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Vocapedia > USA > U.S. Constitution
Fourteenth Amendment 1868
Rights of citizens / equal protection of the laws
Fourteenth Amendment Rights of citizens / equal protection of the laws
in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.
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.
Section 2. among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the executive and judicial officers of a state, or the members of the legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such state, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bea to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such state.
Section 3. 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.
Section 4. authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any state shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.
Section 5.
The Congress shall have power to enforce by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article."
https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/amendmentxiv
The Fourteenth Amendment addresses many aspects of citizenship and the rights of citizens.
The most commonly used -- and frequently litigated -- phrase in the amendment is "equal protection of the laws", which figures prominently in a wide variety of landmark cases, including Brown v. Board of Education (racial discrimination), Roe v. Wade (reproductive rights), Bush v. Gor (election recounts), Reed v. Reed (gender discrimination), and University of California v. Bakke (racial quotas in education). https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/amendmentxiv
The citizenship portion of the 14th Amendment was tied together with the idea of suffrage for all men.
If Black men were made citizens, for the most part, they could also be made voters.
(This didn’t work as smoothly as some had thought. It would require the adoption of the 15th Amendment two years later, in 1870, to guarantee that right, as it read:
“The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”)
One of the heroes of the 14th Amendment as well as the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery was Representative Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania.
He badgered Lincoln on abolishing slavery and he helped to write the 13th Amendment.
Indeed, he gave the closing remarks on the debate of the amendment.
As the National Endowment for the Humanities has noted, when the House passed the bill that authorized the 13th Amendment, Stevens said,
“I will be satisfied if my epitaph shall be written thus, ‘Here lies one who never rose to any eminence, and who only courted the low ambition to have it said that he had striven to ameliorate the condition of the poor, the lowly, the downtrodden of every race and language and color.’ ”
Stevens would also help write the 14th Amendment, and in the lead-up to it he was quite prescient on “universal enfranchisement,” offering words then that we would do well to heed today.
In January of 1868, Stevens wrote in The New York Times:
So far as I took any position with regard to Negro suffrage, it was and is that universal suffrage is an inalienable right, and that since the amendments to the Constitution, to deprive the Negroes of it would be a violation of the Constitution as well as of a natural right.
True, I deemed the hastening of the bestowal of the franchise as very essential to the welfare of the nation, because without it I believe that the Government will pass into the hands of rebels and their friends, and that such an event would be disastrous to the whole country.
With universal suffrage, I believe the true men of the nation can maintain their position.
Without it, whether that suffrage be impartial, or in any way qualified, I look upon this Republic as likely to relapse into an oligarchy, which will be ruled by coarse copperheadism and proud conservatism.
Copperheads were Northern Democrats, mostly in the Midwest, who opposed the Civil War and emancipation and wanted to negotiate a compromise with the South to preserve the Union.
The name comes from the copperhead snake, a notoriously sneaky serpent.
But the 14th Amendment would go on to be passed and ratified, and it signified the birth of Black citizenship.
The day is such an important marker of citizenship that when the first Black senator, Hiram Revels of Mississippi, arrived in Washington to be seated in 1870, his being seated was objected to by conservative congressmen, some arguing that he had only been a citizen since the ratification of the 14th Amendment two years earlier and thus didn’t meet the citizenship requirements for a senator.
(By the way, Revels was born in America and fought in the Civil War.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/07/
The 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, following the Civil War, and its Section 3 essentially disqualifies from office anyone who engaged in "insurrection or rebellion" against the U.S.
It was designed to prevent former Confederate leaders from serving in Congress, and got the most use in the decade or so after the war, says James Gardner, a professor at the University at Buffalo School of Law who specializes in constitutional and election law.
https://www.npr.org/2023/09/25/
https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/amendmentxiv https://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/ourdocs/14thamendment.html
2024
https://www.npr.org/2024/02/07/
https://www.npr.org/2024/02/07/
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/11/
2023
https://www.npr.org/2023/12/28/
https://www.npr.org/2023/09/25/
2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/07/
2018
https://www.npr.org/2018/10/30/
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/08/
2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/03/
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/02/22/
http://www.npr.org/2017/01/26/
2015
http://www.npr.org/2015/08/19/
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/08/18/
2010
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/
Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, sometimes called the insurrection clause, declares that no one who has engaged in an insurrection or rebellion against the United States can hold state or federal office.
It was originally written post-Civil War to prevent Confederate rebels from holding elected office.
https://www.npr.org/2023/12/28/
1967
When Richard and Mildred Loving awoke in the middle of the night a few weeks after their June, 1958 wedding, it wasn't normal newlywed ardor.
There were policemen with flashlights in their bedroom.
They'd come to arrest the couple.
"They asked Richard who was that woman he was sleeping with?
I say, I'm his wife, and the sheriff said, not here you're not.
And they said, come on, let's go,
Mildred Loving recalled that night in the HBO documentary The Loving Story.
The Lovings had committed what Virginia called unlawful cohabitation.
Their marriage was deemed illegal because Mildred was Black and Native American; and Richard was white.
Their case went all the way to the Supreme Court.
And on June 12, 1967, the couple won.
(...)
On June 12, 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court justices ruled in the Lovings' favor.
The unanimous decision upheld that distinctions drawn based on race were not constitutional.
The court's decision made it clear that Virginia's anti-miscegenation law violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
The landmark civil rights decision declared prohibitions on interracial marriage unconstitutional in the nation.
Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote the opinion for the court; he wrote that marriage is a basic civil right and to deny this right on a basis of color is "directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment" and seizes all citizens "liberty without due process of law."
https://www.npr.org/2021/06/12/
In 1917 the Supreme Court strikes down a racial zoning law in Louisville, Ky., that prohibits nonwhites from moving into homes in majority-white areas
Laws like these, which existed in numerous cities at the time, are part of a larger, shameful history of government-sponsored racial segregation.
In Buchanan v. Warley, the court ruled that such ordinances violate the 14th Amendment and related statutes that “entitle a colored man to acquire property without state legislation discriminating against him solely because of his color.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/03/
245 U.S. 60 https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/245/60
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/03/
Related > Anglonautes > Vocapedia
law > USA > U.S. Supreme Court,
U.S. Constitution, U.S. Supreme Court > USA
Related > Anglonautes > History > USA
landmark civil rights case > Loving v. Virginia 1967
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