The Fourteenth Amendment

Paper Summary:

The paper outlines the three sections of the Fourteenth Amendment and refers to the cases of "Elk v. Wilkins" and "Plessy v. Ferguson" that represented the first stirrings of the battle against segregation in the United States. The paper looks at how the Great Depression helped black Americans and how the case of "Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka" convinced the Supreme Court that segregation in American public schools was unconstitutional. The paper then relates that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were major social and political triumphs for African Americans. The paper concludes that today, the struggle for racial equality and justice continues not just for African Americans but also for an entire new generation of immigrants seeking life, liberty and happiness as mandated in the U.S. Constitution and the Fourteenth Amendment.

From the Paper:

"Some twenty years after the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that discrimination against African-Americans by private persons cannot be regarded as imposing slavery or involuntary servitude against them. As a result, the U.S. Congress decided that "it could not make it a federal offense for private persons to discriminate against African-Americans." However, Congress did in fact, during the days of Reconstruction after the close of the Civil War, use its powers to prohibit "peonage, or involuntary servitude to work off a debt," but specific loopholes in this decision made the protection incomplete, something which Congress at the time did nothing to fix (Chemerinsky, 1145)."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Berger, Raoul. "The Fourteenth Amendment: The Framer's Design." South Carolina Law Review. Vol. 30 no. 3 (1979): 495-509.
• Chemerinsky, Erwin. "The Supreme Court and the Fourteenth Amendment: The Unfulfilled Promise." Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review. 25 (1992): 1143-1158.
• Hughes, James A. "Equal Protection and Due Process: Contrasting Methods of Review Under Fourteenth Amendment Doctrine." Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review. Vol. 14 no. 2 (1979): 529-574.
• Koppleman, Andrew and Donald Rebstock. "On Affirmative Action and Truly Individualized Consideration." Northwestern University Law Review. Vol. 2 no. 1 (December 14, 2006): 235-237.
• Perry, Michael J. "The Fourteenth Amendment and the Supreme Court." Loyola University Chicago Law Review. Vol. 38 (2006): 101-110.

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