The 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses the history and application of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the United States Constitution. The paper analyzes each amendment and describes its importance with regards to the close of the slavery era in the U.S. The paper also discusses the implications of the landmark court-case, Plessy v. Ferguson and how these amendments related to it.

Table of Contents:
The History of These Three Amendments
Why Support These Amendments
The Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
Who Benefited From The 13th Amendment?
Hard-Line Southerners and Their Evil Deeds
The 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
Plessy v. Ferguson
The 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

From the Paper:

"In 1910, Arthur W. Machen wrote in the Harvard Law Review - forty years after the passage of the 15th - that this amendment has been "despised, flouted, nullified, evaded," and moreover, had never up to and through the time Machen wrote his piece, been backed by the High Court to assure the suffrage rights of black citizens. And indeed it took the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to truly move the country forward into an era that the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution were supposed to open the door for. Jim Crow and Southern segregation were alive and well even up into the 1960s in some Southern states, as witnessed by the fact that President John Fitzgerald Kennedy and U.S. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy had to send federal troops into Mississippi in 1962 to allow James Meredith to enter the University of Mississippi."

Sample of Sources Used:

• FindLaw. "The Fifteenth Amendment." Retrieved 17 March 2007 from http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data/constitution/amendment15/01.html#3.
• Horton, James Oliver; & Horton, Lois E. Slavery and the Making of America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
• Machen, Arthur W. "Is the Fifteenth Amendment Void?" Harvard Law Review 23.3 (1910): 169-193
• Schneider, Dorothy, & Schneider, Carl J. Slavery in America: From Colonial times to the Civil War. New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2000.
• Taylor, Joseph H. "The Fourteenth Amendment, the Negro, and the Spirit of the Times." The Journal of Negro History 45.1 (1960): 21-37

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