Courts

This Supreme Court Justice Absolutely, Positively Should Not Have A Street Named After Him

Get it together, Philly.

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Roger Brooke Taney

Roger B. Taney (Image via Getty)

When lawyers, or maybe more accurately law students, get together and are feeling pedantic, the subject of all-time best and worst Supreme Court justices seems to come up. One justice that is *always* on the worst-of list is Roger Taney.

The author of the Supreme Court’s biggest black eye, Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857), is forever associated with the scourge of slavery and it’s frightfully obvious that in the year of our lord 2023 there should not be tributes to his memory. Remember, this is the guy who wrote Black people were not citizens of the United States, writing, “We think [people of African ancestry] are not, and that they are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word “citizens” in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States…”

And he continued with some wildly racist shit that Americans should — at a minimum — be embarrassed over:

They had for more than a century before been regarded as 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; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery. . . . He was bought and sold, and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever a profit could be made by it. This opinion was at that time fixed and universal in the civilized portion of the white race.

No one who wrote that has any right to be remembered as a positive figure in American history. Congress has gotten the memo, replacing the bust of Taney in the U.S. Capitol with Thurgood Marshall. Baltimore and Annapolis, in Taney’s native Maryland, removed their statutes of the justice in 2017. But yet, for some reason, a street named after Taney still exists in Philadelphia.

What in the actual hell?

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And it’s not like the residents of Taney Street *like* it. As reported by the Philadelphia Citizen, they’ve been working to get the name changed, only to be stymied by the bureaucracy of it all:

For three years, a group of volunteer residents and neighbors of generally charming Taney Street have been trying to change their blocks’ name. The group has surveyed neighbors online. They’ve written letters. They’ve door-knocked galore, and gotten nearly everyone to join team Rename. They’ve taken time away from work and family and themselves … simply to get something done that most everyone believes should be done.

All that’s needed for the change is City Council’s approval — which is all but guaranteed if the three City Council members whose districts encompass Taney Street give the thumbs-up to a new name. Instead, almost inexplicably, folks on City Council and their representatives have repeatedly described the process of renaming Taney Street as “complex,” “not easy,” “unprecedented” and “a Pandora’s box.”

But all of this raises the inevitable question… why IS there a Taney Street in Philly? He never lived there, as the Citizen reports, “No one has unearthed any record of Roger B. Taney doing a damn thing in the 2-1-5. Naming a street for him in 1858 would be like naming a street, I don’t know, Tom Brady Way … in 2019.”

And no one can figure out *why* it was ever named that:

To date, no one involved in this project can say for sure how Taney Street got its name. We do know it was named (well, renamed, from Minor Street) in 1858, one year after Dred Scott, back when Chief Justice Taney was a very famous (infamous) American. Famous for, you know, writing the decision that said an African American, even when he’d moved to a free state, was still not free — a ruling that is considered a major trigger for the Civil War.

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It certainly feels like this trolling move has gone on long enough. But the hoops the city is making the volunteers jump through for the seemingly obvious change is approaching Kafka levels. But as a lifelong New Yorker, it just reinforces my belief about Philly (and acknowledged in the Citizen article) — Philadelphia just can’t have nice things:

“We have done the work here,” says [volunteer Samaya Brown]. “We have gone above and beyond what a typical civic engagement should be.”

Maybe that’s the point. Maybe it’s a case of if the people in charge put up enough obstacles, the people who want change will just drop it. Maybe this is why (again) we Philadelphians can’t have nice things …

“This kind of process definitely deters other efforts to improve our communities,” says [Rename Taney co-founder Ben Keys] … “If Philadelphia is going to be a place that gets things done, it needs to get things like this done.”

Surely even Philly can get their shit together on this one.

Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Mastodon @Kathryn1@mastodon.social.

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