July 28th...This Day in History (Now with links to other events)

14th Amendment adopted 1868

 

Following its ratification by the necessary three-quarters of U.S. states, the 14th Amendment, guaranteeing to African Americans citizenship and all its privileges, is officially adopted into the U.S. Constitution.

Two years after the Civil War, the Reconstruction Acts of 1867 divided the South into five military districts, where new state governments, based on universal manhood suffrage, were to be established. Thus began the period known as Radical Reconstruction, which saw the 14th Amendment, which had been passed by Congress in 1866, ratified in July 1868. The amendment resolved pre-Civil War questions of African American citizenship by stating that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States…are citizens of the United States and of the state in which they reside.” The amendment then reaffirmed the privileges and rights of all citizens, and granted all these citizens the “equal protection of the laws.”

In the decades after its adoption, the equal protection clause was cited by a number of African American activists who argued that racial segregation denied them the equal protection of law. However, in 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that states could constitutionally provide segregated facilities for African Americans, so long as they were equal to those afforded white persons. The Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which announced federal toleration of the so-called “separate but equal” doctrine, was eventually used to justify segregating all public facilities, including railroad cars, restaurants, hospitals, and schools. However, “colored” facilities were never equal to their white counterparts, and African Americans suffered through decades of debilitating discrimination in the South and elsewhere. In 1954, Plessy v. Ferguson was finally struck down by the Supreme Court in its ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

 (More Events on This Day in History)

• American Revolution

• 1776 Sargent and Hutchinson arrive at Horn’s Hook, New York

• Automotive

• 1935 Tazio Nuvolari triumphs over Germans at the Nurburgring

• Civil War

• 1864 Battle of Ezra Church begins

• Cold War

• 1945 U.S. Senate approves United Nations charter

• Crime

• 1990 A soft drink containing liquid cocaine sickens an unsuspecting drinker

• Disaster

• 1945 Plane crashes into Empire State Building

• General Interest

• 1932 Bonus Marchers evicted by U.S. Army
• 1976 Worst modern earthquake

• Hollywood

• 1978 Animal House released

• Literary

• 1814 Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin elope to France

• Music

• 1901 Rudy Vallée is born

• Old West

• 1923 Indian agent James McLaughlin dies

• Presidential

• 1929 Future first lady Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy is born

• Sports

• 1991 Dennis Martinez pitches perfect game

• Vietnam War

• 1965 Johnson announces more troops to Vietnam
• 1972 CIA reports minor damage done to North Vietnam’s dikes

• World War I

• 1914 Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia

• World War II

• 1943 Hamburg suffers a firestorm