Support your local PBS station in our mission to inspire, enrich, and educate.

Thus, the Equal Protection Clause can be understood only as an organic part of the Fourteenth Amendment and in the broader context of all the Reconstruction amendments. Under current Supreme Court ...

Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude ...

Most of Reconstruction legislation is far ahead ... did not do it under the Fourteenth Amendment. The Fourteenth Amendment has still not been interpreted to allow Congress to bar private ...

Federal policy on slavery and race, particularly the three Reconstruction amendments, are the best-known legal innovations of the era. Change, however, permeated all levels of the legal system, ...