Sherrilyn Ifill - The Other Constitutional Crisis - the 14th Amendment

Amendment XIV

Section 1.

All persons born or naturalized 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.

  Sherrilyn Ifill - The Other Constitutional Crisis - the 14th Amendment

By Sherrilyn Ifill [Vernon Jordan, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Civil Rights, Howard Law School; Fmr Pres. & Dir-Counsel, NAACP LDF]

***There are those who say we are once again fighting the Civil War. Again, I disagree. That war was fought and won. What has been resisted since then is the new country that was stitched together by the framers of the Civil War Amendments, who stitched together from the frayed garment of a war weary republic, a new nation. 

Their names – John Bingham, Charles Sumner, Thaddeus Stevens, and others – should be as familiar to us as Hamilton, Jefferson, and Madison. They created the blueprint for a new nation – one without caste in which, as the Declaration of Independence promised “all men are created equal.” 

They corrected the errors and compromises that dotted our original Constitution (like the 3/5 compromise that measured Black personhood in fractions) - compromises that made our march towards Civil War inevitable. And their work was influenced by other founders – Frederick Douglass, participants in the many Colored Conventions who shared petitions with their Congress, abolitionists, suffragists, and the enslaved themselves, whose relentless pursuit of freedom confirmed the fundamental humanity of Black people held in bondage.