“What message are we sending about how we value human dignity?”Īnother important consideration: Marshall and his descendants had no connection to the law school other than its name. “How do we ask a student to wear Marshall’s name on a sweatshirt or hat or use a coffee cup with his name, with pride?” says Jones. He says the task force felt compelled to consider what preserving the name would mean for today’s African-American students.
“Some of our students thought it was inconceivable that someone could excuse the horrors of slavery or worship a man that so actively engaged in these horrors for most of his adult life.” “Slavery is not just about the buying and selling of slaves, but the rape of women, the killing of babies and the hundreds of years of racial subordination that followed slavery,” says task force head Jones. In a series of four virtual meetings, the task force discovered that many members of the law school community were deeply disturbed by Finkelman’s revelations. Through his Virginia plantations, staffed by hundreds of enslaved people, he became one of the richest people in the state.
Marshall also profited handsomely from slavery. But new scholarship published by Paul Finkelman, a historian and law and policy professor who serves as president of Gratz College in Melrose Park, Pennsylvania, has made clear that Marshall was also a vicious racist who wrote opinions in favor of slavery in at least 15 cases before the Court.
0 kommentar(er)
