what did the 14th amendment do how did it attempt to protect african
Who is included in "Nosotros the People"? Whose rights does the law protect?
The 14th Amendment to the Constitution is one of the nation's well-nigh important laws relating to citizenship and civil rights. Ratified in 1868, three years later the abolishment of slavery, the 14th Amendment served a revolutionary purpose — to ascertain African Americans as equal citizens under the law. Although its promises have not always been upheld, the 14th Amendment has provided African Americans and other groups in club with a legal ground to challenge discrimination, demand equal rights and protections, and effect alter.
Black people take been fighting for bones citizenship rights since the inception of the country.
Ta-Nehisi Coates "The First White President," The Atlantic, 2017
Deconstructing the 14th Amendment
The 13th Amendment, ratified in December 1865, made slavery illegal throughout the United States. But it did non address other central questions about the status of newly freed African Americans. Were they citizens? Did they have the same rights as other Americans? To resolve these issues, Congress passed the 14th Amendment, which contained central provisions on the definition of citizenship, the protection of ceremonious rights, and the power of the federal regime.
Birthright Citizenship
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and discipline to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.
— 14th Amendment, Section ane
From the nation'due south founding, African Americans regarded themselves as citizens. When the U.South. Constitution was ratified in 1788, it did not restrict citizenship based on race. Even so, it only counted enslaved people as 3/5ths of a person, rather than as full citizens, in state populations.
Dred Scott and Harriet Robinson Scott
Dred Scott and his married woman, Harriet Robinson Scott, filed suits to claim their freedom while nonetheless enslaved, based on having lived in free territory. Dred Scott appealed his case to the The states Supreme Court, which denied his merits on the basis that he was not a citizen and had no correct to sue in federal courtroom. Delivering the opinion of the Supreme Court in the case of Dred Scott v. Sanford, 1857, Master Justice Roger B. Taney wrote: "[slaves and their descendants] had for more than a century been regarded as beings of an inferior lodge … they had no rights which the white homo was bound to respect."
The Example of Dred Scott in the United States Supreme Court, 1857.
Drove of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, CC0
Illustrated portraits of Dred Scott, his wife, Harriet, and their children, Eliza and Lizzie.
Library of Congress
The U.S. Supreme Court declared in the instance of Dred Scott 5. Sanford that Black people, whether free or enslaved, were not citizens, but "a separate class of persons." This determination protected the institution of slavery, which divers enslaved people equally property, and supported discriminatory laws that denied equal citizenship status to costless Black people.
The citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment was specifically intended to repeal the Dred Scott decision. It established the principle of birthright citizenship, pregnant a person built-in in the U.S. is automatically a denizen. This clause did not employ to Native Americans, however, who were not legally declared U.Southward. citizens until the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 (pdf). Under the 14th Subpoena, African Americans could now legally claim the same constitutional rights afforded to all American citizens.
Ceremonious Rights, Due Procedure, and Equal Protection
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall whatever Land deprive any person of life, freedom, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person inside its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
— 14th Amendment, Department 1
Protesting Black Codes
Later on the abolishment of slavery in 1865, southern states passed laws known equally Blackness Codes, which restricted the civil rights of newly freed African Americans and forced them to work for their former enslavers. African Americans organized conventions beyond the South to protest the Blackness Codes and petition Congress for equal rights.
Proceedings of the Colored People's Convention of the Country of S Carolina,1865.
Colored Conventions Project
We simply want that nosotros shall be recognized every bit men; that we accept no obstructions placed in our manner; that the same laws which govern white men shall direct colored men; that we accept the correct of trial by a jury of our peers; that schools be opened or established for our children; that we exist permitted to learn homesteads for ourselves and children; that we exist dealt with equally others, in equity and justice.
Accost of the Colored Land Convention to the People of the Land of S Carolina, 1865
The State Convention of Colored People of South Carolina, held in Charleston in November 1865, issued a 54-foot-long petition signed by hundreds of men. The petitioners asked Congress to help them secure "our equal rights before the law" and "an equal voice with all loyal citizens."
Petition of Colored Citizens of South Carolina for Equal Rights Before the Law, and the Elective Franchise,1865.
Justin S. Morrill Papers, Manuscript Sectionalization, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Read the transcript of the Petition of Colored Citizens of South Carolina for Equal Rights Earlier the Law, and the Elective Franchise, 1865:
To the Honorable Senate and Business firm of Representatives in Congress assembled. We the undersigned colored citizens of Southward Carolina, do respectfully ask your Honorable Body, in consideration of our unquestioned loyalty, exhibited by us alike as bond or costless;—as soldier or laborer;—in the Matrimony lines nether the protection of the government; or within the insubordinate lines under the domination of the rebellion; that in the exercise of your high authority, over the re-establishment of ceremonious regime in South Carolina, our equal rights earlier the law may be respected; — that in the germination and adoption of the central law of the state, we may have an equal vocalization with all loyal citizens; and that your Honorable Body will not sanction any country Constitution, which does not secure the do of the right of the elective franchise to all loyal citizens, otherwise qualified in common grade of American police, without distinction of Colour — Without this political privilege nosotros will accept no security for our personal rights and no means to secure the blessings of education to our children.
The state needs our vote, to brand the state loyal to the Union, and to bring its laws and assistants into harmony with the present dearly bought policy of the country, and nosotros respectfully suggest that had the constitution of South Carolina been heretofore, every bit we now ask that it shall exist hereafter, this state would never accept led 1 tertiary of the United States into treason confronting the nation.
For this object, your petitioners will as in duty bound, ever pray &c.
The 14th Amendment revoked the Black Codes by declaring that states could not pass laws that denied citizens their constitutional rights and freedoms. No person could be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process (fair treatment by the judicial arrangement), and the police force was to be equally practical to everyone. This represented a major shift in power betwixt u.s.a. and the federal regime. For the showtime time, civil rights were to be protected at the federal level, non left to the states.
Representation and Voting Rights
The 14th Amendment also included provisions relating to voting and representation in Congress. It amended the iii/5ths clause in the Constitution, stating that population counts would exist based on the "whole number of persons" in a land—all people would be counted as. Information technology as well protected the right to vote "for all male person citizens age 21 or older," though information technology would take another amendment to the Constitution (the 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870) to ban voting restrictions based on race. Women would not secure the right to vote until the ratification of the 19th Subpoena in 1920.
Reconstruction and the 14th Amendment
Congress passed the 14th Subpoena on June 13, 1866, and sent information technology to u.s.a. to be ratified. Only irresolute the Constitution to fulfill the promise of equality for African Americans would not be an easy process. Slavery, which defined Blackness people as holding, not as citizens, had shaped the United states since its founding. In order for the 14th Amendment to get the new police of the land, information technology would need more a ratification—it would need Reconstruction.
White Resistance
Twenty-2 states ratified the 14th Amendment within a twelvemonth afterwards it was passed, out of a total of 28 needed to make the amendment part of the U.S. Constitution. But well-nigh southern states, led by the same white men who had passed the Black Codes, refused to ratify an amendment that defined African Americans as equal citizens. Black men and women who attempted to exercise their rights and freedoms faced resistance, violence, and retaliation from their beau white citizens.
On May 1, 1866, mobs of white civilians and constabulary attacked the Black community in Memphis, Tennessee. The beginning major outbreak of racial violence afterward the Civil War, the Memphis Massacre lasted 3 days and resulted in the deaths of 46 African Americans. National outrage over the incident helped fuel support for passage of the 14th Amendment.
I was going home to my mother'south, and when I had got to Brown artery and De Soto streets, I met two men, one was a policeman, I practice not know who the other was; the policeman shot me in the head … After he shot me, he asked me if I was a soldier. I said no. He said it was a practiced thing I was not, and he then went along.
Taylor Hunt, age 16 Testimony from Memphis Riots and Massacres," Business firm of Representatives Report No. 101, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 1866
Scenes in Memphis, Tennessee, During the Anarchism—Shooting Downwardly Negroes on the Morning of May 2, 1866.
Tennessee Virtual Archive
Opposition to the 14th Amendment was not limited to the S. In northern and western states, the Democratic Party appealed to white voters who opposed the thought of equal rights for African Americans. Iii states—Ohio, Oregon, and New Jersey—that initially ratified the 14th Amendment rescinded their ratifications in 1868 later Democrats gained command of those state legislatures.
Reconstruction Acts
In 1867, Congress passed the Reconstruction Acts, which placed former Amalgamated states under military machine rule until they ratified the 14th Amendment and established new constitutions guaranteeing equal rights and protections to African Americans. The Reconstruction Acts also granted Black men in southern states the right to vote and concord elected office. Once African Americans were able to participate in the political process, the 14th Subpoena gained the final votes it needed in the South. On July 9, 1868, Louisiana and Southward Carolina voted to ratify the amendment, making it officially office of the U.S. Constitution.
Enforcement Acts
After the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, white southerners continued to violently oppose Black civil rights. In 1870 and 1871, Congress passed three laws known as the Enforcement Acts, which invoked the power of the federal regime under the 14th Subpoena to intervene when states failed to protect the rights of citizens.
The Enforcement Acts specifically targeted the Ku Klux Klan for conspiring to prevent Blackness men from voting. During federal grand jury investigations, hundreds of African Americans came forward to testify about being terrorized past the Klan. In South Carolina, this testimony led to the indictment of 220 Klansmen for civil rights violations, simply merely five were ultimately tried and convicted.
Civil Rights Act of 1875
To aggrandize on the 14th Amendment's promises of equal rights and protection nether the law, civil rights advocates called for new federal legislation to outlaw racial bigotry in public places. In 1875, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, which guaranteed all persons equal access to public accommodations, including theaters, hotels, and transportation, and allowed anyone denied services on account of race to seek restitution in federal courtroom. Among those who helped secure the bill's passage were Black members of Congress elected during Reconstruction, including Robert B. Elliott of South Carolina, who gave a famous spoken language in favor of the legislation.
Rep. Robert Brown Elliott.
Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Civilisation, Stanley Turkel'southward Collection of Reconstruction Era Materials
[This bill] does not seek to confer new rights … simply but to prevent and preclude inequality and bigotry on account of race, colour, or previous status of servitude. … [Information technology] will decide the ceremonious status, not but of the Negro, but of any other class of citizens who may feel themselves discriminated against.
Rep. Robert B. Elliott Speech communication in favor of the Ceremonious Rights Act, 1874
Past 1875, when the Civil Rights Human action was passed, the 14th Subpoena was already under attack. Over the adjacent ii decades, the 14th Amendment'southward power to protect the constitutional rights of African Americans would be undermined past legal challenges that reestablished the primacy of states' rights, allowed racial segregation, and relegated Black people to 2d-class citizenship.
Limiting the 14th Subpoena: Segregation and Unequal Protection
White supremacists opposed to Black equality and citizenship used violence, terror, and voter suppression to retake command of southern state governments. Efforts to gainsay southern racial violence lost momentum within the federal government and finally resulted in the withdrawal of federal troop protection of African Americans living in the South. Supreme Court rulings restricting and overturning 14th Subpoena civil rights protections reinforced Southern efforts to restrict the rights of African Americans. Racial discrimination and segregation consequently characterized the twenty-four hour period-to-twenty-four hours lives of African Americans.
Colfax Massacre and Cruikshank Decision
On April 13, 1873, white Democrats in Louisiana aroused near their defeat in the election attacked Black Republicans gathered for a meeting at the Colfax Parish Courthouse in Louisiana. Approximately 150 African Americans were killed, forty of whom were executed subsequently they surrendered.
In March 1876, the U.South. Supreme Court conclusion in United States v. Cruikshank overturned the convictions of the white men who attacked Black citizens in Colfax, Louisiana. The Courtroom ruled that the 14th Amendment only applied to deportment taken by the land, not to actions taken by individuals. As a event, none of the white attackers were punished for their role in the Colfax Massacre
The 1876 Cruikshank ruling followed an earlier Supreme Court decision in the 1873 Slaughter-house Cases, which immune state legislatures to pass laws restricting citizenship rights, and further highlighted the decision by the Court non to protect the civil rights of African Americans. Southern legislatures before long passed discriminatory laws restricting access to voting and other rights of African Americans.
The Rise of Jim Crow
After the withdrawal of federal troops and the systematic removal of African Americans from political offices, southern legislatures wrote new country constitutions. The new constitutions made segregation and racial bigotry legal. These "Jim Crow" laws made African Americans second-class citizens no longer protected by the 14th Amendment. Consequently, lynching and other acts of intimidation increased in frequency while African Americans had no legal ways of protecting themselves.
African Americans repeatedly challenged the emergence of segregation. They staged protests, brought claims to the courts, and produced publications highlighting and opposing the bigotry and violence they faced. They argued the passage of the 14th Subpoena gave them the same civil rights and equal protection equally any other citizens.
Ida B. Wells
In 1883, Ida B. Wells was working as a schoolteacher in Memphis, Tennessee, when a white conductor forced her off a train for refusing to movement out of the first-course car. Citing her rights nether the Ceremonious Rights Human activity of 1875, Wells sued the railroad visitor for damages. The Excursion Court of Shelby County ruled in Wells's favor, stating that she was "refused the fantabulous accommodations to which she was entitled under the law"; however, the Supreme Court of Tennessee later reversed the decision on appeal. Wells went on to become a prominent journalist and civil rights activist whose campaign against lynching brought worldwide attending to racial violence and injustice in the Jim Crow Southward.
Homer Plessy
In 1892 Homer Plessy of New Orleans, Louisiana, volunteered to exam the legality of railroad motorcar segregation in that country. He sabbatum in a "whites only" car, refused to motion to a segregated car, was arrested, and sued in court. The case eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in 1896 that segregation was legal as long every bit the accommodations were "separate simply equal."
The 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision farther reinforced the ascent of segregation. The Court rendered this decision despite the reality that separate areas provided for African Americans rarely were equal. John Marshall Harlan, the only dissenting justice, argued against the decision: "The arbitrary separation of citizens, on the footing of race … is a bluecoat of servitude wholly inconsistent with the ceremonious freedom and the equality before the law established by the Constitution."
Despite the refusal of the courts or politicians to back up them, African Americans continued to claiming segregation and demand their equal rights under the Constitution. They pressed forward their fight in the belief that their efforts might eventually result in change.
Reviving the 14th Amendment: Mod Ceremonious Rights Movement
In the 20th century, the NAACP and its Legal Defense arm emerged as a key organization which used the 14th Subpoena to litigate changes in the laws of the state. In a series of cases, information technology was able to persuade the Supreme Court to interpret the 14th Amendment in a mode which increased the legal rights of African Americans and others.
Landmark Court Cases
Emmett Till (1955)
Emmett Till, a fourteen-yr-one-time from Chicago, was kidnapped while visiting relatives in Mississippi and murdered for allegedly insulting a white woman. The decision past his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, to accept a public funeral in Chicago brought national and international attention to southern atrocities inflicted on African Americans. .
Photograph of Emmett Till with his mother, Mamie Till Mobley.
Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gift of the Mamie Till Mobley family
"Segregation Forever," Fort Lauderdale, Florida, 1964.
High Museum of Art, © Steve Schapiro
Southern Manifesto (1956)
A concept initiated by Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia, which called for massive resistance to the desegregation of schools. More than 100 members of Congress endorsed the idea. A number of states, led past Virginia, passed laws which cut off state funds and airtight any public school that attempted to integrate. Eventually the Supreme Court overturned these laws based upon the "equal protection" portion of the 14th Subpoena.
Ceremonious Disobedience and Nonviolent Action
Civil rights activists, oftentimes led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., used irenic protests and civil disobedience to pressure for the passage of legislation which would embody the original intention of the 14th Subpoena and protect their rights as citizens.
Montgomery Motorcoach Boycott, 1955–1956
The abort of Rosa Parks on December ane, 1955, for refusing to surrender her bus seat to a white passenger served as the catalyst for a boycott of the segregated buses in Montgomery, Alabama. With the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. as their spokesperson, African American residents refused to utilize public buses for 13 months. The protestation ended afterwards the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregation on public buses was unconstitutional.
Rosa Parks is fingerprinted after she was arrested along with other civil rights activists during the omnibus boycott, Montgomery, Alabama, 1956.
Photo past Underwood Athenaeum/Getty Images
Marchers gathering at the Lincoln Memorial after walking from Washington Monument grounds, August 28, 1963.
Drove of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Souvenir of James H. Wallace Jr. © Jim Wallace
March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, 1963
In an endeavour to force per unit area President John F. Kennedy and Congress to pass a strong civil rights bill, A. Phillip Randolph and Bayard Rustin organized a peaceful march in Washington, D.C., attended past more than than 200,000 people. There, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous "I Take A Dream" voice communication. The post-obit yr the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed.
Civil Rights Act of 1964
President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Ceremonious Rights Human action into police force on July 2, 1964, in the presence of Martin Luther King Jr. and other ceremonious rights activists. The law gave the federal government the ability to ensure the desegregation of schools, parks, swimming pools, and other public facilities. It also restricted the use of literacy tests every bit a requirement for voter registration and established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to address problems of race and sex discrimination in employment.
Pen used by Presdient Lyndon B. Johnson to sign the 1964 Civil Rights Human activity.
Drove of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Souvenir of James F. Dicke, II
NAACP demonstration for equal housing, 1968.
Harvard Civil Rights, Ceremonious Law Review
Fair Housing Human action of 1968
Building on earlier housing bigotry legislation, the 1968 Fair Housing Human activity provided protection from discrimination based on race, religion, national origin, or sexual practice for individuals renting or buying a home, getting a mortgage, seeking housing aid, or engaging in other housing-related activities. The federal law was enacted on April eleven, 1968, 7 days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee.
14th Amendment Issues Today: Whose Rights? What Rights?
The 14th Amendment defines all persons built-in in the U.s.a. as citizens. It also extends the rights of due process and equal protection of the laws to any person, regardless of citizenship status. But from Reconstruction to today, diverse groups in society have had their citizenship condition and civil rights ignored or redefined through executive order or legislation. In demanding to be included and recognized as "Nosotros the People" whose rights the Constitution protects, these Americans take challenged the nation to fulfill its founding promises of liberty, equality, and justice for all.
Citizenship
Who is a citizen, and what rights are granted to not-citizens, are questions that go along to spark debate. The birthright citizenship principle of the 14th Amendment was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1898 when they ruled that Wong Kim Ark, born in the United States to Chinese parents, was a denizen despite his parents' condition as not-citizens. Immigrants have also looked to the 14th Amendment to merits rights to due process and protection from bigotry, while besides seeking more than equal pathways to citizenship.
Youth immigrants known as Dreamers, who grew upwardly in the U.s.a. after arriving with their undocumented parents, protest exterior a federal detention center where undocumented immigrants are held, Los Angeles, California, 2018.
David McNew/Getty Images
ERA supporters rally at the Land Capitol in Richmond, Virginia, 2019.
Patricia Sullivan/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Women's Rights
Afterwards the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, women sought to claim their full rights of citizenship under the law, including the right to vote. Simply the courts did not back up these claims, and so women's rights activists worked for other laws that would guarantee equal rights regardless of sex. The 19th Amendment, ratified in 1920, granted women the right to vote. The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), first proposed in 1923, passed Congress in 1972 but failed to secure the land votes needed for ratification. Since and so, activists take continued to fight against gender-based discrimination through legal, political, and social means.
Union Equality
The right of individuals to marry the person of their choice, regardless of their race or gender, gained protection under the 14th Amendment through two landmark legal cases. In Loving v. Virginia (1967), the U.S. Supreme Court struck down land laws banning interracial marriage. Nearly 50 years after, in Obergefell five. Hodges (2015), the Courtroom ruled that country laws against same-sex marriage were unconstitutional.
Ikea Catu and her partner Carmen Guzman celebrate the Supreme Court's decision in favor of same-sexual practice union, Washington, D.C., 2015. The couple married in Canada in 2009 as their matrimony wasn't legalized in their dwelling house state of Virginia.
Brittany Greeson/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Black Lives Matter
Ane hundred and fifty years after the 14th Amendment divers African Americans equally equal citizens nether the police force, the promises of total racial equality remain unfulfilled. Protests over the violent and discriminatory treatment of Black people by the justice system, sparked past the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and likewise many others, gave rise to the nation'south largest civil rights movement. In taking on issues of racial profiling and police brutality, Blackness Lives Matter activists accept compelled Americans to reckon with legacies of white supremacy, violence, and social injustice that have persisted for generations. They have demanded answers to questions that are at the heart of the 14th Amendment: Who is included in "We the People"? Whose rights does the law protect? Whose lives matter?
Reconstruction changed the nation in fundamental ways. Three new amendments to the U.S. Constitution abolished slavery, provided equal protection of the law for all citizens, and banned racial bigotry in voting. Simply the promise of these laws alone would not secure the visions of freedom that African Americans pursued, if the nation was not willing to uphold and enforce them.
In a composite Nation like ours, made upwards of almost every variety of the homo family, there should be, as before the Law, no rich, no poor, no high, no low, no black, no white, but one state, one citizenship, equal rights, and a common destiny for all.
Frederick Douglass 1882
(Image Top)Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gift of Monica Karales and the Estate of James Karales
Source: https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/exhibitions/reconstruction/citizenship
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