Prior to the American Civil War, the legal definition of the Negro was, according to Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney, “ an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic.” Negros were not considered citizens or even human beings, only property that could be bought and sold. Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney was most likely influenced by Chief Justice John Marshall, who in 1833, ruled that the Bill of Rights only applied to the national government, meaning that states were allowed to keep African Americans from becoming state citizens. As a result, it was only logical to conclude that because African Americans are not citizens, then they are not protected by the Bill of Rights. However, the Fourteenth Amendment passed in June 1866, gave full rights of citizenship to all people born or naturalized in the United States, including African Americans. …show more content…
The American South took measures to make sure that African Americans still felt like the deferential society, by enforcing laws that separated blacks and whites. Many African Americans hated segregation, calling it unjust. On the other hand, some whites such as Woodrow Wilson, a former president of the United States of America felt it was necessary. He once said, “Segregation is not a humiliation but a benefit…”. The question of whether segregation was a necessity for American society or a hindrance, was the central focus of two society changing Supreme Court cases—Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of
However, that veto was overridden and the legislation had officially become a law. It stated that every person born in the US is to be considered a citizen "without distinction of race or color, or previous condition of slavery or involuntary servitude. " [Sandoval, Interracial Democracy, notes]. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 was an attempt to compensate for rights that were lost due to the black codes. This bill demanded citizenship without discrimination against ancestry or race.
To answer these questions, the 14th and 15th amendments were added to the Constitution. The 14th Amendment established citizenship to those who were born in the United States, which overturned the Dred Scott Case of 1857, which declared African Americans could not be citizens. This Amendment granted said citizenship, as well as clauses within the amendment that outlawed states from infringing on the guaranteed rights of citizens, regardless of their race, gender, or creed. African Americans were also counted as a whole person, not 3/5ths of a person. In addition to citizenship, this amendment set the stage for the passage of the 15th amendment.
Ferguson was a case of the Supreme Court in 1892 after passenger Homer Plessy traveled on the Louisiana railroad and refused to sit in a car for blacks only. Homer Plessy was brought before Judge John H. Ferguson to a Criminal Court in New Orleans to be trailed for refusing to follow the state law of Louisiana “separate but equal.” Such conflict challenged the violation of the 13th and 14th amendment where they ensure equality for recently emancipated slaves. They stated, “Separate facilities for blacks and whites satisfied the Fourteenth Amendment so long as they were equal.” “In the nature of things it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political equality, or a commingling of the two races unsatisfactory to either.”
This amendment granted citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States,” which included former slaves recently freed by the Thirteenth Amendment. In addition to granting citizenship, it forbids states from denying anyone "life, liberty or property, without due process of law" or to "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” no matter who they were. The 14th Amendment expanded the protection of civil rights tremendously to all Americans no matter color or race and is cited in more litigations than any other amendment of the United States today. On June 22, 1866, precisely fourteen days after the senate passed the Fourteenth Amendment, President Andrew Johnson issued a message to Congress announcing that the Fourteenth Amendment had been sent to the states for ratification. Johnson voiced his negative opinion of the amendment by stating that his actions should "be considered as purely ministerial, and in no sense whatever committing the Executive to an approval or a recommendation of the amendment to the State legislatures or to the
In document 1, it expresses “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment of a crime wherof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist in the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” This section of the 13th amendment alone provides us a coherent view of how the South was greatly flawed. Despite the Constitution stating “all men are created equal,” racial discrimination continued to take a part of society in this era and limited, sometimes even violated, the rights of these former slaves and African Americans. The 15th Amendment also sets forth, “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.” Like Document 1, this segment of the Amendment supports how African Americans proceeded to be regarded and looked upon as indifferent to the whites, lessening their rights as citizens in the process.
The nation’s mindset revolved around white supremacy, so African Americans were never viewed as human beings, rather, they were viewed as property and white people despised them. White males did not have any respect towards African Americans because they were considered property, so they were put to work as slaves. Once slavery was abolished and president Andrew Johnson heard that congress was planning to grant formerly enslaved people to be viewed as citizens through the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, he immediately vetoed the bill. Johnson was a racist and former slave owner who said, “this is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am president, it shall be a government for white men.” The president was the person that
One of the most famous lines of the Declaration of Independence is that “all men are created equal…”, yet American society does not always treat people as though they are all equal. America’s roots come from the fight against oppression, yet as our country continued to grow we became the oppressors. Although America has tried to write some of its wrongs from the past there are still traces left behind. The effects of segregational laws and sketchy housing practices have carried on to hurt minorities in America. Segregational laws have been eradicated, but the societal sigmas created from the laws continue and have created a process of De Facto segregation in American society against all minorities.
The Court said that the purpose of the 14th Amendment was “to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law… Laws … requiring their separation … do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race (“Plessy v. Ferguson” par. 4).” In my opinion, I do not agree with the majority ruling . If I lived in the time period when segregation was prevalent, I most likely would have agreed with the ruling.
The amendment tells that all persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens of the United States (厚). Because the terms “citizens” and “person” appear in this amendment, African Americans certainly have political rights and privileges or immunities (厚). Also, civil rights rooted in the Fourteenth Amendment pointed out that African American can guarantee of equal protection under the law (厚). However, in spite of they are citizens, the discriminatory acts of private citizens and segregation alone were not illegal. The “separate but equal” led to the Jim Crow laws, which resulted in blacks being treated as second-class-citizens.
People throughout America had different views on how to end segregation, as each state had its own background with segregation and slavery. Oklahoma although it prided itself on never being a slave state it still had segregation, from the 1920s to when schools and public places began to be integrated in the 1960s. In the earlier phases in segregation practices in Oklahoma you could find the Ku Klux Klan marching through downtown Oklahoma City, people recognized and supported the Klan. The Klan recruited Public High School students to join their patronage against the African American community. The segregation occurring within Oklahoma provided the African American community with many hardships, such as not being able to shop in many stores,
On July 9, 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified to the Constitution. The Fourteenth Amendment was created to grant citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States,” which included the freeing of former slaves after the Civil War in 1865. It gave the former slaves their natural rights as citizens to the United States after the Dred Scott case, where they declared that black slaves were not people. Moreover, in Southern states the majority of them rejected this because they still wanted to keep their slaves, but later was required to be ratified by the three-fourths of the states. This is also known as the “Reconstruction Amendment,” meaning to forbid any states to deny any person of “life, liberty, or property without
The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868. The United States were guaranteed citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States and granted them federal civil rights. Before this time the freemen were just considered men brought to America to be slaves. The slaves thought this was the only way of life.
The Fourteenth Amendment (Amendment XIV) The amendments were put into place to protect the rights and civil liberties of all American citizens from the federal government. However, prior to the fourteenth amendment, there was no certainty with the constitution. The constitution did not state in a clear enough way who was protected under it and exactly what rights you had as an American Citizen. The 14th amendment was in response to the just passed thirteenth amendment, which ended slavery in all of the southern states.
The segregation of schools based on a students skin color was in place until 1954. On May 17th of that year, during the Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education, it was declared that separate public schools for black and white students was unconstitutional. However, before this, the segregation of schools was a common practice throughout the country. In the 1950s there were many differences in the way that black public schools and white public schools were treated with very few similarities. The differences between the black and white schools encouraged racism which made the amount of discrimination against blacks even greater.
This would initially keep southerners from revoking the laws if they ever happened to win control of Congress. In June of 1866, Congress proposed the Fourteenth Amendment. The Fourteenth Amendment acknowledges federal and state citizenship for persons born in the United States. It forbade any state to lessen the “privileges and immunities” of citizenship, which targeted a section in the Black Codes. It forbid any state to strip any person of life, liberty, or property without “due process of law.”