14th amendment protection12/7/2023 ![]() ![]() Police brutality and murder escalated in the summer of 1866, as Congress completed its work on the amendment and the ratification process began. The historian Leon Litwack has observed that “how many black men and women were beaten, flogged, mutilated, or murdered in the first years of emancipation will never be known.” Still, the report made clear that the goal of protecting Black bodies from police abuse of power was fundamental to the Fourteenth Amendment. The committee’s report captured only a small slice of the violence. In vivid, terrible detail, the report cataloged how police officers acted “ in respect to violence and ill usage, in every way equal to the old days of slavery” how they arrested Black Americans as vagrants “ simply because they did not have in their pockets certificates of employment from their former owners or other white citizens” and how the police “ go in squads and search houses and seize arms,” fleecing Black people of their possessions.ĭerecka Purnell: How I became a police abolitionist ![]() In all these ways, the police and the criminal-justice system functioned as a lever to take freedom-and even life itself-from Black people. The committee’s report-released in June 1866 and widely distributed across the country-made the case for securing “the civil rights and privileges of all citizens in all parts of the republic.” If southern states were left to their own devices, Black people “could hardly live in safety” and “acts of cruelty, oppression and murder” would flourish.įive different kinds of police abuse of power were detailed in the report: home invasions, theft of personal property, indiscriminate and pretextual arrests, wanton state-sponsored racial violence, and a refusal to protect Black people from private violence. The committee drafted the Fourteenth Amendment, and its findings and the testimony it heard bore directly on the amendment it wrote. The committee took testimony from white southerners, Black Americans seeking to enjoy freedom for the first time, and Union officers working in the South, learning firsthand of the gruesome violence and systemic violation of fundamental rights. Some of the leading lights of the 39th Congress, including Senator Jacob Howard and Representatives John Bingham and Thaddeus Stevens, served on the 15-person bipartisan committee. In 1866, Congress formed the Joint Committee on Reconstruction to investigate conditions in the South. The history of how the amendment came to be reveals that foundational promise. Equal citizenship and true freedom could not be enjoyed without limiting police abuses. Open-ended police power, the framers of the amendment recognized, was a tool of racial oppression and violence. The Fourteenth Amendment struck at centuries of history that permitted Black bodies to be violated indiscriminately, instead promising personal security to all. This reflected the obvious and most basic truth that bodily integrity and security are fundamental to freedom. In doing so, the Fourteenth Amendment embedded directly in the Constitution the idea that violence against Black people must stop. Together, these guarantees sought to put an end to racialized policing practices. Tyler: The first step is figuring out what police are for The requirement of equal protection ended “ the injustice of subjecting one caste of persons to a code not applicable to another,” according to Howard. Second, as Senator Jacob Howard-one of the amendment’s framers-explained in congressional debates, its guarantee of “the equal protection of the laws” demanded “ one measure of justice” for all persons, regardless of race. State police could not indiscriminately search and seize Black Americans. First, it required states to respect basic fundamental rights, including those to life and personal security. The Fourteenth Amendment effected a fundamental transformation in the constitutional law of policing in two respects. The Fourteenth Amendment, written the next year and ratified in 1868, vindicated their demands for equal justice, human dignity, and bodily security. “Now we are free,” they insisted, “we do not want to be hunted … All we ask is justice and to be treated like humane beings.” They recalled vividly “the yelping of bloodhounds and tareing of our fellow servants To pisces” by slave patrols, and called for an end to these violent abuses. ![]() On December 3, 1865, a group of Black Mississippians wrote to the state’s governor, demanding respect for their newly won freedom. ![]()
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