March 6

Anne Braden, Dr. Alice Woodby McKane, and the Dredd Scott decision

Author

David Barnhart
March 06, 2025

2008. Own photo.

On this day in 1857, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Dredd Scott v. Sandford that the US Constitution did not confer citizenship on Black people. Scott and his family had lived in free states and his daughter had been born outside of a slave state, but Chief Justice Taney’s convoluted and white supremacist reasoning not only prevented him from buying his family’s freedom, but set the stage for the Civil War. In some ways, this injustice was an accelerator for the freedom that would be bought with blood.

Today marks the death, in 2006, of Anne Braden, a white journalist and civil rights activist who grew up in Anniston, Alabama. She remembered first expressing her belief in civil rights at her Episcopal youth group, but experienced a conversion to activism as a journalist while covering marches in Birmingham. She and her husband bought a house for a Black family in a segregated neighborhood in Louisville in 1954, but the house was later bombed (thankfully, while the family, Charlotte and Andrew Wade, were away). Though the white supremacists who carried out the bombing were never brought to justice, she and other white allies were charged with sedition—a reminder that the Powers that Be will often turn a blind eye to terrorist violence, but rush to punish social activism.  

Today also marks the passing, in 1948, of Dr. Alice Woodby McKane, a physician and early Black civil rights leader in Savannah, Georgia. She and her husband Cornelius McKane opened a school of nursing, founded Charity Hospital in Savannah, and established a hospital and school of nursing in Monrovia, Liberia. Their teamwork and efforts in health and justice both in the United States and in Liberia affected generations of people.

Reflection: 

The men who pulled the triggers that killed 5 people here on the streets of Greensboro are dangerous men who must be brought to justice. But they are not the cause of our problem, they are the result. The real danger today comes from the people in high places, from the halls of congress to the board rooms of our big corporations, who are telling the white people that if their taxes are eating up their paychecks, it’s not because of our bloated military budget, but because of government programs that benefit black people; those people in high places who are telling white people that if young whites are unemployed it’s because blacks are getting all the jobs. Our problem is the people in power who are creating a scape goat mentality. That, that is what is creating the climate in which the Klan can grow in this country and that is what is creating the danger of a fascist movement in the 1980s in America.

Anne Braden also wrote:

In every age, no matter how cruel the oppression carried on by those in power, there have been those who struggled for a different world. I believe this is the genius of humankind, the thing that makes us half divine: the fact that some human beings can envision a world that has never existed.

Prayer: Creator, we reflect your divinity in our imagination of a new world and new social possibilities. Help us to persist in dreaming and working for it. Amen.