On This Day: The 14th Amendment

On this day in history, July 28th, 1868, the 14th Amendment, which guaranteed African Americans citizenship and all its privileges, was officially adopted into the U.S. Constitution.

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.  “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, which legalized segregation, was finally struck down by the Supreme Court in its ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.