Today in Labor History May 26, 1857: Dred Scott was freed from slavery. Scott is most well-known because of the infamous Dred Scott Supreme Court decision. He had sued for his family’s freedom, arguing that they had lived four years in the north, where slavery was illegal. The Court ruled 7-2 that people of African descent weren’t U.S. citizens and thus had no standing before the court. Scott’s lawsuit was funded by the children of Peter Blow, who had turned against slavery in the years since their father had sold the Scotts to John Emerson. After the ruling, Emerson’s wife and her new husband, who was an abolitionist, deeded the Scotts back to the Blow children. They manumitted the Scotts on May 26, 1857. However, Dred Scott died from tuberculosis fourteen months later.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #slavery #DredScott #SCOTUS #abolition #africanamerican #BlackMastodon

History’s first US-born pope, whose family history includes both enslaved people & slave owners, delivered the apology in his first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” (Magnificent Humanity), which was released Monday.

#PopeLeo #apology #slavery #Vatican

Anthea Butler, senior fellow at the Koch History Center, Oxford University, said #PopeLeo needed to acknowledge & atone for the Catholic Church’s complicity in historic #slavery if he wanted to credibly “speak to the current issues of technological enslavement.”

“For descendants of enslaved persons, this is once again a much needed apology from the pope,” said Butler….

#PopeLeo XIV made a historic #apology Monday for the role the Holy See played in #slavery & for having failed to condemn it for centuries, calling the #Vatican’s record a “wound in Christian memory.”

Past popes have apologized for Christians’ involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. But no pope had ever publicly acknowledged, much less apologized for, the role that past popes played in giving European sovereigns explicit authority to subjugate & enslave “infidels.”
apnews.com/article/pope-apolog…