Several Saturdays ago, Diane and I went to Calvary Cemetery in St. Louis. It’s old, founded in 1854, and it’s big, some 300,000 graves. We had learned that some of Diane’s ancestors were buried there, so we went to find their resting places (the dates you go on when you get older!), but while we were there we found the graves of other famous people. One of them is Dred Scott.
In a case that arose from Dred Scott’s contested freedom, the Supreme Court ruled in 1857 that blacks are “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” How terrible was that?
Yesterday was Constitution Day, commemorating the day in 1787 when 12 state delegations to the constitutional convention ratified the new constitution. Many authors of the Constitution were troubled by slavery but knew practically that it couldn’t be eliminated immediately. Hence articles, like Article 1, section 9, undermined slavery and anticipated its eventual abolition. But that didn’t happen until the Civil War. After the Civil War, Amendment XIV declared, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States…are citizens of the United States.” It was slow in coming, and justice for all is still a goal.
Because the Articles of Confederation weren’t working, the founders wrote their Constitution “to form a more perfect Union, (and) establish Justice” (Preamble). Practicing love for our neighbor is God’s command for His people, and love in action for all people is how we Christians contribute toward “a more perfect Union.” “We are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Ephesians 2:10). Mr. Scott, we’re still working at justice for all, still struggling for “a more perfect union.”
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