Fourteenth Amendment Quotes

Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments—the ones abolishing slavery and guaranteeing citizenship rights—still exist, but they’ve been so weakened by custom, by Congress and the various state legislatures, and by recent Supreme Court decisions that they don’t much matter.

Very soon after the Fourteenth Amendment became law, the Supreme Court began to demolish it as a protection for blacks, and to develop it as a protection for corporations.

...pointed out that the corporation enjoys the same rights as a living person under the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. This concept was upheld in 1886 by the Supreme Court in 'Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company' and has been a fact of law ever since. I emphasized to those executives that the corporation should also be required to accept the same responsibilities as those expected of a person; it too should be a good citizen, an honorable, ethical member of the community. In the case of international corporations, that community has to be defined as the world.

In 1937, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black would observe, with grim dismay, that, over the course of fifty years, “only one half of one percent of the Fourteenth Amendment cases that came before the court had anything to do with African Americans or former slaves, while over half of the cases were about protecting the rights of corporations.

The idea was there from the beginning: equality. And yet you can read every page of your pocket Constitution and you will not find, in the original Constitution, the word equal, or equality, even though equality was a main theme of the Declaration of Independence. The word equal becomes a part of the Constitution in the Fourteenth Amendment.

Frederick Douglass called Republicans the ‘Party of freedom and progress,’ and the first Republican president was Abraham Lincoln, the author of the Emancipation Proclamation. It was the Republicans in Congress who authored the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments giving former slaves citizenship, voting rights, and due process of law. The Democrats on the other hand were the Party of Jim Crow. It was Democrats who defended the rights of slave owners. It was the Republican President Dwight Eisenhower who championed the Civil Rights Act of 1957, but it was Democrats in the Senate who filibustered the bill.

The Fourteenth Amendment repudiated the prewar Dred Scott decision by declaring that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States” were citizens. It also seemed to make a powerful statement for racial equality, severely limiting “states’ rights”: No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

According to the legal historian Akhil Reed Amar, before the enactment of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1868, “the Supreme Court never—not once—referred to the 1792 decalogue as ‘the’ or ‘a’ bill of rights.

How do you legally privilege white men as a 'ruling race' in a land in which the written Constitution - and quite explicitly the Fourteenth Amendment - guarantees equal protection of the law to all, regardless of skin color?

The Fourteenth Amendment was not only revolutionary in its own time. Birthright citizenship remains extremely rare even today. No Asian country grants it. No European country grants it. In fact, the United States is one of only a very few developed nations to recognize birthright citizenship (Canada is another). If anything, the trend is in the opposite direction. France eliminated birthright citizenship in 1993; Ireland, in 2005; New Zealand, in 2006.

Thomas, and the rest of the conservatives, absolutely believe substantive due process exists; they just think the Fourteenth Amendment is hiding rights for businesses they think are people, instead of minorities they wish were not.

The Republican Congress shelved a civil rights bill, and, in May 1872, it enacted an amnesty law that restored full political rights to the vast majority of ex-Confederates who had been barred from office under a special provision of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments—the ones abolishing slavery and guaranteeing citizenship rights—still exist, but they’ve been so weakened by custom, by Congress and the various state legislatures, and by recent Supreme Court decisions that they don’t much matter.

Americans had to work around the requirements of the Fourteenth Amendment, and more broadly around their announced traditions of equality; and in consequence their law was a law of covert devices and legal subterfuges. American law, as Krieger wrote, was a law of Umwege, devious legal pathways.

Fourteenth Amendment. When they looked at the wording of this amendment they saw that it granted rights to “all persons.” And so, in one of those inspired flights of human imagination that suggest the involvement of alcohol, lawyers stepped into court and argued that those rights also applied to corporations, because a corporation was really a person.

If you take the Fourteenth Amendment literally, then no undocumented alien can be deprived of rights if they’re a person. Well, the courts, in their wisdom over the years, have carved that away and said they’re not persons. Undocumented aliens who are living here and building your buildings, cleaning your lawns, and so on, they’re not persons, but General Electric is a person, an immortal, super powerful person.

In 1937, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black would observe, with grim dismay, that, over the course of fifty years, “only one half of one percent of the Fourteenth Amendment cases that came before the court had anything to do with African Americans or former slaves, while over half of the cases were about protecting the rights of corporations.”63 Rights guaranteed to the people were proffered, instead, to corporations.

Perhaps the most important thing I learned was about democracy, that democracy is not our government, our constitution, our legal structure. Too often they are enemies of democracy. Certainly this was the experience of African-Americans in this country for two hundred years. With the government failing to enforce the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, black men, women, and children decided to do that on their own.

Indeed, when people talk about how the Constitution is designed to implement the principles of the Declaration, they almost always point to the Fourteenth Amendment—sometimes without noticing that this means they are not talking about the Founders’ Constitution. In part due to Supreme Court decisions, however, the federal government ended up protecting individuals primarily from states and secondarily, if at all, from other individuals.

Lincoln died as he brought about a nation that would ratify the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to abolish slavery and make citizenship for Black Americans a federal constitutional right. In his lifetime, however, he would never fully put into practice the principles summed up in the motto of a newspaper founded in Rochester, New York, in 1847: Right is of no sex—Truth is of no color—God is the father of us all, and all we are brethren.

Broad as the power of Congress is under the Enforcement Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, RFRA contradicts vital principles necessary to maintain separation of powers and the federal balance.” The Rehnquist Court majority used similar interpretations of Section 5 and of the Commerce Clause to overturn other statutes, including the Violence Against Women Act, which permitted women who were victims of gender-motivated violence to sue their attackers in federal court (United States v.

The Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments—the ones abolishing slavery and guaranteeing citizenship rights—still exist, but they’ve been so weakened by custom, by Congress and the various state legislatures, and by recent Supreme Court decisions that they don’t much matter. Indenturing indigents is supposed to keep them employed, teach them a trade, feed them, house them, and keep them out of trouble. In fact, it’s just one more way of getting people to work for nothing or almost nothing.

But Lincoln says something about the future that’s pretty amazing. He says that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom. And it does. The Reconstruction Amendments—the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth—give us a new set of founding principles.

Perhaps the most important thing I learned was about democracy, that democracy is not our government, our constitution, our legal structure. Too often they are enemies of democracy. Certainly this was the experience of African-Americans in this country for two hundred years. With the government failing to enforce the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, black men, women, and children decided to do that on their own. They organized, demonstrated, protested, challenged the law, were beaten, went to prison, some killed—and thereby reached the conscience of the nation and the world. And things changed.

Attempting to resolve questions of interpretation by deferring to the intentions of the Framers of the Constitution leads to several practical and philosophical difficulties. First, the Fourteenth Amendment, for example, was not written by one person but was arrived at through a process of debate, politicking, and compromise. It may be that the various participants in that process had different intentions about what the amendment should mean and how it should be implemented; those intentions may even have been contradictory. Moreover, some would argue that even if the Constitution had one author with one coherent intention as to its meaning and future implementation, that intention could never be completely accessible to judges, or even historians, two centuries later. Finally, assuming for the sake of argument that the Constitutions; Framers did have a unitary, discoverable intention as to how it should be implemented in a particular case, it is not clear that that intention should necessarily govern constitutional interpretation in the late twentieth century, a profoundly different time and society from that of the Framers. The Constitution endures because it is a vehicle for the most central values of American society; but those values necessarily evolve as society changes.

In theory, at least, the Union’s victory in the Civil War had reaffirmed the supremacy of the national government over the states. But of course the states of the former Confederacy had not come back willingly. They rejoined the union at gunpoint, and only after being forced to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment and rewrite their state constitutions to ensure equal rights for newly freed blacks. Even then, it took the constant presence of federal troops, who fanned out across the South, to fight off attempts by the newly formed Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists to intimidate, terrorize, or murder black citizens who dared try to cast a ballot.

the Ku Klux Klan Act. He had planned a California trip that spring, but canceled it in the belief that he couldn’t sidestep this historic moment. The strong new measure laid down criminal penalties for depriving citizens of their rights under the Fourteenth Amendment, including holding office, sitting on a jury, or casting a vote. The federal government could prosecute such cases when state governments refused to act. The law also endowed Grant with extraordinary powers to suspend habeas corpus, declare martial law, and send in troops. To halt night riders, the act made it illegal “to conspire together, or go in disguise upon the public highway . . . for the purpose . . . of depriving any person . . . of equal protection of the law.

I, too, grew up in a place that could sometimes feel as limiting and final as being locked in an airtight closet, the air humid and rank with one’s own breath and panic. A place where for all the brilliant, sun-drenched summer days, there is sometimes only the absence of light: America, and the American South. A place where the old myths still hold a special place in many white hearts: the rebel flag, Confederate monuments, lovingly restored plantations, Gone with the Wind. A place where black people were bred and understood to be animals, a place where some feel that the Fourteenth Amendment and Brown v. Board of Education are only the more recent in a series of unfortunate events. A place where black life has been systematically devalued for hundreds of years.

[A] constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic theory, whether of paternalism and the organic relation of the citizen to the State or of laissez faire. It is made for people of fundamentally differing views, and the accident of our finding certain opinions natural and familiar or novel and even shocking ought not to conclude our judgment upon the question whether statutes embodying them conflict with the Constitution of the United States. . . . [T]he word liberty in the Fourteenth Amendment is perverted when it is held to prevent the natural outcome of a dominant opinion, unless it can be said that a rational and fair man necessarily would admit that the statute proposed would infringe fundamental principles as they have been understood by the traditions of our people and our law.

Whether the criticism of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments expressed by the leaders of the women’s rights movement was justifiable or not is still being debated. But one thing seems clear: their defense of their own interests as white middle-class women—in a frequently egotistical and elitist fashion—exposed the tenuous and superficial nature of their relationship to the postwar campaign for Black equality. Granted, the two Amendments excluded women from the new process of enfranchisement and were thus interpreted by them as detrimental to their political aims. Granted, they felt they had as powerful a case for suffrage as Black men. Yet in articulating their opposition with arguments invoking the privileges of white supremacy, they revealed how defenseless they remained—even after years of involvement in progressive causes—to the pernicious ideological influence of racism.

I’m not a Black Nationalist, because I believe the Reconstruction and Nineteenth Amendments could redeem this whole bigoted and misogynist enterprise. But white people won’t let them. It really is that simple. I say the fifteenth Amendment must mean that the votes of Black people cannot be suppressed by voter ID laws, and white people tell me no. I say that Black political power cannot be gerrymandered away by racist white legislatures, and white people tell me no. I say that the Fourteenth Amendment’s grant of equal protection of laws must protect me from racial harassment by the cops, and entitles me to equal pay for my talents, and promises me that my peaceful protest will be treated with the same permissiveness the cops accord to a mob of white insurrectionists storming the nation’s Capitol, and white people tell me no, no, no. These amendments are a tonic white people refuse to drink. They can cure the Constitution of its addiction to white male supremacy, if white people would just take the medicine.

In 'United States v. Brignoni-Ponce,' the Court concluded that it was permissible under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment for the police to use race as a factor in making decisions about which motorists to stop and search. In that case, the Court concluded that the police could take a person's Mexican appearance into account when developing reasonable suspicion that a vehicle may contain undocumented immigrants. The Court said that "the likelihood that any person of Mexican ancestry is an alien is high enough to make Mexican appearance a relevant factor." Some commentators have argued that 'Brignoni-Ponce' may be limited to the immigration context; the Court might not apply the same principle to drug-law enforcement. It is not obvious what the rational basis would be for limiting overt race discrimination by police to immigration. The likelihood that a person of Mexican ancestry is an "alien" could not be significantly higher than the likelihood that any black person is a drug criminal.

When the battle resumed in 1995, the Court’s target was an obscure federal statute that barred possession of guns near school buildings. Since every state had a similar law, the fate of the federal law, the Gun-Free School Zones Act, was of little moment. Nonetheless, the decision invalidating the statute, United States v. Lopez, ushered in the Rehnquist Court’s federalism revolution. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Rehnquist said that to uphold the statute would be to blur the “distinction between what is truly national and what is truly local.” This analysis implied an end to the long period during which the Court permitted Congress to decide for itself whether the distinction between national and local mattered for any particular piece of legislation. The vote was 5 to 4, with the dissenters quick to point out the implications. Justice Souter warned that “it seems fair to ask whether the step taken by the Court today does anything but portend a return to the untenable jurisprudence from which the Court extricated itself almost sixty years ago.” There followed, in quick succession, a series of closely divided decisions that constricted congressional authority not only under the Commerce Clause but also under the Fourteenth Amendment. Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment gives Congress “the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article”—namely, the guarantees of due process and equal protection provided by the amendment’s Section 1.

To understand and criticise intelligently so vast a work, one must not forget an instant the drift of things in the later sixties. Lee had surrendered, Lincoln was dead, and Johnson and Congress were at loggerheads; the Thirteenth Amendment was adopted, the Fourteenth pending, and the Fifteenth declared in force in 1870. Guerrilla raiding, the ever-present flickering after-flame of war, was spending its forces against the Negroes, and all the Southern land was awakening as from some wild dream to poverty and social revolution. In a time of perfect calm, amid willing neighbors and streaming wealth, the social uplifting of four million slaves to an assured and self-sustaining place in the body politic and economic would have been a herculean task; but when to the inherent difficulties of so delicate and nice a social operation were added the spite and hate of conflict, the hell of war; when suspicion and cruelty were rife, and gaunt Hunger wept beside Bereavement,—in such a case, the work of any instrument of social regeneration was in large part foredoomed to failure. The very name of the [Freedmen's] Bureau stood for a thing in the South which for two centuries and better men had refused even to argue,—that life amid free Negroes was simply unthinkable, the maddest of experiments.

The purpose of our Constitution—especially the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal-protection guarantee—is to protect minority rights even when, or especially when, they are unpopular.

the Fourteenth Amendment, which granted citizenship to former slaves and guaranteed, at least on paper, equal protection. The amendment established the principle of birthright citizenship (thus overturning Dred Scott and making blacks citizens), and, with its equal protection clause, put the idea of equality into the Constitution for the first time, making the federal government, not the states, the protector of Americans’ liberties.

Indenturing indigents, young and old, is much in fashion now. The Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments—the ones abolishing slavery and guaranteeing citizenship rights—still exist, but they’ve been so weakened by custom, by Congress and the various state legislatures, and by recent Supreme Court decisions that they don’t much matter. Indenturing indigents is supposed to keep them employed, teach them a trade, feed them, house them, and keep them out of trouble. In fact, it’s just one more way of getting people to work for nothing or almost nothing. Little girls are valued because they can be used in so many ways, and they can be coerced into being quick, docile, disposable labor.

The Fourteenth Amendment has been another primary method by which the power of the federal government has been expanded. Until this Amendment was ratified, the guarantees under the Bill of Rights were only applicable against infringements of citizens’ rights by the federal government, not by the states. States protected the fundamental rights of their own citizens through their own individual state constitutions and courts. Since the Bill of Rights was originally written for the purpose of protecting the people from the federal government, the states were free to individually determine which of their citizens’ rights they would protect. This fact was recognized by the Supreme Court prior to the Civil War in Barron v. Mayor and City Council of Baltimore, 32 U.S. 243 (1833).

Taft ended his opinion with an added clause, a statement so bold that it would rattle even his strongest supporters. The chief justice of the Supreme Court and former president of the United States gave individual states full constitutional power to segregate public schools and assign students to any race they saw fit: “The decision is within the discretion of the state in regulating its public schools, and does not conflict with the Fourteenth Amendment. The judgment of the Supreme Court of Mississippi is affirmed.” Without the participation of any person of the Negro race, the Supreme Court rendered a decision that sanctioned racial segregation within all public schools. The Court’s unanimous ruling provided Mississippi with one of its strongest weapons to uphold segregation. A case that could have dismantled the “separate but equal” doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson now became a pillar for its defense.

Objection! This defendant, evil genius that he is, has through his abhorrent actions managed to racially discriminate against every race all at the same time, to say nothing of his unabashed slaveholding. The state of California feels that it has more than enough evidence to prove that the defendant is in abject violation of the Civil Rights Acts of 1866, 1871, 1957, 1964 and 1968, the Equal Rights Act of 1963, the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, and at least six of the goddamn Ten Commandments.

The Supreme Court – on behalf of the propertied few – quickly interpreted the word “person” to apply to corporate entities and misapplied the Fourteenth Amendment to give corporations freedom from state regulation. With no federal regulation either, the corporations existed in a laissez faire paradise. Meanwhile, the Court ignored the rights of actual human beings and civil liberties were largely left to state officialdom. Attacked

Over the Democrats’ opposition, Republicans passed the Fourteenth Amendment securing for blacks equal rights under the law, and the Fifteenth Amendment giving blacks the right to vote.

Other corporations have asserted Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination as well as asserted that the Fourteenth Amendment—passed after the Civil War to strip slavery from the Constitution—protects their right “against discrimination” by a local community that doesn’t want them building a toxic waste incinerator, commercial hog operation, or superstore.

Lee’s reference to Missouri as a “country” hints at another widely shared conception of his time. The United States was not yet a solidified nation. It lacked a truly national identity. Other than through its post offices, the federal government had little presence in the lives of most Americans. Rather, the state evoked a person’s primary loyalty. One was a Virginian or a Georgian or a Minnesotan before one was an American. Indeed, a common name for the country was plural—these United States—rather than singular—the United States. It took a civil war to forge the thirty-two states into one nation. As a former Union general reminisced, “We must emphasize this one statement which was ever on the lips of many good men in 1860 and ’61, to wit: ‘My first allegiance is due to my State!’” Only after the country added the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 did the Constitution affirm the preeminence of national over state citizenship.27

And, in 1971, when she had questions about Reed v. Reed, the first Supreme Court case to declare sex discrimination a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, Nina flipped to the front of the brief and sleuthed out its author, a professor of law at Rutgers University named Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The professor was happy to give this young reporter an hour-long lecture about why the amendment, which Nina believed covered only Black citizens, also covered women.

fresh cornucopia of “rights.” It provides that “The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” 66 What is enumerated is embodied in the Constitution; what is retained is not. Reservations are not grants of power to deal with what is retained. Put differently, what is retained is excluded from the federal jurisdiction. This is made clear by Madison’s explanation

I thought the Fourteenth Amendment applied to African Americans after the Civil War. How does it apply to women? Ruth spent an hour walking me through her argument, that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees equal protection of the law to all persons, and “women are persons,” as she put it.

Ironically, this argument, designed to persuade white Southerners that woman suffrage held great advantages for white supremacy, was initially proposed by Henry Blackwell when he announced his support for the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Already in 1867 he had addressed an appeal to “the legislatures of the Southern States” urging them to take note of the fact that female enfranchisement could potentially eliminate the Black population’s impending political power.

No, what makes abortion difficult is not some fancy lawyering from the right, but the near refusal to defend it from the left. The hard sell is almost always left to women and “abortion activists,” while men scramble around trying not to piss off a diner in Ohio. I can turn over a rock on Twitter and find some person with no legal training able to passionately explain why segregation is wrong, or why the death penalty is immoral, or how “love is love.” But ask people about abortion and it’s all, “Well… I think the important thing is that women get to choose for themselves! Retweet if you agree!” Don’t get me wrong, “choice” is great. It’s a fine frame. It’s a language designed to appeal to people who have a genuinely held religious belief about when life begins, and even the word choice should remind those adherents that not everybody shares their choice of God either, and yet we co-exist. But the better legal frame is “Forced birth is some evil shit that can never be compelled by a legitimate government. The end.” Hell, if you don’t like my Eighth or Fourteenth Amendment arguments in defense of abortion rights, I could give some Thirteenth Amendment arguments. Because the same amendment that prohibited slavery surely prohibits the state from renting out women’s bodies, for free, for nine months, to further its interests. Forced labor is already unconstitutional. 

If I had decided Griswold, it would have been maybe a three-sentence opinion: Women, being people, have a right to control their reproductive system, as men-people do, through the use of contraceptives, which men-people seem to always be able to get their hands on when they really need to fuck a prostitute while on shore leave. This right flows from the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of Equal Protection, which we now recognize includes the right to have sexual intercourse without internal reproductive consequences. We note that men-people have technically enjoyed this right to sex-without incubation for five-to-seven million years, depending on when you start the clock on anatomically modern humans. 

For, read properly, the ninth amendment creates no rights at all. There are no “ninth amendment rights” in the sense in which there are, for example, first amendment rights or fourth amendment rights. That there are individual rights fully derivable from no single provision but implicit in several, or in the structure of the Bill of Rights as a whole, is a proposition implicit in the ninth amendment. But that amendment is not itself the fount of any such rights, and it in no way obviates the need to argue that the Constitution does indeed impose upon government the particular limitation for which the advocate contends.52 Thus the Ninth Amendment itself does not protect a right, but tells us not to not find a right in the Constitution just because it is not specifically enumerated. The right to privacy still needs some kind of constitutional hook, although that hook might be the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, for example, even though the clause does not mention “privacy.” In interpreting that clause, and other clauses, we should be mindful of their more expansive interpretations.

The South began acting in outright defiance of the Fourteenth Amendment of 1868, which granted the right to due process and equal protection to anyone born in the United States, and it ignored the Fifteenth Amendment of 1870, which guaranteed all men the right to vote.

This investigation has revealed a pattern or practice of unlawful conduct within the Ferguson Police Department that violates the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, and federal statutory law.

Reconstruction is part of our lives even today. Issues that agitate American politics—who is an American citizen and what rights come along with citizenship, the relative powers of the national government and the states, affirmative action, the relationship between political and economic democracy, the proper response to terrorism—are Reconstruction questions. Reconstruction is embedded in our judicial processes. Every session of the Supreme Court adjudicates issues arising from the Fourteenth Amendment and the civil rights legislation of Reconstruction.

The U.S. Department of Justice filed a complaint against Colorado City and Hildale in June 2012, alleging that by acquiescing to the influence of the FLDS Church in the areas of law enforcement, housing, and access to public facilities, and discriminating against non-FLDS residents, the two areas and agencies under their control violated the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, as well as the Fair Housing Act and Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.75 The lawsuit is currently pending.

I’ll bet you want to know how a person like Stocky can be thrown into a debtors’ prison, something this country outlawed about two hundred years ago. Right?” Samantha slowly nodded. Mattie continued, “More than likely, you’re also certain that throwing someone in jail because he cannot pay a fine or a fee violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. And, you are no doubt familiar with the 1983 Supreme Court decision, the name escapes me right now, in which the Court ruled that before a person can be thrown in jail for not paying a fine it must be proven that he or she was willfully not paying. In other words, he could pay but he refused. All this and more, right?

Humans have natural rights in the state of nature but they do not have civil rights. Civil rights are derived from membership in a society. The Republicans who controlled both houses of Congress after the Civil War knew this. They also knew that, before conferring civil rights, they had to once and for all abolish slavery. The Thirteenth Amendment ending slavery was passed by the Senate on April 8, 1864, and by the House on January 31, 1865. Republican support for the amendment: 100 percent. Democratic support: 23 percent. Even after the Civil War, only a tiny percentage of Democrats were willing to sign up to permanently end slavery. Most Democrats wanted it to continue. In the following year, on June 13, 1866, the Republican Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment overturning the Dred Scott decision and granting full citizenship and equal rights under the law to blacks. This amendment prohibited states from abridging the “privileges and immunities” of all citizens, from depriving them of “due process of law” or denying them “equal protection of the law.” The Fourteenth Amendment passed the House and Senate with exclusive Republican support. Not a single Democrat either in the House or the Senate voted for it. Two years later, in 1868, Congress with the support of newly-elected Republican president Ulysses Grant passed the Fifteenth Amendment granting suffrage to blacks. The right to vote, it said, cannot be “denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude.” In the Senate, the Fifteenth Amendment passed by a vote of 39 to 13. Every one of the 39 “yes” votes came from Republicans. (Some Republicans like Charles Sumner abstained because they wanted the measure to go even further than it did.) All the 13 “no” votes came from Democrats. In the House, every “yes” vote came from a Republican and every Democrat voted “no.” It is surely a matter of the greatest significance that the constitutional provisions that made possible the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Fair Housing Bill only entered the Constitution thanks to the Republican Party. Beyond this, the GOP put forward a series of Civil Rights laws to further reinforce black people’s rights to freedom, equality, and social justice. When Republicans passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866—guaranteeing to blacks the rights to make contracts and to have the criminal laws apply equally to whites and blacks—the Democrats struck back. They didn’t have the votes in Congress, but they had a powerful ally in President Andrew Johnson. Johnson vetoed the legislation. Now this may seem like an odd act for Lincoln’s vice president, but it actually wasn’t. Many people don’t realize that Johnson wasn’t a Republican; he was a Democrat. Historian Kenneth Stampp calls him “the last Jacksonian.”8 Lincoln put him on the ticket because he was a pro-union Democrat and Lincoln was looking for ways to win the votes of Democrats opposed to secession. Johnson, however, was both a southern partisan and a Democratic partisan. Once the Civil War ended, he attempted to lead weak-kneed Republicans into a new Democratic coalition based on racism and white privilege. Johnson championed the Democratic mantra of white supremacy, declaring, “This is a country for white men and, by God, as long as I am president, it shall be a government of white men.” In his 1867 annual message to Congress, Johnson declared that blacks possess “less capacity for government than any other race of people. No independent government of any form has ever been successful in their hands. On the contrary, wherever they have been left to their own devices they have shown a consistent tendency to relapse into barbarism.”9 These are perhaps the most racist words uttered by an American president, and no surprise, they were uttered by a Democrat.

The South began acting in outright defiance of the Fourteenth Amendment of 1868, which granted the right to due process and equal protection to anyone born in the United States, and it ignored the Fifteenth Amendment of 1880, which guaranteed all men the right to vote.

Though Article II requires “natural born” citizenship, the Constitution does not explain what the phrase means. There was no constitutional definition of American citizenship until 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted. Nor was there any existing body of American immigration law to explain it.

In 1985, in Batson v. Kentucky, the Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits prosecutors from discriminating on the basis of race when selecting juries, a ruling hailed as an important safeguard against all-white juries locking up African Americans based on racial biases and stereotypes.

WHERE THESE RIGHTS COME FROM Yet what was the constitutional basis for these actions? Desegregation and anti-discrimination laws both relied on the notion that blacks weren’t slaves any longer; rather, they were free and could make their own choices. This freedom, however, had been secured for blacks by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution which permanently abolished slavery. Thus, the Thirteenth Amendment was the original freedom charter for African Americans. The desegregation court rulings and the anti-discrimination provisions of the Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Bill were also based on the “equal protection” clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. This Amendment granted citizenship to blacks and established equal rights under the law. It was the original social justice manifesto for blacks, women, and other minorities. Finally, the Voting Rights Act attempted to secure for blacks full enfranchisement, the right to vote. But blacks already had the right to vote. That right was specified in the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution. This amendment declared that, as citizens, blacks had the same prerogative to cast their ballots as whites and all others. The 1965 Voting Rights Act merely sought to enforce an equality provision that had been constitutionally affirmed much earlier.

The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments were passed in the aftermath of the Civil War. They were passed by the Republican Party. The Republicans enacted these measures then to secure the freedom, equality, and social justice that Democrats keep harping on today. To further promote these goals, Republicans also implemented a series of Civil Rights laws: the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Reconstruction Act of 1867, and the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871.

Supreme Court ruled in McCleskey v. Kemp that racial bias in sentencing, even if shown through credible statistical evidence, could not be challenged under the Fourteenth Amendment in the absence of clear evidence of conscious, discriminatory intent.

openly. But the Supreme Court has indicated that in policing, race can be used as a factor in discretionary decision making. In United States ν. Brignoni-Ponce, the Court concluded it was permissible under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment for the police to use race as a factor in making decisions about which motorists to stop and search. In

Once slavery was abolished, the core of the changes that followed was found in the Fourteenth Amendment, which for the first time defined the terms of American citizenship and declared that no state could deprive people of their natural rights or the traditional rights inherited through the common law. Yet shortly afterwards, that amendment was crippled by a Supreme Court decision known as The Slaughter-House Cases.

Technically the state’s exclusion laws were superseded by federal law after the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted. But Oregon had a rather complicated relationship with that particular Amendment. Having ratified it in 1866, the state then rescinded its ratification when a more racist state government took control in 1868. The move was more symbolic than anything, but Oregon gave the sign that it wasn’t on board with racial equality. Astoundingly, it wouldn’t be until 1973 (and with very little fanfare) that activists would get the state to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment yet again.

The desire to ground Reconstruction in the Constitution led to the passage of the most important amendment to the Constitution, to that point or since, and the single most significant act of the Thirty-Ninth Congress: the Fourteenth Amendment.

In 1876, Democrats congratulated themselves on redeeming the state in the name of white supremacy. Well before the close of Reconstruction in 1877, the vengeance of the Redeemers had essentially suspended the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments in North Carolina. White supremacy was triumphant. For the next seventeen years, the Redeemers ruled North Carolina.

In 1917, the Supreme Court overturned the racial zoning ordinance of Louisville, Kentucky, where many neighborhoods included both races before twentieth-century segregation. The case, Buchanan v. Warley, involved an African American’s attempt to purchase property on an integrated block where there were already two black and eight white households. The Court majority was enamored of the idea that the central purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment was not to protect the rights of freed slaves but a business rule: “freedom of contract.” Relying on this interpretation, the Court had struck down minimum wage and workplace safety laws on the grounds that they interfered with the right of workers and business owners to negotiate individual employment conditions without government interference. Similarly, the Court ruled that racial zoning ordinances interfered with the right of a property owner to sell to whomever he pleased.

This intent requirement leaves women with no legal recourse under the Fourteenth Amendment for many forms of discrimination, including unequal pay for equal work. Indifference to inequality and subconscious bias have had the same or even more harmful impact on women as intentional discrimination, but the Fourteenth Amendment has not effectively addressed this harm.

Later that spring and early summer, this seismic shift in Reconstruction policy and politics led to passage of a new Freedmen’s Bureau bill, the first Civil Rights Act of American history, and the Fourteenth Amendment.

Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the plurality, rejected the Fourteenth Amendment as a basis for finding for plaintiffs, noting that the Equal Protection Clause “guarantees equal protection of the law to persons, not equal representation in government to equivalently sized groups.” The plurality opinion cited one of the leading casebooks on voting rights for the proposition that, throughout its subsequent history, “Bandemer has served almost exclusively as an invitation to litigation without much prospect of redress.”88 Justice Scalia pointed out that those who had sought relief under Bandemer had achieved nothing except to rack up substantial legal fees. The

Section 3. No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

On April 14, 1873, in a 5–4 decision, the justices offered their interpretation of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments and destroyed the legal basis for federal intervention in most civil rights disputes involving racial minorities. The Court ruled that the amendments were not designed to protect a person’s profession. The Thirteenth Amendment had been specifically designed to prohibit the enslavement of African Americans and prevent the indentured servitude of Mexicans and Asians. The justices wrote: “While the thirteenth article of amendment was intended primarily to abolish African slavery, it equally forbids Mexican peonage or the Chinese coolie trade, when they amount to slavery or involuntary servitude; and the use of the word ‘servitude’ is intended to prohibit all forms of involuntary slavery of whatever class or name.”69 The Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment likewise did not apply to the professions, since it had been designed to solely protect a person’s political rights as a US citizen.70

In Ex parte Milligan, decided in 1866, the Court held unconstitutional the North’s policy of using military tribunals instead of civilian courts to try citizens charged with attempting to sabotage the war effort. In Ex parte Garland, decided the next year, the Court struck down a law barring former members of the Confederacy from serving in federal office. In Bill Cruikshank’s case, the Court disregarded what John Bingham said was the very purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment and held that it did not in fact make the Bill of Rights enforceable against the states. “The second amendment declares that it shall not be infringed; but this . . . means no more than it shall not be infringed by Congress,” the Court explained.

Japanese paranoia stemmed partly from xenophobia rooted in racism. This combination wasn’t peculiar to Japan, as the Nazis were demonstrating in Germany. In the United States, the 1924 Exclusion Act remained in force, prohibiting all immigration from Asia. Some Western states didn’t think the Exclusion Act went far enough, because it hadn’t gotten rid of the Japanese who had immigrated before the United States slammed the door. Xenophobes argued that these immigrants were now breeding more Japanese, who were recognized, outrageously, as American citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment. Farmers in California and Arizona were especially hostile. Even before the Exclusion Act, these states had passed Alien Land Laws severely restricting the property rights of Japanese. Then in 1934 a group of farmers in Arizona’s Salt River Valley began agitating to kick Japanese farmers out, alleging that they had flooded into the region and were depriving farmland from deserving whites who were already hurting from the Depression. They also demanded that white landowners stop leasing acreage to Japanese farmers. The white farmers and their supporters held rallies and parades, blaring their message of exclusion. In the fall of that year, night riders began a campaign of terrorism. They dynamited irrigation canals used by Japanese farmers and threw dynamite bombs at their homes and barns. The leaders of the Japanese community tried to point out that only 700 Japanese lived in the valley and most had been there for more than twenty years. Three hundred fifty of them were American citizens, and only 125 worked in agriculture, mostly for American farmers. Facts made no impression on the white farmers’ racist resentments. Some local officials exploited the bigotry for political gain. The Japanese government protested all this. Hull didn’t want a few farmers to cause an international incident and pushed the governor of Arizona to fix the problem. The governor blamed the terrorism on communist agitators. Dynamite bombs continued to explode on Japanese farms through the fall of 1934. The local and state police maintained a perfect record—not a single arrest. In early February 1935 the Arizona legislature began considering a bill that would forbid Japanese immigrants from owning or leasing land. If they managed to grow anything, it could be confiscated. Any white farmer who leased to a Japanese would be abetting a crime. (Japan had similar laws against foreigners owning farmland.) American leaders and newspapers quickly condemned the proposed law as shameful, but farmers in Arizona remained enthusiastic. Japanese papers covered the controversy as well. One fascist group, wearing uniforms featuring skulls and waving a big skull flag, protested several times at the US embassy in Tokyo. Patriotic societies began pressuring Hirota to stand up for Japan’s honor. He and Japan’s representatives in Washington asked the American government to do something. Arizona politicians got word that if the bill passed, millions of dollars in New Deal money might go elsewhere. Nevertheless, on March 19 the Arizona senate passed the bill. On March 21 the state house of representatives, inspired more by fears of evaporating federal aid than by racial tolerance, let the bill die. The incident left a bad taste all around.

The plaintiffs argued, remarkably, that requiring government to treat everyone equally violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

For not guaranteeing Black male suffrage, Wendell Phillips blasted the Fourteenth Amendment as a “fatal and total surrender.” Republicans argued that omitting suffrage was strategically necessary. They told Black male suffragists that “‘the negro must vote,’ but the issue must be avoided now so as ‘to keep up a two thirds power in Congress.

In 1953, the Supreme Court ended this circumvention of Shelley. It ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment precluded state courts not only from evicting African Americans from homes purchased in defiance of a restrictive covenant but also from adjudicating suits to recover damages from property owners who made such sales. Still, the a Court refused to declare that such private contracts were unlawful or even that county clerks should be prohibited from accepting deeds that included them.

In 1917, the Supreme Court overturned the racial zoning ordinance of Louisville, Kentucky, where many neighborhoods included both races before twentieth-century segregation. The case, Buchanan v. Warley, involved an African American’s attempt to purchase property on an integrated block where there were already two black and eight white households. The Court majority was enamored of the idea that the central purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment was not to protect the rights of freed slaves but a business rule: “freedom of contract.” Relying on this interpretation, the Court had struck down minimum wage and workplace safety laws on the grounds that they interfered with the right of workers and business owners to negotiate individual employment conditions without government interference. Similarly, the Court ruled that racial zoning ordinances interfered with the right of a property owner to sell to whoever he pleased.

The Fourteenth Amendment was a crucial step in transforming, in the words of the Republican editor George William Curtis, a government “for white men” into one “for mankind.”34

In December 1952, Marshall argued before the U.S. Supreme Court that racial segregation violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth as well as the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment.

district court, Kirstein v. University of Virginia,20 may well mark the turning point in the long effort to place equal opportunity for women under the aegis of the Federal Constitution.21 The court held inconsonant with the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause the exclusion of women from the University of Virginia’s undergraduate school at Charlottesville; it approved a plan which, after a two-year transition period, requires the admission of women on precisely the same basis as men. Although sixteen years have elapsed since Brown v. Board of Education,22 Kirstein v. University of Virginia is the first decision to declare unconstitutional exclusion of women from educational opportunities afforded to men by a state institution.23 Significantly, “private” institutions of higher learning that might escape a constitutional prod confined to “state action” are beginning to volunteer similar reforms. For example, Cornell University’s College of Arts and Sciences announced during the 1969–70 academic year that it would admit women on the same basis as men and would offer students of both sexes the same options with respect to housing accommodations

They knew the proneness of prosperity to breed tyrants, and they meant when such should re-appear in this fair land and commence their vocation they should find left for them at least one hard nut to crack.

NAACP v. Patterson 357 U.S. 449 (1958) Freedom to engage in association for the advancement of beliefs and ideas is an inseparable aspect of the "liberty" assured by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment [State of Alabama tried to force NAACP to hand over their membership list, but Supreme Court stopped it.]

Under the Naturalization Act of 1790, only “free white” persons could become citizens, and Issei remained “aliens” no matter how long they lived in the country.98 Their children, the Nisei, became citizens at birth, as called for in the Fourteenth Amendment. Both Munson and Ringle concluded that Japanese in America posed no significant threat to national security.

While the Francis brothers lived in Portland for several more years, the exclusionary law was never repealed. In 1868 the U.S. Congress adopted the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibited states from depriving any person of “life, liberty, or property” or the “equal protection of the laws.” The amendment made the exclusionary law unenforceable, although it remained on Oregon's books until 1927.

The Supreme Court justices gave the aura of being “strict constitutionalists” whose job was not to interpret or create but merely to distinguish between the rights the federal government enforced and those controlled by the states.99 But the supposedly legally neutral interpretations had profound effects. And the court, just like Johnson, demonstrated an uncanny ability to ignore inconsistencies and to twist rules, beliefs, and values to undermine the solid progress in black people’s rights that the Radical Republicans had finally managed to put in place. The court declared that the Reconstruction amendments had illegally placed the full scope of civil rights, which had once been the domain of states, under federal authority. That usurpation of power was unconstitutional because it put state governments under Washington’s control, disrupted the distribution of power in the federal system, and radically altered the framework of American government.100 The justices consistently held to this supposedly strict reading of the Constitution when it came to African Americans’ rights. Yet, this same court threw tradition and strict reading out the window in the Santa Clara decision. California had changed its taxation laws to no longer allow corporations to deduct debt from the amount owed to the state or municipalities. The change applied only to businesses; people, under the new law, were not affected. The Southern Pacific Railroad refused to pay its new tax bill, arguing that its rights under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment had been violated. In hearing the case, the court became innovative and creative as it transformed corporations into “people” who could not have their Fourteenth Amendment rights trampled on by local communities.101 So, while businesses were shielded, black Americans were most emphatically not. The ruling that began this long, disastrous legal retreat from a rights-based society was the 1873 Slaughterhouse Cases.

June, Congress drew up and quickly passed the Fourteenth Amendment that would, once ratified by three-fourths of the states, safeguard the equal-citizenship provisions of the new Civil Rights Act by enshrining them in the Constitution. The amendment would protect the Civil Rights Act from the Supreme Court by invalidating the Dred Scott ruling that African-Americans were not citizens. Since the Constitution assigns the president no role in the amendment

Today the equal protection guarantee extends to women, but if you ask the question “Back in 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment became part of the Constitution, did the people at that time envision that women would be citizens equal in stature to men?” The answer, surely no. But as I see the equality idea—it was there from the beginning and was realized by society over time. So I would say this: It’s true that in 1868 women were a long way from having the vote. But then the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920, and women gained the vote. We had the civil rights movement of the 1960s aimed at making the equality guarantee real for race—as it should have been from the beginning. Those developments inform my view of what the Equal Protection Clause means today.

There is another, grimmer history to the filibuster, though, one that carries special relevance for me. For almost a century, the filibuster was the South's weapon of choice in its efforts to protect Jim Crow from federal interference, the legal blockade that effectively gutted the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Decade after decade, courtly, erudite men like Senator Richard B Russell of Georgia used the filibuster to choke off any and every piece of civil rights legislation before the Senate, whether voting rights bills, or fair employment bills, or anti-lynching bills.

Even in the United States, after all, what brought equal rights to blacks wasn't the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments passed after the Civil War, but rather the grassroots civil rights movement nearly one hundred years later. Laws matter, but typically changing the law by itself accomplishes little.

Election of Public Officers. The right to vote is not a natural one but is derived from constitutions and statutes; it is not a privilege protected by the Fourteenth Amendment;