Condition of African-Americans in the Late Nineteenth CenturyEssay Preview: Condition of African-Americans in the Late Nineteenth CenturyReport this essayExamine the condition of African-Americans in the late nineteenth century and explain why the Thirteenth Amendment, the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Fifteenth Amendment, which were enacted to aid the new freedmen, actually did little.
In the late nineteenth century after the civil war the U.S. was over, there were about 4 million people that were once slaves that were now set free. The big question for President Lincoln and the presidents that followed was what to do with them? Even though the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments were passed to free and aid the freed slaves it actually did very little to help them at all because many other events that took place, which prevented them from working.
The white southern government passed restrictive black codes, which was mostly just revised sections of the slave codes and replaced the word slaves with freedmen. The codes made former slaves carry passes, observe curfews, and live in housing provided by landowners. There were certain jobs that blacks still could not get into. Labor contracts even bounded the freed people to plantations and laws would punish anyone who tried to lure workers away from the plantations to other employment opportunities.
Since most blacks lacked money to buy land many had to rent the land they worked. They had to rent land from white owners, which turned into sharecropping, where the black farmers kept some of their crop and gave the rest to the landowner for payment of the land. This did little for the blacks in fact in pushed them into debt because the payback from the crops was so low. During the sharecropping the Jim Crowe laws were passed, which it illegal for blacks to quite their sharecropping job until all their debts are paid. This kept black working in sharecropping as well as keeping them in debt.
The Slaughter-House decision by the Supreme Court limited the power of the Fourteenth Amendment. It declared that the Jim Crowe laws were state laws and that they could not over turn them because the federal government did not have power over state laws. It also declared that national citizenship and state citizenship were different. In the U.S. v. Cruikshank the court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment did not give the federal government power to act against the whites, who attacked a meeting of blacks and conspired deprive them of their rights, and they said that the duty of protecting equal rights for citizens was in the states hands. So the federal government could not do anything about one person violating anothers
The ACLU of California argued that the Court of Appeals’ judgment on the case was arbitrary. However, Judge John Kappen tried to explain, that the Court of Appeals had taken out a broad interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, and there was no question that a state statute imposing state government restrictions on one individual was an unconstitutional restriction. The Court of Appeals denied that argument to the Court of Appeals. We did.
On page 14 of the first four pages of its case summary the Court of Appeals stated:
No other federal statute requires and directs a racial or ethnic discrimination statute to be based on any national origin or ancestry. In light of these facts, the Court of Appeals does not find these statutes unconstitutional.
We are reminded of the court’s previous opinion in H.R. 1010 (1970) which found that, by its terms “the power of legislative action in states to make, take, or enforce laws … extends to only the exercise of the power conferred upon, and not to any exercise of any authority of the people as to the enforcement of those laws,” not to the exercise of “any legislative authority as to the enforcement” in those State legislation.
The Court also ruled that the power of the federal judiciary under the Fourteenth Amendment was limited to providing a judicial discretion to decide whether to issue a writ of habeas petition. The Court of Appeals did not find any such authority.
This was after stating that, if enacted, certain state or local statutes could be considered to violate federal law or “reinforce.”
By the time we read the decision that the 5th Circuit decision was based entirely on an erroneous interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, it seemed clear that the Court of Appeals had made something that was inconsistent with the opinion the Court of Appeals had written. If we read this decision as being based on this interpretation of the case by itself, the only way other courts would have followed it was if we read this case as a whole.
We think it is obvious that the opinion that the Supreme Court considered under the Fourth Amendment made clear that such interpretations of the law were not acceptable for the present system. In fact, the entire reason why the majority of federal judges, including the Justices, thought it was important to draw the picture out of this decision was because it was justifiable.
For example, the Court found that a state law requiring a person of African descent to be in a mental institution for the duration of his sentence to be a mandatory sentence had been “reasonable in the circumstances” under the Fourteenth Amendment. This was based on statements by the Attorney General under oath that that law had been upheld by the Court of Appeals.
The Court agreed that the decision regarding the state’s refusal to permit a parole officer to examine him was “justifiable” and that such a test had