14th Amendment For African American In Kings
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FAQ
Which of the following was a loophole in the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution? It could not stop the private sector from refusing to employ and serve nonwhites.
The original Constitution didn't define citizenship, nor did it give any guarantees of equality. But the 14th Amendment enabled any group of Americans to turn to the Federal government if they faced discrimination and gave them the legal tools to demand redress, just as King did on that December night in Alabama.
The Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution contains a number of important concepts, most famously state action, privileges or immunities, citizenship, due process, and equal protection—all of which are contained in Section One.
The Fourteenth Amendment only applies to actions by state governments (state actions), not private actions. Consider, for example, Obergefell, which involved the fundamental right to marry. Some state laws interfered with that right.
Instead, it barred states from denying suffrage based on race, opening a large loophole for literacy, land ownership, or other requirements. It was a loophole that Southern states quickly exploited to effectively ban all blacks from the polls, and that wasn't rectified until the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965.
The loophole is made possible by the United States' longstanding policy of granting citizenship to children born within its territorial borders regardless of whether the parents of such children have violated the nation's sovereignty by crossing the border illegally.
However, its attempt to guarantee civil rights was circumvented for many decades by the post-Reconstruction-era black codes, Jim Crow laws, and the U.S. Supreme Court's “separate but equal” ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).
A major provision of the 14th Amendment was to grant citizenship to “All persons born or naturalized in the United States,” thereby granting citizenship to formerly enslaved people.
The 14th Amendment granted U.S. citizenship to former slaves and contained three new limits on state power: a state shall not violate a citizen's privileges or immunities; shall not deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; and must guarantee all persons equal protection of the laws.
The Fourteenth Amendment, particularly Section 1's wording of due process and equal protection, would be extensively used in the 20th and early 21st centuries, such as the Supreme Court decisions of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (racial discrimination in public schools unconstitutional), Loving v.
