John K. Bollard: Certain people? Common sense?

On Oct. 31, vice presidential candidate J. D. Vance stated, “Somehow it’s fundamentally racist to say, well, we don’t want certain people of certain backgrounds to be in the United States of America. No, it’s just common sense.” My ears immediately perked up, remembering a similar statement by a Massachusetts judge long ago.

On July 6, 1841, Northampton’s own David Ruggles, the renowned civil rights activist, was in a New Bedford courtroom. He had brought a charge of assault and battery against a railroad conductor who had violently thrown him off a train after Ruggles, a Black man, had sat in a car occupied by white passengers. The presiding judge, Henry H. Crapo, had to decide first whether the railroad had the right to make a rule about “certain people of certain backgrounds,” as we might say, forbidding them to sit with white people.

Judge Crapo ruled that the company directors “have such right — the right being implied in the very nature of things and supported by common sense.” And he declared the conductor’s violence to be justified. For almost 200 years since then, Black Americans have continued to fight for the right to travel, to go to school, to work, and to vote as equals without fear.

I simply want to ask, who gets to decide who “certain people” are and declare what “common sense” is?

John K. Bollard

Florence