Descendant of judge who wrote infamous Dred Scott decision pens a play about where we are now

Writer and actor Kate Taney Billingsley has been thinking a lot about America's racial history and her family's part in it. One of her ancestors had an outsized role.

- MARK KENNEDY AP

Billingsley's great-great-great-great uncle was Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney, who made arguably the worst decision in U.S. Supreme Court history in 1857.

It was Taney who ruled that African Americans could not be citizens as part of the infamous Dred Scott decision, named after an enslaved man who unsuccessfully sought his freedom. The ruling helped set the nation on a path toward war.

"I inherited this generational trauma in the family," Billingsley says. The decision was overturned by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution after the Civil War, granting citizenship to all those born in the United States, regardless of race.

Right about the time of Black Lives Matter protests, Billingsley decided to confront that trauma the only way she knew how — turning it into theater.

"I sat down to write this dramatic question that had been in my family for many, many years, which was, 'Should we apologize to the Scott family for what our ancestor did?'"

What emerged is the thrilling play "American Rot" about the modern-day fictional meeting of descendants on both sides of the Dred Scott decision in a diner off the New Jersey Turnpike. It makes its world premiere this month off-offBroadway at La MaMa's Ellen Stewart Theatre.