The 14th Amendment - What Followed Slavery in America
Also known as the Citizenship Amendment, the 14th Amendment was another effort to help the former slaves that didn't live up to its promises.
Once the Civil War was over and slavery gone, the U.S. passed three new constitutional amendments to help protect the rights of the former slaves. Sadly, all failed to live up to their promise in one way or more. Last time I described how the 13th Amendment, which ended slavery throughout the United States, fell short of its potential. Today, let’s examine the ways that racists and the court system neutered the 14th Amendment.
The full text of this amendment is long, so I won’t reprint it all for you here. But Congress created and approved this amendment to make sure the former slaves would have full citizenship rights. Partly, this was a response to the Dred Scott decision of 1857. In that judicial farce, the Supreme Court declared African Americans weren’t meant to be citizens of the U.S. and had no rights White people had to respect. So, the 14th Amendment had to write into the Constitution that African Americans were citizens of the country where they lived.
The 14th was also in response to the black codes (read more here) passed by Southern states to hold back and virtually re-enslave African Americans after the Civil War. It clarified several rights possessed by all citizens and defined what a citizen was: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
(If you follow current events, it’s likely that you know about the recent Supreme Court case challenging that this amendment does not makes all people born in the U.S. a citizen. The wording of the amendment itself is clear, obvious, and straightforward. The intent of the people who wrote it is equally clear. How four Supreme Court justices, (and four justices who claim to be originalists, at that) could think that’s not enough, and that those words don’t guarantee citizenship by birth, is beyond any reasonable person. But you must remember that you and I are reasonable people, rather than conservative racists bred by the Federalist Society to do its ghoulish bidding.)
This definition of citizenship seemed a step in the right direction. A second positive step was the amendment’s statement that “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.”
This, seemingly, guaranteed equal legal treatment to the former slaves. Except . . . when it comes to equal rights for African Americans, racists and the courts (two groups with occasionally overlapping membership) always find a loophole. What was the loophole in this amendment?
“NO STATE SHALL . . .” That’s the loophole. The Supreme Court decisions of the 1800s took these words literally. A state could not deprive citizens of their life, liberty, or property without due process of law. But what if an individual person did so, rather than a state?
In that case, courts ruled, the 14th Amendment did not apply. As long as the group depriving African Americans of their rights were individuals not specifically bidden to do so by their state, the 14th Amendment offered no protection.
That was the betrayal of America’s promise to the former slaves. Even an amendment that seemed to offer airtight assurances could be rendered meaningless by conservatives on the Supreme Court.
That’s not all, however. The Supreme Court couldn’t just neuter the amendment into impotency for its stated purpose—that was a start, in the court’s eyes, but didn’t go far enough to satisfy conservatives of the late 1800s.
One historian did some research and discovered 307 Supreme Court cases citing the 14th Amendment between 1890 and 1910. Of those 307 cases, 288 of them applied the 14th Amendment to protecting the rights of corporations. Corporations were already people by this time (read how here), and so the Supreme Court applied the amendment to protect the property of those corporations against regulation by the states.
There we have it. An amendment written to uphold the rights of former slaves proved virtually useless for that purpose, but eminently effective in making corporations more powerful. That was the Supreme Court of the late 19th century’s doing, and the Roberts court stands proudly in this same tradition.
Thank you for reading, my friends. I welcome polite comments.
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