Constitutional rights, or no rights fellow citizens are "bound to respect"?

Chief U.S. Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney once said that African-Americans “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Roger Taney uttered these words as the high court issued its landmark decision in the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford case.

Today the bigotry, akin to Justice Taney’s racist decree, looks like Representative Chuck Bayse commanding fellow U.S. citizens in the Missouri State Capitol to leave his office. Being ordered to leave as a citizen asserting clarity and context for why anti-education bills such as HB 1643 and HB 1457 exist in the first place and how they affect me as a Black parent with a child in the public school system is beneath the office of a public servant.

I am almost certain that if I were a white male, the representative’s visceral and hypersensitive reaction would not have ended with us being kicked out of his office. Matter of fact, after he commanded us to leave, he asked the only male (who was Afro-Puerto Rican) with our group to stay and talk further.

In hindsight, I was not treated as a U.S. citizen as my 14th constitutional amendment rights guarantee, but as one “full of crap” (according to his statement to another local publication) and therefore having no constitutional rights that the state rep. was obligated to respect.

The larger issue for me is this kind of treatment as a means to deter civic engagement among members of groups who’ve been historically disenfranchised, intimidated, terrorized and suppressed from full participation in our American democracy. I come from ancestors who were a part of The Great Migration in the early 20th century escaping the hostile Jim Crow South. They would eventually settle in what would become redlined neighborhoods in Kansas City, where I was born and raised. They had no civil rights rights or any other incentive to be civically engaged with their government that was “of the people, by the people, and for the people” (in the words of Abraham Lincoln) though my great grandfather planted and pastored a church in Kansas City.

If I know better, my ancestors’ political life was wrapped up in their faith life, a place to express their identity as image bearers and assert their activism for civil rights under societal duress. The legacy my relatives left behind compels me to be civically engaged and to encourage others be involved as well. But gosh, no wonder so many remain disengaged.

If the average person knows that contacting their elected officials results in disparaging treatment as a citizen, then why participate? Why not avoid such confrontations with public officials who staunchly dismiss your lived experienced with racism and other forms of systemic exclusion?

But that’s the goal: to suppress participation, to mute your voice, and discourage activism. The popular civil rights era lyrics gives the historically disenfranchised our marching orders: “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around, turn me around, turn me around…keep on a-walkin’, keep on a-talkin.’ Marching into freedom land.”

Monica Horton lives in Springfield.

This article originally appeared on Springfield News-Leader: Constitutional rights or no rights fellow citizens are bound to respect?