The Fourteenth Amendment

620 Words2 Pages

In 1868, the United States Congress adopted the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution to secure citizenship rights and equal protection laws for all Americans, particularly former slaves who had been recently freed ____. The Amendment consisted of several clauses aimed to protect targeted minorities on issues from holding citizenship to guaranteeing due process. One of the most striking was the Equal Protection Clause, which required each state to provide equal protection to all people in its jurisdiction. (Additional sentence or two to summarize clause in greater depth, then allow for transition.) During the 1950s and 1960, the United States continued to renovate its social policies to address inequalities present among its citizens. Much of this change was aided by the Supreme Court, which found government-sponsored racial segregation unconstitutional, and worked to strike down infringing state and federal legislation. In its decision during Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, the Supreme Court ruled that the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment invalid...

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