The 14th Amendment Was Meant to Protect Black People — What Happened?

Описание: The Fourteenth Amendment is often spoken of as a triumph of American democracy — a constitutional promise of citizenship, equality, and protection under the law. But what if that promise was broken almost as soon as it was made?

This video explores the untold history behind the Fourteenth Amendment and the devastating gap between what it was meant to do and what actually happened. Written in the aftermath of slavery, the amendment was designed specifically to protect newly freed Black Americans from hostile state governments, racial terror, and legal systems determined to preserve white supremacy. For a brief moment during Reconstruction, that promise felt real. Black citizens voted, held office, built institutions, and demanded the rights the Constitution now guaranteed them.

Then the nation retreated.

Through court decisions, political compromises, and deliberate inaction, the Fourteenth Amendment was slowly stripped of its power. Federal protection collapsed. Jim Crow rose. Segregation was legalized. Racial violence flourished unchecked. And one of the most powerful amendments ever written became a hollow shield for the very people it was supposed to defend.

This video traces how the Supreme Court, Congress, and the broader American public abandoned the amendment’s original purpose, how corporations were granted protections Black citizens were denied, and how the struggle to reclaim the Fourteenth Amendment’s promise continues into the present day. This is not just a story about the past — it is a warning about how easily justice can be rewritten when power goes unchallenged.

If you want to understand how America’s most important civil rights amendment was weakened, distorted, and betrayed — and why it still matters today — this is a story you need to hear.

---

References

Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877

David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery

Michael Kent Curtis, No State Shall Abridge: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Bill of Rights

Charles Sumner, Congressional speeches on Reconstruction and civil rights

U.S. Congressional debates on the Fourteenth Amendment, 1866–1868

U.S. Supreme Court decisions: The Slaughter-House Cases (1873), United States v. Cruikshank (1876), Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), Brown v. Board of Education (1954)