[PART 1/3]

This is pretty accurate. To show this, I’ll make a sort of historical "scorecard," tallying how the amendment has helped African Americans, and how it helped business corporations.

Summary

For African Americans:

• The Fourteenth Amendment could have been a source for civil rights legislation, but this mostly didn’t happen.
• The greatest benefit of the Fourteenth Amendment was a series of Equal Protection decisions in the Warren Court. These victories were atypical and not representative of most of history. Even the greatest case, Brown v. Board, was remarkably ineffective at actually integrating schools.
• The Due Process Clause applied the Bill of Rights to the states. This helped the Civil Rights Movement organize; otherwise, its effects were more limited.
• It is possible there was some cultural shift in favor of rights and equality due to the amendment.

For business corporations:

• The Due Process Clause was a boon to business corporations in the early 20th century, and may be trending that way again.
• The application of the Bill of Rights to the states is currently helping big business win deregulation under the right to “free speech.”
• Other parts of the Fourteenth Amendment haven’t had much impact.

Overall, I’d say the two groups are within striking distance when it comes to gains from the Fourteenth Amendment. If you take out the Warren Court of the 1950s and 60s, it is clear that big business is a much bigger winner. But with the Warren Court, it’s a close call.

Now, the evidence. I’ll walk through the Fourteenth Amendment section by section. The Fourteenth Amendment is a sprawling topic, so sit back. This could take some time.

Congressional Enforcement (Section 5)

Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment was expected to be the most important: “Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.” In other words, Congress was empowered to pass civil rights legislation. During the Reconstruction Era, Congress did just this, creating things like the Enforcement Acts to fight the KKK, the Freedmen's Bureau, and the Civil Rights Acts of 1875. Many people don’t know this, but the 1875 Act ordered the desegregation of “public accommodations” (retail, restaurants, hotels) almost a century before the Civil Rights Movement. That’s right, lunch counter sit-ins in the 1960s were trying to accomplish something that Congress had actually passed in the 1870s.

If the 1875 act had been enforced, the Fourteenth Amendment would have generated a real success for African Americans, greater than any triumph for big business. It was not enforced, however, and it’s important to look at why. First, white Southerners wouldn’t have accepted integration except with a gun to the head—but at just that moment, Northern patience with Reconstruction was wearing thin. Federal troops would leave the South just two years later, in 1877.

Second, the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court is going to look like a villain in the tale I’m about to tell. That’s because the Court’s record on both of the things you asked about—racial equality, and corporate power—is in fact pretty lousy. Put simply, the Reconstruction Court was in a sort of denial that the Reconstruction Amendments had happened. In case after case, the Supreme Court found ways to ignore the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, usually with the following logic:

“We can’t believe the Civil War Amendments actually mean what they say, because if we took them literally, it would radically alter the United States system of government. It would give the national government vastly more power over the states.”

To which Radical Republicans would say, “Um, yes? That’s exactly what we were trying to do. This thing called the Civil War—did you notice it?—and the Reconstruction amendments, they did in fact radically alter the United States system of government.”

But the Court didn’t see it that way, instead taking a “see no evil” approach to racial injustice. The most famous case is Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), where the Court upheld segregated rail cars (“separate but equal”). But my favorite example is United States v. Reese (1876)—it deals with the 15th Amendment, not the 14th, but it gets the flavor across. In Reese, an African American man in Kentucky wanted to vote (he even paid his poll tax), but was forbidden to do so by an election official. To paraphrase, the Court said, “How do you know it was because the voter was black? Maybe the poll worker just didn’t like the guy!” This meant that anyone trying to prove a 15th Amendment violation would have to show that the denial of suffrage was based explicitly on race—not an easy thing to do.

With the justices showing a nearly willful disregard for the Civil War Amendments, it’s no surprise the Court struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875 (in the Civil Rights Cases of 1883). No way, said the Court, did the 14th Amendment confer that kind of power on Congress. Between a lack of political willpower, and a hostile Supreme Court, Congress stopped trying to pass civil rights legislation for nearly a hundred years. Even when Congress passed landmark civil rights legislation in the 1960s, those laws had to be based on other parts of the Constitution, not the 14th Amendment.

To summarize: Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment was theoretically a powerful tool by which Congress could protect African Americans, but as history actually panned out, it didn’t work that way. No impact on business corporations.

Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment

So, even if the Fourteenth Amendment wasn’t a major source of civil rights legislation, Section 1 has some rights protections that have legal force of their own. “Equal protection of the laws”; “due process.” These clauses should have helped African Americans win civil rights cases in the courts, right?

Well, maybe. We’ve already seen how the Supreme Court was remarkably unsympathetic to African American plaintiffs during and after Reconstruction. Let’s go clause by clause and see how things developed.

Citizenship Clause

The Fourteenth Amendment unequivocally says that African Americans, including former slaves, are citizens of the United States, and of the state wherein they reside. This is a clear and straightforward improvement over Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), which denied citizenship even to freed blacks.

However, citizenship doesn’t necessarily confer suffrage, economic opportunity, equal dignity, or protection from violence. So let’s keep going.

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