Statue of controversial judge gets an addition

FREDERICK, Md.

More than 150 years after the U.S. Supreme Court issued the notorious Dred Scott decision affirming slavery, a Maryland city unveiled a plaque last week to educate visitors about the opinion and the local man who wrote it -- and to quell a local controversy.

The rectangular bronze marker stands on a granite pedestal at Frederick City Hall about eight feet from a stern bust of Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney that has occupied the plaza for nearly 80 years despite calls for its removal.

The plaque is a compromise between residents who wanted the Taney statue gone and those who consider him a great jurist whose racial views reflected the tenor of his times.

Frederick, roughly 50 miles from Washington and Baltimore, has a population of about 59,000, and is about 15 percent black.

Dred Scott and his wife, Harriet, were slaves who sued for their freedom after they were taken from the slave state of Missouri into territory where slavery had been prohibited by the Missouri Compromise.

Taney practiced law in Frederick from 1801 to 1823. As a Supreme Court justice, he wrote the 1857 decision which said that even freed slaves and their descendants could never be citizens of the United States.

The case became a catalyst for the Civil War.

He based the ruling upon his assertion that when the Constitution was framed, educated whites generally regarded "negroes" as "beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race."

The 7-2 decision also held that Congress had no authority to prohibit slavery in new territories.

Chief Judge Robert Bell of the Maryland Court of Appeals said Tuesday that the Dred Scott opinion was "the ultimate bad decision," written by a justice who "relied on poor scholarship and weak reasoning."

The ruling, Bell said, "left America in shock and throes and convulsions" that could be cured only by the abolition of slavery.

The plaque's dedication comes 2 1/2 years after some local civil-rights leaders called for the removal of the Taney statue.

Guy Djoken, the president of the Frederick county NAACP, said that the plaque turned out to be a better solution.

By seeing both Taney's face and his words, "children will now have the opportunity to know why this was a problem," Djoken said.