Monument of Roger B. Taney
who served as chief justice of the United States from 1836 to 1864, is best known as the author of Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), the notorious case which said that black Americans have "no rights which the white man was bound to respect." Blacks "are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word 'citizens' in the Constitution," Taney asserted. At the time of the founding, blacks "had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order." In Taney's view, black Americans were entitled to nothing more than whatever cursory privileges "as those who held the power and the Government might choose to give them." In other words, a number of black Americans were quite literally part of "We the People" at the exact moment when those famous words were enshrined in the Preamble to the Constitution. Taney's toxic interpretation not only violated constitutional text and history, but it retroactively wrote those patriots out of the constitutional system that they helped to found. [1]
Taney told the president that blacks in the United States had only those rights which they were able to “enjoy” at the “sufferance” and “mercy” of whites, and that blacks, “even when free,” were a “degraded class” whose “privileges” were “accorded to them as a matter of kindness and benevolence rather than right.” Later, during the Civil War, Taney did all he could to obstruct Lincoln’s attempts to hold the Union together, and even drafted an opinion in anticipation of an opportunity to strike down the Emancipation Proclamation. Taney were lifelong slaveowners, and the former was personally involved in buying and selling significant numbers of human beings. [2]
https://www.baltimoresun.com/politics/bs-md-taney-statue-removed-20170818-story.html