U2LP8 Amendment 11- 21

14th Amendment
In 1857, The Dred Scott Supreme Court decision stated no African American, whether
enslaved or free, were United States citizens at the time Constitution was adopted, and
therefore had no rights to be free. The Dred Scott decision caused great outrage and
protest in the North and added to the tension that led to the Civil War. African American
abolitionist Frederick Douglass hoped that the Courtʼs decision would begin a “chain of
event” that would produce a “complete overthrow of the whole slave system.”

In 1868, three years after the end of the Civil War, the 14th Amendment to the
Constitution overruled the Dred Scott decision. The amendment clearly established
what constitutes citizens at both the national and state level of government. The
amendment was designed to grant citizenship to and protect the civil liberties of recently
freed slaves. It did this by prohibiting states from denying or abridging the privileges or
immunities of citizens of the United States, depriving any person of his life, liberty, or
property without due process of law, or denying to any person within their jurisdiction the
equal protection of the laws.

U2LP8 Amendment 11- 21

15th Amendment
The Fifteenth Amendment was added to the Constitution in 1870 to protect Blacks’
voting rights. It prohibited the national and state governments from refusing citizens the
right to vote because of their race, color, or because they were a slave at one time. After
the Fifteenth Amendment was passed, a large number of Blacks voted during the late
1860’s through the 1880’s. The African-Americans used their voting rights to gain
political power and to protect their rights.

The 15th Amendment was the last step in denying states the right to abuse the rights of
freed blacks. First, they gained their freedom with the 13th Amendment, right to Due
Process and Equal Protection with the 14th Amendment. The southern states could not
be trusted to allow blacks to votes, so the National Government had to secure this right
through the 15th Amendment which prohibited the government from denying a person’s
right to vote on the basis of race.
U2LP8 Amendment 11- 21

18th and 21st Amendment

Prohibition in the United States, also known as The Noble Experiment, was the period
from 1920 to 1933, during which the sale, manufacture, and transportation of alcohol
were banned nationally as mandated in the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States
Constitution.

Under pressure from the temperance movement, a group that was trying to end
drinking, smoking and all other ills of society, the United States Senate proposed the
Eighteenth Amendment on December 18, 1917.

The "Volstead Act", the popular name for the National Prohibition Act, passed through
Congress over President Woodrow Wilson's veto on October 28, 1919 and established
the legal definition of intoxicating liquor. Though the Volstead Act prohibited the sale of
alcohol, it did little to enforce the law. By 1925, in New York City alone, there were
anywhere from 30,000 to 100,000 speakeasy [alcohol-based] clubs.

While Prohibition was successful in reducing the amount of liquor consumed, it tended
to destroy society by other means, as it stimulated the proliferation of rampant
underground, organized and widespread criminal activity.

Prohibition became increasingly unpopular during the Great Depression, especially in

large cities. The bulk of America became disenchanted after the St. Valentine's Day
massacre in 1929. Until then, they felt that, even with setbacks, Prohibition was
working.

On March 22, 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt signed into law an amendment to the
Volstead Act known as the Cullen-Harrison Act, allowing the manufacture and sale of
certain kinds of alcoholic beverages.

On December 5, 1933, the ratification of the Twenty-first Amendment repealed the

Eighteenth Amendment.
U2LP8 Amendment 11- 21

19th Amendment
Votes for women were first seriously proposed in the United States in July, 1848, at the
Seneca Falls Woman's Rights Convention organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and
Lucretia Mott.

Some battles for woman suffrage, or their right to vote, were won state-by-state by the
early 20th century. Alice Paul and the National Women's Party began using more radical
tactics to work for a federal suffrage amendment to the Constitution: picketing the White
House, staging large suffrage marches and demonstrations, going to jail. Thousands of
ordinary women took part in these -- a family legend is that my grandmother was one of
a number of women who chained themselves to a courthouse door in Minneapolis
during this period.

In 1913, Paul led a march of eight thousand participants on President Woodrow

Wilson's inauguration day. (Half a million spectators watched; two hundred were injured
in the violence that broke out.) During Wilson's second inaugural in 1917, Paul led a
march around the White House.

During World War I, women took up jobs in factories to support the war, as well as
taking more active roles in the war than in previous wars. After the war, even the more
restrained National American Woman Suffrage Association took many opportunities to
remind the President, and the Congress, that women's war work should be rewarded
with recognition of their political equality.

The 19th Amendment passed, in a 304 to 90 vote:

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the
United States or by any States on Account of sex.