Dred Scott is buried 2 miles from where Mike Brown was murdered in Ferguson. Philando Castile is buried there, too. In 1875, the SCT said "blacks had no rights which the white man was bound to respect." While overruled, its logic still infects our society today. 🧵 1/10
SCT: Black people "might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery. He was bought and sold and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever profit could be made by it." Prison slavery is legal. We cage more than any country---mostly Black & brown ppl. 2/10
If you treated every state as an individual country and compared their incarceration rates to the rest of the world, the thirty-three highest rates of incarceration are in the US. We are the world leader in mass incarceration, imprisoning more than China, Russia, and Iran. 3/10
While he was jailed in St. Louis County, the Sheriff "rented" Dred Scott and his wife, keeping their wages for St. Louis. In Ferguson, where Mike Brown was murdered, made $2.6M by arresting & caging Black people. 4/10 npr.org/2014/08/25/343…
Philando Castile was stopped 46 times in 14 years by police and was fined $6000 before being killed by police. Castile, who was from St. Louis, Missouri, was living in St. Louis County, Minnesota, at the time of his killing. He is buried in the same cemetery as Dred Scott.
5/10
Prison labor is slavery, generating $2 billion/yr. 6/10
The criminal legal system is an industry, creating jobs and profits from a $182 billion annual investment in perpetuating Dred Scott. 7/10 prisonpolicy.org/reports/money.…
Some of the most well known corporate brands profit from prison labor. 8/10 peoplesworld.org/article/corpor…
When the US and world leader in human caging sought to release a small percentage of people, the Sheriff opposed because he didn't want to lose the free labor it created. 9/10
The Dred Scott decision reflects the founders' assessment of Black people and continues to infect our society. The Constitution sanctioned slavery and the Supreme Court is not here to save us. It should be taught in law school, journalism school, and everywhere else. It 10/10
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