March 6 Birthday
On March 6, 1857, the Supreme Court decided Dred Scott v. Sandford. Scott, an enslaved man, had sued for his freedom on the grounds that he had lived in free territories. The Court, led by Chief Justice Roger Taney, ruled against Scott and went further, declaring that no person of African descent — free or enslaved — could ever be a US citizen. The decision also invalidated the Missouri Compromise, holding that Congress could not ban slavery in the territories. The opinion was 7-2. Taney wrote that African Americans had "no rights which the white man was bound to respect." The decision inflamed the abolitionist movement, destroyed the Court's credibility, and pushed the nation closer to civil war. Scott was freed by his owner three months after the decision and died of tuberculosis a year later. The Dred Scott decision is widely considered the worst Supreme Court ruling in American history. Michelangelo Buonarroti was born on this day in 1475 in Caprese, Tuscany. He sculpted the Pieta at twenty-three and the David at twenty-nine. He painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling between 1508 and 1512, lying on his back on a scaffold sixty feet in the air, paint dripping into his eyes. He wrote that after four years of this, he could not read except by holding the paper above his head. He considered himself a sculptor, not a painter, and considered the Sistine commission a punishment imposed by Pope Julius II. He lived to be eighty-eight, outliving most of his contemporaries and rivals. His last sculpture, the Rondanini Pieta, was unfinished at his death — he was still working on it at the age of eighty-eight. Gabriel García Márquez, born this day in 1927 in Aracataca, Colombia, was raised by his grandparents. His grandmother told him ghost stories; his grandfather told him war stories. One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) tells the history of the fictional town of Macondo through seven generations of the Buendía family. It sold 50 million copies in 30 languages. He won the Nobel Prize in 1982. He invented the town of Macondo, but readers from across Latin America recognized it as their own. That is what magical realism is — not fantasy, but the recognition that reality in Latin America is already strange enough. In 1899, the Bayer company registered "Aspirin" as a trademark with the Imperial Patent Office in Berlin. The active ingredient, acetylsalicylic acid, had been synthesized by Felix Hoffmann, a Bayer chemist, in 1897. The name combined "a" for acetyl, "spir" for spirea (a plant containing salicylic acid), and "in" as a suffix. Bayer lost the trademark after World War I as part of the Treaty of Versailles, and aspirin became a generic term in many countries. It remains the most widely used drug in the world — 100 billion tablets are consumed annually. People born on March 6 fall under the zodiac sign of Pisces. The birthstone is Aquamarine and the birth flower is Daffodil. Historical events on March 6 include 1857: Supreme Court rules in Dred Scott case that African Americans cannot be US citizens, 1853: Verdi's La Traviata premieres at La Fenice in Venice, 1899: Bayer registers "Aspirin" as a trademark. Famous people born on March 6 include Michelangelo (1475), Gabriel García Márquez (1927), Rob Reiner (1947).