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Cardozo Law Review

Abstract

The thesis of Professor Donald Nieman's paper, "From Slaves to Citizens: African-Americans, Rights Consciousness, and Reconstruction," is that the nation experienced a revolution in the United States Constitution and in the consciousness of AfricanAmericans. According to Professor Nieman, the Reconstruction Amendments represented "a dramatic departure from antebellum constitutional principles," because the Thirteenth Amendment reversed the pre-Civil War constitutional guarantee of slavery and "abolish[ed] slavery by federal authority." The Fourteenth Amendment rejected the Supreme Court's "racially-based definition of citizenship [in Dred Scott v. Sandford], clearly establishing a color-blind citizenship" and the Fifteenth Amendment "wrote the principle of equality into the Constitution." Professor Nieman also states that "in the course of a decade, the nation had moved from slavery to freedom, and from a constitutional order that sanctioned white supremacy to one that embraced equality of civil and political rights."

Keywords

Fourteenth Amendment, Government (General), Sentencing and Punishment, Penology

Disciplines

Fourteenth Amendment | Law

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