The Fourteenth Amendment

Jon Pennington Dr. J.P. Girard U.S. Survey -1865- Present The Fourteenth Amendment 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 . . . The Fourteenth Amendment was initially ratified to safeguard the newly emancipated citizen from the annulment of his rights by the Southern states. …

…Constitution has served as the principal touchstone for legal debates over the meaning of equality and freedom in the United States. While originally structured to deal with the rights of freedmen, cases such as Brown vs. Board of Education, its construal came to be the legal core of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The fourteenth amendment was questionably the most significant of all. It drastically revolutionized the definition of the United States Citizen.