A Freed-Woman Had No Rights That a Chickasaw or Choctaw Man Had to Respect
It is interesting how inspiration can come to you when you want to express yourself, whether in words or pictures; at least that is how it works for me. Just this morning I was going to turn off the television in the bedroom because my wife had fallen asleep with some program on that caught my attention.
I can’t tell you much about the program or the name of the documentary that was running but what caught my attention was the phrase, “a black man has no rights that a white man is bound to respect.”
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| The Liberator June 12, 1857 |
Many may have heard the quote before and probably just as many may have not heard it or where it comes from? It was familiar to me because I heard it in regards to the Dred Scott case of an enslaved man suing his enslaver for his freedom prior to the War of the Rebellion.
The case was a major blow to the abolition of slavery in this country and it spoke to the manner in which justice in this country has been central to its politics and laws. You may ask, what does this has to do with Indian Territory, Chickasaw and Choctaw Freedmen and I would go as far as to claim it has significance to the two-thousand people involved in Equity Case #7071, Bettie Ligon v Douglass H. Johnson, Green McCurtain and James R. Garfield, Secretary of the Interior filed April 13, 1907.
I have always taken the position that wisdom comes to you when you are ready for it and after reading the recent article by my colleague and friend Angela Walton-Raji on the one-hundred and tenth-year anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling to dismiss Equity Case #7071 because attorney Webster Ballinger failed (deliberately) to file a necessary brief for the case to be heard before the justices of the Supreme Court.
Well legal scholars reviewing the Dred Scott case considered the Supreme Court’s decision written by Roger Taney to be so flawed and “arguably the worst he ever wrote.” In an article posted on Britannica.com it further wrote, “he ignored precedent, distorted history, imposed a rigid rather than flexible construction on the Constitution, ignored specific grants of power in the Constitution and tortured meanings out of other, more-obscure clauses. His logic on the citizenship issue was perhaps the most convoluted.”
Having researched, studied and written about Equity Case #7071 for the past 20 or 30 years I see clearly how the Dawes Commission, the United States government, the Chickasaw Nation and the Choctaw Nation tore a page out of the Dred Scott decision when they continually denied citizenship to the approximate two-thousand individuals seeking citizenship by blood status and their fair share of three hundred-twenty acres based on their lineal descent of a “recognized citizen” of the Chickasaw or Choctaw nation.
The women who gave birth to children of Chickasaw and Choctaw men only to have those children denied citizenship proved again, just fifty-four years after the Dred Scott decision that a “Black Woman Had No Rights that the Chickasaw or Choctaw Nation was Bound to Respect.”
From 1896 when the first applications for citizenship were filed to the abandonment of the 2,000 individuals by their attorney Webster Ballinger in March of 1911, who decided to no longer pursue his legal theory on lineal descent being the issue for citizenship in favor of representing “real Indians” that deserved citizenship, proved that these women, these men and these children had no rights that this country’s judicial system was bound to respect.
So here we are 164 years after the Dred Scott decision and 110 years after one man, Webster Ballinger, and the Chickasaw and Choctaw Nations continue to not respect the rights of thousands of people who were entitled to receive citizenship and their 320 acres of land based on treaties, laws, customs and precedents.
* It is curious to me why Webster Ballinger made an appearance at the court but the attorneys for the tribes and United States did not?
Ballinger agreed to give an interview and discuss his "rationale" for abandoning his legal theory in March of 1911, nine months before the case was to be heard. Did the other parties in the suit already have assurances he would not file that brief and saw no need to appear before the highest court in the country?
