By Amanda Bellows, New York Times
Dr. Bellows is a historian.
July 8, 2018
Image from article
Why are some events forgotten while others loom large in national memory? The Civil War, the deadliest American conflict, is a formative part of our history. Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Mathew Brady’s photographs of soldiers remain etched in the public consciousness. We remember the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared that slaves in Confederate-held territory were from that point free.
But the fundamental story of the 14th Amendment, which extended citizenship to African-Americans, has been overlooked. One hundred and fifty years since the amendment’s ratification, that story is worth remembering.
When the Civil War began in 1861, approximately four million African-Americans were enslaved. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, in 1863, left three-quarters of a million people in bondage. Because the proclamation presaged slavery’s demise, however, African-Americans across the nation joyfully celebrated its anniversary in the years after.
Only after Confederate defeat in the spring of 1865 did the United States formally and entirely end slavery — ratifying the 13th Amendment later that year. At last, the A.M.E. bishop and former slave W. J. Gaines remembered, “the dark night, so full of suffering and unrequited toil, was gone forever.” Even so, African-American freedmen and women were not yet citizens. They remained in a kind of legal limbo in which they lacked constitutionally based civil rights.
For them, the decade of rebuilding that followed the Civil War was at once a time of trepidation and of hope for a better future. Called Reconstruction, it was characterized by political strife, economic peril and racial violence. In 1865, Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s successor, welcomed former Confederates back into the Union, many of whom sought to re-establish control over emancipated African-Americans. Former Confederate states created laws known as “black codes” that restricted former slaves’ mobility and choice of employment and denied them civil and political rights. Black codes created conditions that were startlingly similar to slavery in parts of the South.
Congress responded by passing the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which declared that anyone born in the United States was a citizen, and promised African-Americans equal protection under law. Johnson, sparring with Congress, vetoed the bill, but the legislators overrode him. Still, the law did not go far enough to guarantee rights to freed slaves. The Republican-led Congress consequently urged the passage and ratification of an amendment to the Constitution that would make unassailable the definition of American citizenship by birthright.
On July 9, 1868, the required majority of states ratified the 14th Amendment, which granted citizenship to anyone born in the country, including African-Americans. Now, every American born or naturalized in the United States was promised due process and equal protection of the laws. The 14th Amendment also forbade states from passing legislation that restricted the “privileges and immunities” of citizens, without precisely defining what these were.
Would the 14th Amendment adequately safeguard the rights of the nation’s black citizens? The abolitionist Frederick Douglass had feared that white Southerners would hardly “consent to an absolutely just and humane policy toward the newly emancipated black people so long enslaved and degraded.” Indeed, in the years that followed Reconstruction, Southern states enacted oppressive laws that segregated blacks and undid the work of the 15th Amendment, in 1870, that granted black men the right to vote.
Some scholars see the 14th Amendment’s ambiguity as a weakness. The historian Stephen Kantrowitz argues that “the amendment’s failure to specify equality of political rights would haunt the next century of American history.” In addition, the Supreme Court interpreted the 14th Amendment narrowly during the late 19th century. In a series of rulings that included Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, which established the doctrine of “separate but equal,” the Supreme Court interpreted the 14th Amendment in a way that did not require the federal government to protect blacks from violence and allowed seemingly race-neutral laws to be applied in unequal ways.
By the turn of the century, black disenfranchisement was nearly complete in the South. In a letter to Harper’s Weekly in 1904, a Georgian declared that “the vast majority of Southern Negroes today do not even know that they are entitled to vote.”
During the civil rights era beginning in the 1950s, however, the Supreme Court reversed course. It found sizable new meanings in the 14th Amendment, holding that it guaranteed desegregated public schools, permitted interracial marriage and ensured equal political representation at the state level. The 14th Amendment also served as the basis for decisions striking down policies that discriminated against pregnant women and denied funding for undocumented children to attend public schools in the 1970s and 1980s. Section 5 of the 14th Amendment gave Congress “power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”
An even broader interpretation of the 14th Amendment may reshape American society in the 21st century. In Zadvydas v. Davis in 2001, the Supreme Court ruled that indefinite government detention of aliens violated the Constitution’s due process clause. More recently, Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015 led to the overturning of states’ bans on gay marriage. The court cited the due process clause of the 14th Amendment in the majority opinion, arguing that “the fundamental liberties protected by the 14th Amendment’s due process clause extend to certain personal choices central to individual dignity and autonomy, including intimate choices defining personal identity and beliefs.”
In the last 50 years, the Supreme Court’s evolving interpretations of the 14th Amendment have led to an expansion of civil rights. Its decisions have also produced a system of federalism that significantly differs from that of 1868 through the reallocation of power from the states to the federal government. Thanks to the 14th Amendment, with its plain text authorizing Congress to act in perpetuity, the contours of our federal system continue to shift.
The question remains: How will the Supreme Court interpret the rights promised by this critical amendment in future cases of national importance? We can only hope that, in the words of Frederick Douglass, it will continue to “give full freedom to every person without regard to race or color in the United States.” While 150 years have passed since the ratification of the 14th Amendment, it is not too late to give this powerful document its due.
No comments:
Post a Comment