paid her way to Minneapolis MN. It was there that she attended the Presbyterian churches General Assembly to ask for their support. While many were moved by her story and the need, the church was faced with a severe lack of funding and as a result, mission funding had to be reduced. However, a collection was taken to cover her traveling expenses.
After returning to Augusta, Lucy received a letter from the president of what is now called; the Presbyterian Women. The woman’s association was so moved by her work and dedication that they sent her a check for ten thousand dollars for Lucy to continue God’s work. She was so moved by this gesture that Lucy named the new school after the head of the Presbyterian Women. In the fall of the next year the Haines Normal School moved to its new location.
As an educator, Lucy Craft Laney was a visionary who pioneered what was known as the total school curriculum. She believed that the basics were important but believed that more was needed in order to develop whole person. The school taught the traditional arts and sciences but also job training and vocational programming. She inculcated, in her students, a sense of responsibility and service. But her work did not end with the Haines Normal School. In fact, Lucy Craft Laney created the first black Kindergarten in Augusta, the first black nursing school in Augusta, and the first football team from a black high school in the state Georgia.
Lucy’s influence was far reaching. It even reached the White House. In the early days of the Haines School, a woman by the name of Mary McCloud Bethune came and worked with her. Bethune was so impressed with Lucy’s dedication and planning, that she moved to Florida and founded the Bethune-Cookman College. Not only is she credited with founding the college, Bethune later became an advisor to president Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Her influence ran from a small school in the basement of a church to the halls of power in this country. It is am impressive story. However, who really knows the untold impact that this one woman had on the lives of so many people simply because she dedicated her life to children.
There is no doubt that education is important. And, the importance of education is critical to any community of faith. We live in a time when the culture does not do this work for us. However, I believe that is a good thing. It our responsibility to be the bearers of our tradition, it is our responsibility to educate all our children. It is up to us, each one of us, to make sure that all the children know the stories of our faith so that they too may claim it as their own. Without us, how will they know that the greatest commandment is this?
You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise.
May the life and witness of Lucy Craft Laney touch each one of us to so that we will do whatever is necessary, whatever is asked of us to be educators for all God’s children. Amen.

The Life and Witness of Henry Highland Garnett

WESTMINSTER PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH
February 11th 2007
Rev. Mark R. Bradshaw-Miller
“The Life and Witness of Henry Highland Garnett”
Luke 6:27-38

2007 is a special year for the Presbyterian Church. It is the two-hundred and fiftieth anniversary of African Americans being members in the Presbyterian Church. This year also marks the two hundredth anniversary of the first African American Presbyterian congregation. The Rev. John Gloucester was the founding pastor of “First African Presbyterian Church” in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Unfortunately this and many other stories of our heritage are not all that well know, inside or outside our denomination. That is why I give thanks for the many people who have educated me and opened my eyes to the many contributions of our fore parents. It is becoming something of a custom for us here at Westminster to celebrate Black or African American History month by lifting up a few of the great cloud of witnesses who have gone before us. So today we continue this tradition and look to one of those witnesses, a Presbyterian Minister the Reverend Henry Highland Garnett.
Henry Highland Garnett was born into slavery in 1815. We know little of his early childhood in Maryland. However, by the time he was nine years old Garnett escaped and went to New York City. A few years arriving in New York he heard about a school in Canaan, New Hampshire called the Noyes Academy. The Noyes Academy was a school founded by Abolitionists that accepted, “colored youth of good character on equal terms with whites of like character.” The practice of the school was to foster equality and not paternalism. It was a lesson which became the driving force behind Reverend Garnett’s life’s work. It was at Noyes where he internalized the idea that all people are created in the image of God and as such slavery could never be compatible with the tenets of the Christian faith.
Looking at all of Garnett’s accomplishments in life it is easy to be highly impressed. He was a contemporary of such well known Abolitionists as Fredrick Douglas and William Lloyd Garrison. Garnett was a main organizer in the successful campaign to desegregate of the New York public transportation system. He is also had the distinction of being the first black person to ever make a speech to the House of Representatives. When he died Garnett was serving this country as its minister to Liberia. Yet, despite all of this and more, most of our history books, even those which actually notice non-European influence often ignore his contribution.
Why is this? Well, this may have had to do with two things. The first is a speech that he gave which was commonly known as An Address to the Slaves of the United States of America. In that speech he said, among other things, “It is in your power so to torment the God-cursed slaveholder that they will be glad to let you go free.” His speech was a call, to slaves, to openly resist slavery by any means necessary. This is not the sort of thing which makes our dominant culture particular comfortable. And, the second reason was proposed by W.E.B. Dubois. Dubois believed that Garnett’s disappearance from the annals of American history and even his rejection by many in the abolitionist movement had less to do with his call to violence and more to do with Garnett’s belief that black people did not need to be saved by white people. Garnett had no problem working alongside white people in the abolitionist work. However, he was unwilling to believe that his brothers and sisters were unable to participate and lead the struggle for their own liberation. As such Garnett’s witness has simply been, dare I say, purposely ignored in many circles.
While a student at the Noyes Academy, Garnett’s significant academic and oratorical skills were nurtured. He was a dedicated student who was able to channel his passion and even anger in logical and persuasive ways. Garnett knew, early in life, that God had called him. But this calling was not just for the work of ministry he knew that God had called him as God’s own child and that he was made in the image of God. It was clear that Garnett was passionate about sharing this message.
Even as a student Garnett begin to get a reputation as something of a radical. Garnett was open about his belief that all people are equal in the eyes of God and as such should be equal in this country. This radical message nearly got the school shut down. It is reported that the local farmers threatened to burn the school down. His gifts and abilities left the impression with all who met or heard this young man that he would make a mark on the world.
By the time that Garnett left school he had all but broken with the dominant ideology of the Abolitionist movement. Garnett believed that the dominant teachings of non-violence and moral suasion were not suitable or even realistic to bring about the end of slavery. (As it turns out, history later proved him right. It took the bloodiest war in America’s history to end the sinful institution of slavery.) Yet, Garnett has bigger goals than just the end of slavery. Ending slavery, by any means necessary, was simply part of his greater mission which was to eradicate, in this country and in his own people, the idea that people of African decent were inherently inferior to those of European decent.
In 1843, Henry Highland Garnett gave a speech at the National Negro Convention. It was that speech for which is most well known. It was a speech which frightened many people. It is an eloquent speech which should be a classic in American oratory. However, his call to resist slavery was destined it to the back page or even the dustbin of history.
In his address Garnett begins by lifting the veil on the atrocities of slavery; the systematic rape, the torture, and murder of millions of people. But then, he ties the struggle for freedom to the very foundation of this nation. Garnett did not believe that the system needed to be overthrown. After all, he said that this system had been created by people who made claims like: “Give me liberty or give me death.” It would logically follow then to say better to die free than live as a slave. When Henry Highland Garnett says: “Die freemen, than live to be slaves,” he is not seen a carrying on the tradition of Patrick Henry, the patron saint of liberty, but a threat to the established order. Despite these arguments, Garnett’s was really building his whole argument upon the simple notion that each human being was made in the image of God. The hunger for liberty in each person is part of that reality and as such anything which stands in the way of liberty is something which stands against the will of God. In fact, he even went on to say that not to resist slavery was a sin.
If, however, we focus only on the issue of resistance and call to rise up, we miss what is driving this call. Garnett was preaching a message of empowerment. He said things like: “Brethren the time has come when you must act for yourselves.” And, “You can plead your own cause, and do the work of emancipation better than any others.” And, he even quotes Lord Byron, “if hereditary bondmen would be free, they must strike the blow.” His speech was not only a call to resist but a call to empowerment and a direct challenge to the paternalistic leanings of many abolitionists. In fact, even as Garnett calls for resistance it is clear he does not seek to set the agenda for resistance. He makes it clear that each person is going to have to decide the best course for resistance. Even in his call to resistance he is seeking empowerment.
Garnett believed or at least hoped he would be supported by the convocation in this position. Before the vote was cast Garnett engaged Fredrick Douglas in a debate with Douglas rejecting Garnett’s call. When the vote was finally taken Garnett only lost by only one vote. Who knows, if not for that one vote, maybe it is Fredrick Douglas that is relegated to the back burner of history?
At some point, by now, I assume that most of you have had to think: “How does this line up with Jesus teaching about offering the other check?” Well, despite initial appearances, I have come to believe that Garnett’s teaching and this passage are not really opposed to one another. After all, Garnett’s goal was not simply to bring freedom. His goal was to empower those who had been enslaved and to help them to resist any attack upon the image of God in each person. How does this fit with the scripture from Luke? Let’s take a closer look.
When Jesus teaches to offer the other check he is also teaching empowerment. He was working to provide dignity to an oppressed people in a specific people at a specific time. The entire passage is not about being a doormat but about claiming what little power they could. In ancient Israel they were revolutionary and empowering actions which have too often been used in modern times as tools to keep people in chains. Using this passage from Luke to keep people oppressed is a message simply contrary to the message of the gospel.
The life and witness of Reverend Henry Highland Garnett is a powerful one. His deep faith in God and belief that each person bore the image of God guided him his whole life long. Garnett believed that active resistance was necessary to end the greatest evil that the world has ever known. Yet, at no point did he ever preach hatred toward slave-owners. In fact, he even worked for their transformation and hoped that the nation would repent and turn around from this evil. Reverend Garnett was able to channel his passion, and anger toward positive social change and the empowerment of those who suffered the most. His legacy is not only worth remembering but is one which calls us to act and even resist all the places in our world which deny the image of God in all people. So let the witness Henry Highland Garnett be a challenge to each one of us to do just that. Amen.