The Fourteenth Amendment was a landmark for civil rights in the United States, though it did not accomplish the means it was intended for, courtesy of a Southern sympathetic Supreme Court. The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, declaring that all persons in the United States were guaranteed civil rights, largely targeted at recently freed slaves after the Civil War. The amendment, which was mainly written by John Bingham, a Radical Republican representative from Ohio, was progressive. He believed “the law crowned ‘the rights of persons made in the image of the Almighty’” as he insisted “on securing the rights of Negroes” (Beauregard). While the amendment was progressive on paper and should have given equal rights to African-Americans, the South found loopholes to get around equality, to which the Supreme Court turned a blind eye, betraying the vision of Bingham and his …show more content…
This act was declared unconstitutional as the Fourteenth Amendment protected private, not statewide discrimination. Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 was retaliation against state discrimination against African Americans, but would ultimately continue to support the prejudice against black citizens. Homer Plessy, a man who was only one-eighth black, sat in a white-only car on a train going to New Orleans, Louisiana. For being a fraction black, he was arrested, tried and convicted as a result of sitting in a white car. As the train was public transportation, the Fourteenth Amendment could not protect Plessy in his Supreme Court case, in which his conviction was verified. Plessy v. Ferguson argued that “separate accommodations” were not necessarily unequal accommodations. . . separation and equality were wholly separate ideas” (Lepore, 359). Separate but equal accommodations rose following this