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Pros And Cons Of The 14th Amendment

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The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified on July 28, 1868. The amendment granted citizenship to everyone who was born or naturalized in the United States, which included former slaves and African Americans who were freed after the Civil War. Also, the amendment allowed African Americans to be treated equally as all other citizens. However, the Black Codes, Jim Crow Laws, and the result of the Plessy v. Ferguson case took away these rights that were guaranteed to African Americans. After the Union won the Civil War, slaves were given freedom, but African Americans were not completely free. President Andrew Johnson had very lenient policies for Reconstruction after the Civil War, which allowed southerners from the Confederate states to enact restrictive laws against blacks. These laws were called “Black Codes”, and were primarily designed to restrict African Americans’ labor and activity even though slavery had already been abolished. The Black Codes took away rights from African Americans that were guaranteed to them by the Fourteenth Amendment. For example, some states had laws that required African Americans to sign labor contracts each year and if they refused, they could be arrested, fined, or forced to work without pay. According to the fourteenth amendment, this was not allowed. The …show more content…

Ferguson case took those rights away from them. In 1954, the Brown v. Board of Education case finally ended the “separate but equal” law and acknowledged that public schools were violating the Equal Protection Clause of the fourteenth amendment. With the establishment of the Voting rights act and the ruling of the Brown v. Board of Education case, discrimination and segregation did not end, but helped African Americans with the civil rights

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