Free Republic

A Maryland city has cleared what could be the last obstacle to its plan to rid the City Hall courtyard of a statue of the man who wrote the 1857 Dred Scott decision affirming slavery. Frederick’s Historic Preservation Commission voted 4-1 Thursday to allow the removal of the bust of Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney, and a nearby bust of Maryland’s first governor, Thomas Johnson, who owned slaves. City officials say both will go to nearby Mount Olivet Cemetery, where Johnson is buried. …

Analysis of an almost-150-year-old U.S. Supreme Court decision — the Dred Scott case — is important because it helps answer a contemporary question, said Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy: "Why are black people so angry?" Part of the answer is the racism inherent in the foundation of our government, he said, and it's not a historical artifact. "Do we still live in a pigmentocracy? Yeah, we live in a pigmentocracy," Kennedy said Thursday night. "Until it is a (case) that one can read and feel that it is repudiated, it will continue to have . . . a certain potency."...