Content area
Full text
Toward a Wore Perfect Union
In 2018, as the nation commemorates the 150th Anniversary of the 14th Amendment, stakeholders in the justice system should reflect on our successes and failures along the continuum for equal justice, equal access, equal opportunity, and full inclusion. The 14th Amendment was ratified against the backdrop of slavery, exclusion of women and people of color, disenfranchisement, and white supremacy. It granted citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States and declared that no state could deprive any person of life, liberty, or property "without due process of law." As author Eric Foner writes in his essay The Checkered History of the Great 14th Amendment, it is "one of the most important constitutional Amendments in American history." In the short run, Foner notes, the equal protection clause had little practical effect, as Southern white resistance and northern complacency resulted in a "new system of racial subordination" that...