The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified on July 9, 1868. It granted citizenship to all persons, born or naturalized in the United States. It forbids states from denying any person "life, liberty, or property, without due process of the law" or to "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." An example of Supreme Court Case involving the Fourteenth Amendment is Plessy v. Ferguson. Homer Adolph Plessy was a successful Louisiana businessman. He lived in Baton Rouge. He was comfortable in both racial groups as he had one African-American grandparent. He did not consider himself African-American but Louisiana law considered him as "octaroon". This meant one-eighth African-American. …show more content…
The state of Louisiana argued that each state has the right to make rules to protect public safety. Louisiana claimed it was its public will to have segregated facilities. They claimed the separate facilities were equal and satisfied the Fourteenth Amendment and white citizens. Justice Henry B. Brown of Michigan delivered the court decision. It was a 7 to 1 decision that stated Louisiana law did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment. He stated that the Fourteenth Amendment was not intended to give African-Americans social equality but only political and civil equality with white people. Brown wrote that "legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts or to abolish distinctions based upon physical differences, and attempt to do so can only result in accentuating the difficulties of the present situation. " The court stated that segregation was legal and constitutional as long as "facilities were equal". Segregation remained after that for nearly sixty years. An example for my life would be that some high school students wore certain shorts to school. The school had a policy of the length of the shorts. Students were pulled out of classes and sent
Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (U.S. 1896) gave states the legal right to require persons of different races to use separate but equal segregated facilities. But that ruling was struck down in the landmark case of Brown v. Bd. of Educ. , 347 U.S. 483 (U.S. 1954), In that case the court held that separate but equal public schools based on race is a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and is unconstitutional. In upholding that decision, Cooper v. Aaron held that state governments must comply with Supreme Court rulings and court orders based on the its interpretation of the
Notаbly absent from the opinion, as it was in Plessy, is any citаtion to a Supreme Court cаse that considered whether the prаctice of segregating schools was a violation of the Fourteenth Аmendment. It was an open question for the Court. The Court аdmitted that the precedent to which it cited involved discriminаtion between whites and blacks rаther thаn other rаces. However, the Court found no аppreciable difference here—"the decision is within the discretion of the state in regulating its public schools, and does not conflict with the Fourteenth Аmendment."
To understand the question, focusing on the court cases of Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education, we must first understand each court case on its own. Plessy v. Ferguson resulted in the year 1896. The case involved the 1890s Louisiana law that basically stated that there were separate railway carriages that were specifically labeled for blacks only and whites only. Plessy v. Ferguson involved Homer Plessy, who was seven-eighths white and one-eighth black and appeared to look like a white man. Plessy took an open seat in a white only railway car.
The 14th Amendment is the right for those born on American soil to automatically become a citizen. Although there are some who wish to see a revision to the 14th Amendment, citizenship should continue to be based on birth as Chaves states in “The Case for Birthright Citizenship”. The 14th Amendment is seen as outdated by some Americans. The 14th Amendment was created for free slaves.
The case occurred when Homer Plessy refused to sit in the Jim Crow car, which violated the Louisiana law and was put before Judge John H. Ferguson to challenge whether the state law conflicted with the Constitution or not. Indeed, in 1896, Ferguson concluded that the law was merely a legal distinction between two races and did not conflict with 13th amendment law. Society then adopted a system of “separate but equal” that emphasized separate facilities for blacks and whites
“We all should know that diversity makes for a rich tapestry, and we must understand that all the threads of the tapestry are equal in value no matter what their color.”, says Maya Angelou putting in the spotlight the judgment of people based on how they look. The cases of Dred Scott vs. Sanford, Plessy vs. Ferguson, and Loving vs. Virginia all attempt to prove this point during the civil rights movement. These cases also make apparent the segregation of blacks in the court system. In 1864, the question of having freedom was brought into the courtroom by Dred and Harriet Scott in St. Louis City. Dred and Harriet Scott had been held captive in free territory and then brought back to a slave state.
The contents of these laws included the supposed “separate but equal” accommodations of railway cars between the races and attempted to re-authorize the authority of the coaches driving these railway cars by reinstating the ability to assign people spots on railway cars “on account of the race they belong to.” Furthermore, an attempt to justify the enforced segregation bestowed upon the people of Louisiana was made following the words “neither abridges the privileges or immunities of the colored man, deprives him of his property without due process of law, nor denies him the equal protection of the laws, within the meaning of the 14th Amendment.” This statement attempts to use the 14th amendment, which
The year of 1965 the black community let out a collective victory cry. They had finally gotten the rights they fought hard for. They could at last vote, go to school and college, and got the working condition they deserve. They couldn 't have done it without Martin Luther King Jr., but there were a slew of cases that were tried and further assisted in opening the black community 's opportunity pool. They were well known cases, like the Plessy vs. Ferguson, Brown vs. Board of Education, and the Regents of the University vs. Bakke, all very influential cases in the fight for rights.
The 14th Amendment was ratified to the Constitution on July 9, 1868 and it allowed citizenship to all the people that were born or naturalized in the United States. The 14th Amendment substantially enlarged the safety of civil rights to all American citizens and is mentioned in more legal action than any other amendment. The Fourteenth Amendment involves essential ideas, advantages, exceptions, citizenship, due process, and equivalent protection. All of these involvements are included in Section One, also known as the Naturalization Clause. Before the Fourteenth Amendment was included, people that lived in the states were considered citizens of the United States.
Over time, there have been many interpretations in the meaning of the 14th Amendment due to the use of both explicit and implicit language in the document. Having been written at a time when African-Americans were starting to get their rights. For some at that time, the 14th Amendment meant to just give African-Americans rights but as time progressed, the interpretation of the amendment was challenged and began to change. The 13th Amendment’s meaning is to end slavery in the United States except as a punishment for a crime. The 13th Amendment didn’t help African-Americans because states passed the Jim Crow laws.
The 14th amendment is split into five sections. Section one is the most important of them all and it states, “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.” (The Constitution 2014). However it was put to test in the south early on.
Ferguson was a court case that arose in Louisiana, and it created a drastically different atmosphere in 1896. This court case gave state laws that required black and white people to use separate facilities. The case came into light when Homer Plessy, an African-American, never moved to the “colored only” section on a train. Plessy was said to have had his Fourteenth Amendment violated because the separated facilities were discriminating; however the Court stated that the separate facilities were separate yet equal. Separate yet equal means that people have the same rights, but are separated by their race, religion, and wealth.
Homer Plessy was seven-eighths white and one-eighth black and agreed to test the constitution parts of the Separate Car Law. In 1892, Homer Plessy was arrested because he bought a ticket for a trip and sat down in an empty seat in a white-only train car. Hon. John H. Ferguson of the U.S. District Court dismissed Homer’s claims that his arrest was unconstitutional.
It was a 7 to 1 decision. The decision was that separate but equal was legal as long as no discrimination was shown. They believed that "so long as separate facilities were actually qualitatively equal, the constitution did not prohibit segregation in the view of the majority of the court," as stated in the second
The ruling thus lent high judicial support to racial and ethnic discrimination and led to wider spread of the segregation between Whites and Blacks in the Southern United States. The great oppressive consequence from this was discrimination against African American minority from the socio-political opportunity to share the same facilities with the mainstream Whites, which in most of the cases the separate facilities for African Americans were inferior to those for Whites in actuality. The doctrine of “separate but equal” hence encourages two-tiered pluralism in U.S. as it privileged the non-Hispanic Whites over other racial and ethnic minority