Pulitzer Prize winner Annette Gordon-Reed on race and reality

Gordon-Reed delivers 17th Annual Law and Humanities Distinguished Lecture

By: Kristy Hutchings

Pulitzer Prize winner and Harvard Professor Annette Gordon-Reed

Was Justice Taney Right? The challenging question was the subject of the USC Center for Law, History and Culture’s 17th Annual Distinguished Lecture, featuring Pulitzer Prize winner and Harvard law and history professor, Annette Gordon-Reed.

The center is based jointly at the USC Gould School of Law and the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

Gordon-Reed, best known for her books Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy and The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, is the winner of many awards for excellence in scholarship including the Pulitzer Prize in History, a MacArthur Genius Fellowship, the National Humanities Medal and the National Book Award.

“She is a model of interdisciplinarity,” said Ariela Gross, the John B. and Alice R. Sharp Professor of Law and History at USC Gould, who introduced Gordon-Reed.  “She approaches all of her subjects with sympathy, humility, deep research and a keen critical eye.”

Gordon-Reed with Gould Professor Ariela Gross

On Feb. 21, to a crowd of eager students and faculty, Gordon-Reed addressed the fight for citizenship in the United States, specifically as it relates to the infamous Dred Scott Supreme Court case of 1857.

“The first time I read Dred Scott in law school, I contemplated what Justice Taney was saying about the description of life for African Americans in the United States,” she explained, “I was torn.” Gordon-Reed went on to detail the differences between the legal and cultural questions of the case, arguing that while Justice Taney’s understanding of history and law were not correct, he was right about the attitudes strongly held about African Americans at the time.

“Taney was thinking about the reality. He was saying that the prevailing understanding was that these people belong somewhere else,” she said. That reality, according to Gordon-Reed, was one in which blacks were perceived as ‘chattel,’ excluded from participating in marriage and other cultural institutions, and consistently barred from being considered part of the American community. “There were blacks who were patriots,” explained Gordon-Reed, “and that was not enough to change what had been 200 years of understanding about blacks as outsiders, things that were encoded in law and encoded in the culture.”

Citing her own personal experience growing up in Texas in the 1960s, Gordon-Reed illustrated how the reality of 1857 permeates into a modern one. “I thought about the waiting room that I went to when I was sick,” she said. There was “one side for white people, and one side for black people.” Gordon-Reed explained what it felt like as a child to peek through a window at the nurse’s station, past a line she was not able to cross, and see how much nicer it was. “They even had magazines,” she noted. Meanwhile, the side meant for black people was so small that sometimes sick people were forced to await treatment outside in the cold. “This was the 1960s,” she said, “and the contempt that Taney was describing in that opinion in 1857 was alive and well. It’s alive and well in other places, even today.”

The 17th Annual USC Center for Law, History and Culture Distinguished Lecture drew more than 100 audience members to hear Professor Gordon-Reed.

Despite touching upon the grim historical realities and the ways they continue to have influence today, Gordon-Reed ended her lecture on an inspiring call to action. She explained that while Taney is – and most likely always will be – a controversial figure, it is important that the legal community and society take heed of his words. “We should not write off what he was saying in the hopes of creating a past that is more palatable to us,” she explained. “It ought to be a serious marker for us to think about the work that we have to do today, still.”