The Fourteenth Amendment was intended to undo the attempts of the southern states to enforce limits on African Americans in both political and social spheres through the Black Codes. However, the ratification of the amendment achieved little real change in the life of the everyday African American.
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On 18 February 2013, Mississippi became the last state to officially ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, formally overturning slavery. Their refusal to ratify the amendment represents one example of the disconnection between the way the law says society should behave and actual social practices. In the early twentieth century, the centrality of the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment to national memory spurred the march toward civil rights for African Americans. While these laws were certainly momentous, they were not decisive, nor were they effective in bringing about racial equality. The Thirteenth Amendment failed to better the lives of ex-slaves because it did not specify how to treat former slaves, but merely abolished the existence of the institution. The Fourteenth Amendment addressed this omission, but the enforcement of this document was limited, especially on the part of the Supreme Court and the President.
Much has been written about the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment and the subsequent challenges in interpreting the document. In his 1957 article “There Is No ‘Fourteenth Amendment,’” David Lawrence, founder and longtime columnist for U.S. News and World Report, argues that the Fourteenth Amendment was never a valid document.Three-fourths of the states that comprised the union at the time needed to ratify the amendment. This did not happen, according to Lawrence, and since then, the courts have been acting under false pretenses. His interpretation of history illustrates the southern states’ reluctance to ratify the amendment and the courts’ unwillingness to interpret it as part of the ongoing struggle society against the idea of incorporation of the Fourteenth Amendment.1 Historian Irving Brant considers the Fourteenth Amendment’s incorporation in his book The Bill of Rights: Its Origin and Meaning. He argues that the amendment was intended to overturn those decisions of the Supreme Court that upheld the states’ right to violate the Bill of Rights, such as the case Dred Scott v. Sandford, which denied that African Americans were citizens of the United States. This 1857 decision allowed states to create laws like the Fugitive Slave Act and other legislation that treated slaves as property. Brant goes on to argue that the framers’ intent in writing the Fourteenth Amendment was not carried out until the mid-20th century, over eighty years after it was ratified.2
Connecting these two concepts, it is clear that white society’s reluctance to accept freedmen as equals led to white society’s denial of freedmen’s civil rights. The unwillingness of many whites to accept the change in the social status of freedmen was mirrored in the court’s limited interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment in cases such as Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Additionally, the Presidents of the late nineteenth century could have used their power and influence to push for greater equality among the races. Whether the reluctance to fully enact and enforce the Fourteenth Amendment was caused by the fact that the justices and the President were themselves part of a society that would not accept African Americans as equals or their fear of societal backlash against any efforts to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment is unclear. What is clear is that white society’s prejudices affected the courts in a way that prevented the legal system from upholding the amendment. The Fourteenth Amendment was intended to undo the attempts of the southern states to enforce limits on African Americans in both political and social spheres through the Black Codes. However, the ratification of the amendment achieved little real change in the life of the everyday African American. The unwillingness of the Supreme Court and the President to enforce the de jure equality of African Americans outlined in the Fourteenth Amendment rendered the changes to the US Constitution impotent.
