“The question is simply this: can a negro whose ancestors were imported into this country and sold as slaves become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution of the United States, and as such become entitled to all the rights, and privileges, and immunities, guaranteed by that instrument to the citizen, one of which rights is the privilege of suing in a court of the United States in the cases specified in the Constitution? . . . It is the judgment of this court that it appears . . . that the plaintiff in error is not a citizen . . . in the sense in which that word is used in the Constitution.”
United States Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, Dred Scott v. Sandford, 1857
Which of the following invalidated the decision in the excerpt?
The Fourteenth Amendment
The 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1868, invalidated the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Dred Scott v. Sandford case excerpted here.
Specifically, the 14th Amendment stated:
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
This directly repudiated the Dred Scott decision by establishing that all persons born in the United States, including formerly enslaved Black people and their descendants, are citizens entitled to the protections of the Constitution.
The 14th Amendment overruled the racist reasoning used by Chief Justice Taney, who ruled that people of African descent could never become U.S. citizens, even if free. By constitutionally defining citizenship to include all persons born in the U.S., it struck down Dred Scott’s denial of citizenship to Black Americans.
So in granting birthright citizenship and equal protection under the law to all U.S-born people, the 14th Amendment invalidated and nullified the Dred Scott ruling which had upheld the denial of citizenship rights to Black people based solely on race.