Wake of Echoes

SLAVERY & NAZIS In 1787, Constitutional Convention delegates came to a " Three-Fifths " compromise when deciding how many representatives each state should be allowed in the U.S. House of Representatives. Southern states wanted to count their slaves. Northern states didn't think they should. Thus the three-fifths rule that said each slave could be counted as three-fifths of a human being . Seventy years later, in 1857, a slave named Dred Scott petitioned to buy his freedom because his owners had moved from a slavery state to a free state. In what is largely seen as the most horrendous ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, the court said that residing in a free state did not entitle Scott to his freedom and that, furthermore, African Americans were not and never could be citizens of the United States .  Roughly seventy years after that, Adolf Hitler was rising to power in Germany, espousing the idea that some races are inferior to others, including blacks and Je...