What To Do With Poor Old Roger Brooke Taney?

Once the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court (1836-1884), he is famous or notorious for handing down what is known as the Dred Scott decision in which he declared and thus made authoritative the ruling that African slaves because they were not free at the time the Constitution was created could not be considered then or ever citizens of the United States.  Thus people of African descent had no legal standing in this country, a ruling from which untold misery and privation.  The 13th and14th Amendments overturned the Dred Scott decision, but could only be enacted after several years of bloody Civil War. The 13th Amendment simply bans slavery in the U.S. The 14th amendment states inter alia, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."  A bust of Justice Taney is now up for debate, whether it deserves to be part of the landscape where it sits or should be relegated to a back closet.  I say keep these things our and polished, the same with Calhoun College at Yale University, and in fact I would add more, plaques, for instance, to designate known sites of historic lynchings, plaques in public squares where slave auctions took place, better yet bronze statuary groups a la Rodin's Burghers of Calais.  Somewhere on a roadway there should be similar bronze groupings or some kind of commemoration of the slaves chained together in bands and force marched hundreds of miles as though they were no different than the building materials transhipped across the country creating an economic boom.  I admire the plaques thither and yon in Europe which designate a site where a Partisans was shot or a band of Jews were machine gunned to their deaths.  Europe's suffering is there to see.  History is not necessarily a happy story, and the United States cannot present itself forever as a television commercial where everyone is smiling and everything is coming up roses.  Franklin Delano Roosevelt has statues everywhere commemorating his great role in American life; Chief Justice Taney was also a great mover and shaker who from the bottom of his heart and intellect believed people of African descent could not be citizens.  Millions agreed with him; a war was fought over the idea.  Millions in Nazi Germany believed that all Jews should be exterminated.  Extermination factories still stand to preserve the horror of this perversion that seemed normal to many people at the time.  A people that acknowledges their horrible deeds are closer to cleansing themselves of them than those who hide or deny them