Honoring Harriet Jacobs – with a luxury hotel?

In the mid-19th century, two Americans shaped the nation’s conscience on slavery from vastly different vantage points. Justice Joseph Story, a towering figure of U.S. constitutional law and a Supreme Court Justice and a Harvard Law professor, denounced slavery as “inhuman” and “repugnant to justice” – yet wrote the Amistad (1841) opinion and that of Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842), the latter affirming the federal government’s authority to enforce the return of fugitive slaves. For him the U.S. Constitution needed to be prioritized over personal and even deeply moral views. Harriet Jacobs, a formerly enslaved woman, was 28 and 29 at the time of these decisions and had hidden for nearly seven years in a 3-foot tall attic crawlspace of her grandmother’s house after escaping bondage, likely lear