What Is The 14th Amendment Essay

In 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment was added to the Constitution because of the concern related to the status of protection extended to the newly freed slaves against mistreatment by the states recently freed slaves. The Fourteenth Amendment offered a solution to these discriminatory laws simply guaranteeing “due process of law”, requiring the legal system to provide fundamentally fair trial procedures and “equal protection of laws”, and thereby requiring the government to treat all persons with equal respect. Post Civil War, Congress submitted to the states certain amendments as part of its reconstruction program to guarantee equal civil and legal rights to black citizens .
The major provision of the 14th amendment was to grant citizenship
For example, a law that prohibits murder discriminates against murderers. But the Equal Protection Clause requires that the state ‘shall state’ a good reason or a ‘rational basis’ for such choices meeting a much higher burden to justify such classifications.
Racial discrimination has a noxious past in the United States. In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Supreme Court upheld racially segregated public facilities, in a doctrine of “separate but equal.” But in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Court reversed this doctrine holding that the doctrine of “separate but equal” in which the black and white races were segregated in public schools and other places of public accommodations, was “inherently unequal” and denied African Americans “equal protection of the laws.” Even in cases of affirmative action, where the government is seeking to counter the effects of past discrimination in education and employment, the Supreme Court has ruled that racial classifications are “inherently suspect.” Brown relied on the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to strike down racial segregation in public schools. It is widely accepted that when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, it was not thought to outlaw racial segregation in public
Ferguson, the decision identified with “separate but equal”. But the best justification of Brown is that it followed from a line of precedents that had steadily eroded “separate but equal”; Brown was just the last step in a progression." Plessy, decided in 1896, upheld a state law requiring railroads to provide “equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races.” In the three decades following Plessy, the Court applied the "separate but equal" principle in two cases involving education without reconsidering its validity. But at the same time, the Court began to sow some of the seeds of the common law development that eventually did away with “separate but