14th Amendment Essay

The Fourteenth Amendment What amendment to the United States constitution is considered to be illegally ratified? What amendment both grants the right to vote to men and then takes away that right to vote? If you answered the fourteenth amendment to both questions you would be right. Although most people think of the fourteenth amendment as being a "civil rights" amendment, it also defines citizenship, voting rights, and states congressional representatives and electors numbers. In this paper I will talk about how the passage of the fourteenth amendment was a relevant event in history, how it impacts our country today, how it is viewed as the civil rights amendment in our textbook, how it has both positive and negative elements to it,

The Fourteenth Amendment is the main source of power for most of the laws concerning affirmative action, desegregation, hate crimes, voting, and congressional representation that are used today. Without the fourteenth amendment there would have been no basis for the civil rights movement, we would still have separate facilities for blacks and whites. We would have no base for determining citizenship, voting rights, or congressional representation.

The textbook discusses Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution as being primarily an amendment which focuses on civil rights. Prior to the fourteenth amendment there were no definitions of civil rights. Although originally designed to define and protect the rights of freed slaves the phrase "equal protection of the law" became one of the most important and widely used clauses of the constitution. Since the early 1900's many different groups have used the fourteenth amendment as a springboard to launch an "equal rights" or "equal protection" campaign for many different minority

In reality, the result of the fourteenth amendment was that the northern states had a political and economic advantage over the southern states. The Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution affects us today by granting citizenship, civil rights, and congressional representation. Although civil rights makes up a very small part of the fourteenth amendment the textbook chose this one area to focus on. The positive elements of the fourteenth amendment are citizenship, civil rights, and equal representation in congress. The fourteenth amendment defined a citizen as being anyone who was born within the United States. The negative elements of the fourteenth amendment are twofold; First, it only established voting rights for men; and secondly, the way the fourteenth amendment was used by the northern states against the southern states. By doing so the fourteenth amendment disallowed women the right to vote. By in large, the fourteenth amendment virtually denied the right to vote to almost all southern white