SHERRILYN IFILL: My name is Sherrilyn Ifill,
and I'm a civil rights lawyer.
I lead an amazing civil rights organization, the NAACP Legal
Defense Fund.
The work I do focuses on Black communities
and the rights of Black people in this country.
And all civil rights lawyers are fighting
for the full citizenship and dignity
of the people they represent.
I became a civil rights lawyer because I'm
a product of the civil rights movement.
We didn't have money, but we had dreams.
And we were growing up in a time when
new doors were opened for us.
And so I wanted to be part of the opportunity to not only,
I hope, educate, but also to encourage and inspire you
to believe that we can make change.
A very small group of people transformed the direction
of American democracy in the 20th century
and made it possible for me to even
be sitting here talking to you, made my life possible.
So I know it's possible.
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One of the reasons I'm on a crusade, if you will,
to talk about the 14th Amendment and to help people embrace
and understand the 14th Amendment
is because I think we tend to talk about our right
to be free from racial discrimination in this country
in terms that are not constitutional.
We talk about it as though it's about feelings,
about whether people are fair to us
or not, about the hearts of people
and whether people are racist in their heart,
whether they have a racist bone in their body when, in fact, we
ought to be talking about our right to be free
of discrimination, our right to full citizenship,
our right to full dignity as Americans as constitutionally
grounded, as compelled by the language
of our foundational document, as intended by the framers
of the 14th Amendment.
It doesn't matter what the feelings of white people are.
It matters what the Constitution says.
When we talk about the First Amendment,
when we talk about your right to free speech,
we don't premise it on the feelings of the person hearing
the speech.
When we talk about the Second Amendment--
think about people who are swaggering around with giant
weapons--
they don't talk about it in terms that are about feelings.
They say that the Second Amendment entitles
them to carry those weapons.
We don't talk about our right to be free of discrimination
as a constitutional imperative.
We know we should be free of discrimination.
We know we're entitled to equality.
But we don't ground it in that way.
And so it allows the conversation
to get loose and amorphous, and it allows emotion
to take the place of what should be
the clear certainty of our right to be full citizens.
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I could spend days just breaking down
the meaning of the 14th Amendment.
It's incredibly rich.
And I think when we tend to talk about it, we
skim over a lot of it because we have to,
and so I'll skim over it too.
But let me get to what I think are the most important parts.
The first line of the 14th Amendment
is among the most powerful provisions in the Constitution,
and it literally is responsible for America
looking like America looks.
And it says that every person born
in this country or naturalized is a citizen of this country.
Birthright citizenship-- that's how we describe it.
Now, that's powerful and important.
It was created for the purpose of ensuring
that Black people would be citizens
of this country after the Civil War.
Why did the framers of the 14th Amendment need to do that?
Well, first of all, they were enslaved
Black people who had not been considered citizens.
But it's also true that it was now unclear
that even free Black people were citizens.
In fact, many believed that no Black people
were citizens of the country because of the Supreme Court's
decision in the Dred Scott case in 1850, where the Supreme
Court essentially said that Black people had,
really, no rights that any white people had to respect.
So after the Civil War, we now needed a statement
of Black citizenship that would encompass both slave and free.
But what's the consequence of that one line?
The consequence of that one line is
that it becomes the basis upon which America can today
talk about itself, or people can talk about this country,
as a nation of immigrants.
Why?
Because what it means is that in the 20th century
and in the 19th century, boatloads of white people
come to this country, principally from Europe,
and if they are naturalized, they become citizens.
But moreover, their children, upon birth,
become fully American.
This whole idea of America as a nation of immigrants
can only happen because of that first line
of the 14th Amendment that guarantees citizenship
to anyone born on this soil.
It's a powerful narrative and mythology,
but it comes from the first line of the 14th Amendment that
was designed to give citizenship to Black people.
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The 14th Amendment does two other things
that are really important.
One-- it requires that everyone is entitled
to due process of the laws.
And that means that the state you live in
can't do certain things to you without going
through some kind of process.
They can't just take things from you.
They can't limit you in certain kinds of ways
without having a justification for doing so,
without giving you an opportunity to appear in court
and to explain why this should not happen to you
or why you should be exempted from this particular thing
the state is trying to do.
The state has to give you notice before they
take your property from you.
These are the things we think of as due process.
And then, in really what is the coup de gras,
the 14th Amendment does something incredibly powerful.
It says that every person in the United States
is entitled to the equal protection
of the laws, every person--
not every citizen-- every person within the borders
of the United States.
That means that even if you are not a citizen,
there are certain ways that you have to be treated,
that you cannot be discriminated against by the state without
sufficient reason or rationale.
So the concept of equality that probably most of you watching
this think of as just part of the concept
of being an American that you should expect--
even if it doesn't actually happen,
but that you should expect equality--
comes to this country in 1868 in this guarantee
of equal protection of laws in the 14th Amendment.
On the outside of the Supreme Court,
the words that are etched into the frontage
are "equal justice under law."
So this whole concept of equality
that so defines our legal system,
so defines how we think about what
our expectations are of this country,
is embedded in those words.
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What's extraordinary about the way Black people respond
to the 14th Amendment, both in the immediate aftermath
of its ratification but also in the decades that follow--
Black people are incredibly visionary and imaginative
about who they want to be and who they are determined to be.
So they are creating institutions
that they believe can catapult them in that period
into establishing full citizenship.
They set about trying to purchase land.
They set about building their own schools.
They set about becoming registered to vote
and participating in the political process,
running for office.
They set about becoming full citizens in every way.
They want to participate fully in social life.
They want to go to the theater.
They want to be able to sit wherever they want to sit
on public accommodations.
If we think about some of our most august sororities
and fraternities, they're created in this period
in the early 20th century.
If we think about some of the battles that
are fought over segregation, they're
fought in the 1880s and 1890s by Black people who
understand that segregation is a form of white supremacy meant
to return them to a position of servitude.
But nevertheless, that visionary power of Black people lives on.
And what eventually happens is that we do something
that Black people are uniquely able to do
in this country, which is to see a world that doesn't exist,
the ability to see an America that doesn't exist.
I don't mean an America modeled on some other country.
I mean genuinely doesn't exist.
So think about what some of those early civil rights
pioneers are fighting for.
They're fighting for a world of racial equality.
They're fighting for a world with no segregation.
They're fighting for every Black person
to have every opportunity that every white person has.
And yet that has never existed in their lifetimes.
They've never seen it.
It hasn't existed, actually, in the world
in a way that they can possibly even have heard about.
But they envision it, and they begin
to set about trying to imagine how do we get there.
Well, there are many pathways.
Some believe the pathway is education.
Some believe the pathway is civic organizations.
Some believe the pathway is accumulation of wealth.
And some believe-- some believe that the pathway is
through making those words of the 14th Amendment mean what
they say they mean and challenging
the legal infrastructure that has weakened and hollowed
out the promise of the 14th Amendment.
And those people become the worlds and the nation's
first civil rights lawyers.
This is where, again, the love of Black people
for this country shouldn't be glossed over.
I know it may make some people uncomfortable to even talk
about it, but the truth is, Black people have
been incredibly patriotic in the most important ways
in this country.
Patriotic is not saying we're number one and carrying a flag
and marching in a parade or even necessarily fighting
in the military.
Patriotism is being willing to stare your country in the face,
see it for all its good and all its bad,
work to make it better, demand that it be better,
work to ensure that it lives up to its highest ideals,
and use its own instruments--
its own Constitution, its own Declaration of Independence,
its own laws--
to demand that it be what it claims it is.
To have a vision of citizenship and dignity
for yourself, your family, and your people,
it's a powerful expression of Black love.
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The 14th Amendment was enacted after several other efforts
were made by the Reconstruction Congress
to ensure the full citizenship of Black people.
There was the Civil Rights Act of 1866
in which the framers actually laid out the various elements
of citizenship-- the right to make contracts,
the right to sit on a jury.
They tried to they tried to think
of all the elements of citizenship,
and they tried to enumerate them.
So we know that Congress was attempting to articulate
this very powerfully.
And the 14th Amendment was the language
they settled on to be the all-encompassing language that
would ensure that Black people were entitled
to be free from discrimination in the exercise of every aspect
of citizenship.
And that's how we should be thinking about who
we are in this country--
not about whether or not white people
like us, not about whether we can train them not
to be biased against us, but about what we are entitled
to under the Constitution.