1868
14th Amendment adopted
Following its ratification by the necessary
three-quarters of U.S. states, the 14th Amendment, guaranteeing to African
Americans citizenship and all its privileges, is officially adopted into the
U.S. Constitution.
Two years after the Civil War, the
Reconstruction Acts of 1867 divided the South into five military districts,
where new state governments, based on universal manhood suffrage, were to be
established. Thus began the period known as Radical Reconstruction, which saw
the 14th Amendment, which had been passed by Congress in 1866, ratified in July
1868. The amendment resolved pre-Civil War questions of African American
citizenship by stating that “all persons born or naturalized in the United
States…are citizens of the United States and of the state in which they
reside.” The amendment then reaffirmed the privileges and rights of all
citizens, and granted all these citizens the “equal protection of the laws.”
In the decades after its adoption, the equal
protection clause was cited by a number of African American activists who
argued that racial segregation denied them the equal protection of law.
However, in 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson
that states could constitutionally provide segregated facilities for African
Americans, so long as they were equal to those afforded white persons. The Plessy
v. Ferguson decision, which announced federal toleration of the so-called
“separate but equal” doctrine, was eventually used to justify segregating all
public facilities, including railroad cars, restaurants, hospitals, and
schools. However, “colored” facilities were never equal to their white
counterparts, and African Americans suffered through decades of debilitating
discrimination in the South and elsewhere. In 1954, Plessy v. Ferguson
was finally struck down by the Supreme Court in its ruling in Brown v. Board
of Education of Topeka.