Race

We're going to march, we're going to walk together, we're going to stand together, we're going to sing together, we're going to stay together, we're going to mold together, we're going to build together, that's the world, we're the freedom, freedom, freedom! Stretching from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, all the way down the National Mall, packed shoulder to shoulder, is a sea of people, all colors of clothing, all colors of hair, all colors of skin. It's the March on Washington in August of 1963, and civil rights leaders have joined together to cry out with a crowd of hundreds of thousands that America is not living up to the promise of equality enshrined in the Constitution, that it's failing to be a country of true liberty and justice. This is the day that Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his iconic "I Have a Dream" speech, with the statue of Lincoln towering behind him. And joining him at the lectern on the steps of the memorial were other prominent voices of the era like Roy Wilkins and Bob Dylan and Josephine Baker and... John Lewis, National Chairman, Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, Brother John Lewis. We march today for jobs and freedom, but we have nothing to be proud of, of hundreds and thousands of our brothers are not here, but they're receiving starvation wedges or no wedges at all. While we stand here, they're sharp-profits, and they're dealt with a misinterpret. Why didn't it feel working for left in $3 a day, 12 hours a day? John Lewis was 23 years old back day, the youngest speaker on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Today, he's 77 years old. That was when a backpack before became fashionable to wear a backpack. He has an office bursting with black and white photographs. This is the first time I was arrested. It's on the other side of the National Mall right next to the U.S. Capitol Building, where he serves as a congressman. Well, these photographs fail to capture the spirit. The music, people were saying, people were just be walking along singing. The hand in for music, the Civil Rights Movement, would have been like a bird without wings. The advent of the Civil Rights Movement made it very plain that we had an obligation to do what we could to make real the Constitution of the United States of America. I'm Lillian Cunningham with the Washington Post, and this is Constitutional. We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of Liberty. To ourselves, our prosperity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. Why did we need a Civil Rights Movement in America in the 1950s and '60s? And why do we still have civil rights protests today? The 13th Amendment passed after the Civil War abolished slavery. The 14th Amendment, passed after the Civil War, granted citizenship and guaranteed equal protection under the law regardless of race. And then the 15th Amendment, also passed right after the Civil War, gave men of every race the right to vote. It took enormous effort and bloodshed to fight for these three powerful amendments. And their passage in the 1860s finally put rights for racial equality into the Constitution. What happened? Why 100 years later during the Civil Rights Movement were John Lewis and Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., still fighting for the same things, equal protection, the right to vote, rights that the Constitution already said they had. The answer lies in what happened in America after the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments were passed during reconstruction. The ways that our society and our legal system stripped these amendments of their power and their intended meaning. It was out that as powerful as it was to change the Constitution, that wasn't enough to change the reality of life in America. We had everything in the Constitution. We just had to make it whole. That's John Lewis again. John, it became crystal clear to me that there were certain rights and privileges that other people had, that my mother, my father, my grandparents, my great-grandparents didn't have, that there was an ongoing struggle to realize the dream of the 14th and 15th Amendment. John Lewis was born in Troy, Alabama in 1940, so about 75 years after the passage of these amendments for equal rights and racial equality. But his life in some ways didn't look wildly different from life for African-Americans before the Civil War. The family worked the land as sharecroppers. His parents couldn't vote. He couldn't go to school with white children. He couldn't enter certain shops and restrooms. I kept asking my mother and my father, my grandparents and great-grandparents, why? Asking my teachers, why? They always said, "That's the way it is." But the thing is, that wasn't the way it was supposed to be. Something had gone horribly wrong. John Lewis's parents had the right to vote under the Constitution. They had equal protection under the Constitution. They had no more bondage under the Constitution. As John Lewis said, the words were all right there. Their promises just needed to be kept. Because in America when John Lewis was growing up, those words on paper meant almost nothing. They were empty promises. They were deadletters. To grasp why these amendments were stripped of all their power, we need to understand the hard-fought battle to secure these constitutional amendments in the first place. And that takes us back to abolition. As you'll recall, when the Constitution was drafted in 1787, it didn't end slavery or assure equal rights to all people. If you read the preamble to the Constitution, it can't help but point out exactly how hypocritical the ideals of freedom and justice and inalienable rights that we get from the Declaration of Independence as well. You'll remember this voice from our first episode about the Constitutional Convention. Erica Armstrong Dunbar is a professor of history at the University of Delaware. It's so very clear that these were ideals that were only really available to white men. And these ideals would take close to a century, if not longer, to find their way to the lives of black people both enslaved and later on to those who were free. There was lofty language in the preamble about forming a more perfect union and securing the blessings of liberty. But those ideas were intention with the concrete language in the body of the Constitution about allowing the Atlantic slave trade to continue and returning fugitive slaves to their owners and counting enslaved people as three-fifths of a person. It happened simultaneously with the arrival of cotton on the sea aisles of Georgia and South Carolina. The cash crops of tobacco and indigo and rice had made southerners wealthy and northerners as well who those who were involved in shipping and banking. Slavery played a key role in what would become a national economy. But it doesn't take long for the abolition movement to grow stronger and stronger in America. Over the course of the early 1800s, more and more northern states abolish slavery. It's even being abolished abroad. England in 1833 finally bans it throughout the British Empire. But as these other areas are giving slavery up, the South is digging in. Serving slavery as the basis of its economy and its social structure. So by the time we're on the eve of civil war, there are four million enslaved people in America. And does abolitionists start wrestling with how to get rid of slavery across the entire United States? Their attention turns to the Constitution. Anti-slavery people felt that the Constitution made it impossible for the federal government to directly confront slavery in the states. There was a state institution, the federal government had no authority over it and there wasn't heck of a lot much you could do. Eric Foner is a professor at Columbia University specializing in the history of U.S. race relations. People like William Lloyd Garrison who famously burned the Constitution at a July 4th abolitionist meeting in the 1850s saying it was a covenant with the devil. William Lloyd Garrison was probably the most prominent abolitionist in the United States in the 1830s, 40s, 50s. He was the editor of the liberator, a weekly abolitionist publication that came out of Boston and the key organizer of the American Anti-Slavery Society. A few years after Garrison dramatically burned a copy of the Constitution, the Supreme Court would itself reinforce the idea that this was a pro-slavery document. In 1857, the Supreme Court ruled in the Dred Scott case that slaves should be considered property under the Constitution. This was a slave and by the way it also involved his wife, Mrs. Dred Scott and his daughters, two daughters. But anyway, they were slaves in Missouri, they had been taken by their owner both to the state of Illinois where slavery was banned by state law and then up to Wisconsin territory at that time where slavery had been prohibited by Congress. Then they were taken back to Missouri. Later, they sued for their freedom on the grounds that having been in a free state and a free territory made them free people. This took many years, it got up to the Supreme Court and Chief Justice Roger Torney issued the majority opinion the Supreme Court decided a black person cannot be a citizen of the United States and therefore there's no case here. Scott can't sue because he's not a citizen. The idea of slave doesn't matter, citizenship is only for white people. That meant this case was over, perhaps, but Torney plowed ahead and said Congress in fact has no power to abolish slavery in any of the territories of the United States. This was a flagrantly partisan and sectional decision and it really destroyed the reputation of the Supreme Court in the North. The abolitionist thought this was an outrageous attempt by the Supreme Court to intervene in politics and to make slavery almost a national institution. So when the secession crisis took place, nobody said let's see what the Supreme Court is to say about this. The Supreme Court's reputation was at its lowest deb in its history as a result of the Dred Scott decision. But one of the reasons for the 14th Amendment will get to that was to overturn Dred Scott and to say that anybody born in the United States is a citizen. And yet at the same time that some abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison are railing against the Constitution as an evil document, there are others who take a different tack. One of them is the famous abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass. Frederick Douglass who started out as a Garrisonian later changed his mind and said no the Constitution interpreted properly is an anti-slavery document. Instead of casting the Constitution as something that needs to be fought against, Frederick Douglass starts drawing attention to the ideals and intent of the framers. He uses the Constitution to actually help the case for abolishing slavery. It's a tactic that civil rights leaders like John Lewis would also use a century later. Douglass had the ability and the capacity to speak up. We would deeply inspired by his words. In one speech of his called What to the Slave is the Fourth of July, Frederick Douglass says of the Constitutional framers quote. "They were peacemen, but they preferred revolution to peaceful submission to bondage. They were quiet men, but they did not shrink from agitating against oppression. They showed forbearance but that they knew its limits. They believed in order but not in the order of tyranny. Then nothing was settled that was not right. With them, justice, liberty and humanity were final, not slavery and oppression. And then he goes on, quote, "interpretyd as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a glorious liberty document." And its preamble, consider its purposes. Is slavery among them? Is it at the gateway or is it in the temple? It is neither. The word slave does not appear in the Constitution. There are certain locations, you know, other persons, persons held to labor, things like that. Some anti-slavery people said, as a result of that, the Constitution is really anti-slavery. It does not recognize slavery explicitly. And there are other sections, like the preamble, which talks about securing the blessings of liberty or the Fifth Amendment, which says that the federal government cannot deprive anyone of life, liberty or property, liberty, obviously, without due process of law, that those are strongly anti-slavery provisions. There was a lot of dispute about that until the Civil War. Of course, the Civil War comes in 1861. And while it's being fought on the battlefields, the fight also begins inside Congress. They start thinking about how to amend the Constitution to bring its words more in line with the spirit of union and justice. Funding the Constitution is a very cumbersome process. It's very difficult to do. It requires two-thirds of Congress to approve and then three-quarters of the States. Before the Civil War, there was no conceivable way that you could get two-thirds of Congress and three-quarters of the States to approve an anti-slavery constitutional amendment. The Southern States had the power to block it. It's really only during the Civil War when the Southern States or 11 of them, anyway, have seceded, then no longer represented in Congress, which makes it easier to pass an amendment through Congress. And then how are you going to get three-quarters of the States? That's something they were trying to figure out as the Civil War went on. The emancipation proclamation, of course, made the destruction of slavery an aim of the Union War effort, but it did not completely abolish the institution of slavery. And very quickly after that, some radical Republicans and then others began saying the way to irrevocably get rid of slavery completely and utterly from the country is by amending the Constitution. Many law of Congress can be repealed by the next Congress, right? So to make these things permanent, you'd have to put them into the Constitution. So as the Civil War comes to an end, the focus in Congress turns toward this goal, adding three new amendments to the Constitution that will officially end slavery and finally secure equal rights regardless of race. To pass and ratify these takes place during the reconstruction era. Reconstruction is one of the most important and unfortunately one of the most misunderstood eras in American history, the period after the Civil War, when the country confronted these fundamental problems of how to reunite the nation after the war and also what was going to be the status of the four million black people who had acquired their freedom as a result of the war. And a tremendous political battle took place over that between Andrew Johnson, the president who succeeded Lincoln after he'd Lincoln's assassination and the Republican majority in Congress. The first amendment that the Congress tackles is the abolition of slavery and they start the push for it even before the war has ended. The Republican set a very big majority in Congress, the 13th amendment passed the Senate by a large margin in the spring of 1864, but it failed in the House to get the two-thirds required. The issue came back to Congress to the House in 1865, January and there was a lot of armed twisting and a lot of maneuvering and eventually they managed to cobble together the two-thirds majority in the House of Representatives to approve the 13th amendment. There was probably the biggest celebration in the history of Congress on the day, January 31st, 1865, that the 13th amendment was passed. I mean, in the hall of the House of Representatives, members started shrieking and yelling and screaming and throwing their hats up in the air. Women and men in the galleries were applauding and yelling. It was a giant celebration which was not usually the way proceedings went in the House of Representatives. You still needed three-quarters of the states to ratify. And so most of the northern states quickly did, but you needed some southern states to get to that three-quarters of the states. It's not actually until December 1865, months after the end of the Civil War, that the Secretary of State, Suward, declares that the 13th amendment has been ratified by the requisite number of states. And the way they get enough states to sign off on it is that President Andrew Johnson, despite his friction with Congress and his lack of support for true equal rights, he does make it a condition of reentry to the Union that southern states ratify this amendment. The 13th amendment is very brief. It simply says neither slavery nor involuntary servitude can exist in the United States, but it has a second clause which says that I'm paraphrasing here. Congress can enforce this amendment by appropriate legislation. That was a very, very important clause because it meant that the abolition of slavery was an ongoing process. It was not just one moment. Congress would have the right to enforce it. What does it mean to enforce the abolition of slavery? Well, that depends on what you think is actually being abolished. Is it simply the buying and selling of human beings? Okay, there'll be no more buying inside. But maybe there's more than that. What is it to be a free person in America? What about the racism that is intrinsic to slavery? Is that being abolished? What about the political system in the South founded on slavery? Education, slaves were barred from education. In other words, are all of the restrictions of slavery now to be abolished and can Congress enforce that? That became a major source of debate during reconstruction. The first effort to implement that was in early 1866 when Congress enacted over the veto of President Johnson, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which was the first civil rights legislation in American history. Civil Rights Act was, as Eric says, an offshoot of that clause in the 13th Amendment that gave Congress the power to enforce the abolition of slavery. So in this new legislation, Congress laid out certain basic rights that should be given to African Americans as part of this end of slavery. Things like the right to testify in court, the right to sue, the right to sign a contract. They're not political rights, not the right to vote, but the rights to enable you to compete as a free person in the marketplace to try to advance yourself. If you can't sign a contract, if you can't go to court, if you can't testify, how are you going to advance in the society? And in fact, it also said that the laws must treat black and white equally. So you see it went beyond just knocking the chains off of people and said these are the basic rights of what it is to be a free person in the United States. It was a very far-reaching measure and it showed the power of the 13th Amendment as a vehicle for trying to address the inequities of slavery, even after slavery was abolished. Around the time this civil rights act is going through Congress, though, relations between President Andrew Johnson and the Congress are rapidly deteriorating. He vetoes this bill, then Congress passes it over his veto. Meanwhile, Republican congressmen are also trying to get other amendments passed. Next up, the 14th Amendment. The 14th Amendment is the longest amendment in our constitution. It's got five sections. The first section, which is the most important today in terms of jurisprudence, is the first, which was primarily written by John Bingham, a moderate Republican congressman from Ohio. He was a strong anti-slavery person before the Civil War. He wanted to use language that was very familiar to people. For example, Charles Sumner, a radical Republican from Massachusetts, he proposed a 14th Amendment which was based on the French declaration of the rights of man and the citizen from 1791. Bingham said, "No, we don't want French stuff here. This is ridiculous. We're going to use common American language." He put in phrases which are already in the constitution in many places. The 14th Amendment, the first section, begins by saying any person born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, is a citizen of both the state they're living in and the nation. This will actually the first constitutional definition of who is a citizen of the United States. So if the 13th Amendment abolishes slavery, the 14th Amendment grants those former slaves citizenship. But it also goes on to do a lot more. It basically makes sure that rights for citizens under federal law, like not being denied life, liberty, or property without due process, that those rights also apply on the state level. There's also a very important clause in the 14th Amendment that says states can't deprive citizens of equal protection. That's new. There was nothing in the original constitution about equal protection of the law. There was nothing about equality. Now remember, before the Civil War, every state in the union, North and South had laws discriminating against black people. It keeps out laws all over the country that were based on white supremacy. It's a very radical idea in 19th century America that there must be equal protection of the law to all people in the United States. Again, what does that exactly mean? So these phrases, equal protection, due process, privileges, immunities, you know, their exact meaning gets worked out over time. Bands over time today, this section of the 14th Amendment has been used in ways that were hardly anticipated by the people of 1866. I mean, for example, the Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage or saying a state cannot deny people the right to marry on the basis of homosexuality, that's a 14th Amendment decision. So the 14th Amendment has become the most important part of the constitution in many ways in determining the rights of citizens, something that people can appeal to when they feel their equal rights are being violated. It really changed the constitution into what we knew it to be in the late 20th century. That is to say a vehicle for groups that feel their rights are being denied by the state governments. So it's a fundamental change in our political and constitutional system. The 14th Amendment does have four other sections to it, including a section that finally gets rid of the three fifths compromise. The other sections mostly have to do with war debt and with limits on public service if you were part of the Confederacy. It's an educated amendment and getting it ratified was not easy. Every single one of the southern state governments that Andrew Johnson had set up rejected the 14th Amendment. They thought it was outrageous. They didn't want to give blacks these equal rights, etc. So eventually Congress got so fed up with Johnson and his governments that they pretty much said we're going to have new governments in the South. These governments are no good. And those governments must ratify the 14th Amendment if they want to get back into the union. On the 13th, the 14th ratification was required by the federal government as a consequence of the civil war. This is unusual in American history, of course, for Congress to require the ratification of an amendment. But that is how the 13th and 14th amendments both eventually got into the constitution. But unlike the 13th Amendment. They celebrated the passage of the 14th Amendment. There was no big party in Congress. There were no big parades. It was a compromise, as I said. And a lot of people were unhappy with it. Thaddeus Stevens, the great congressman from Pennsylvania who basically shepherded it through the House of Representatives in the final speech before his passage, he said, "We like this amendment all that much. It doesn't give black men the right to vote, which they deserve. It doesn't punish the South as much as I wish. Why do I vote for it then?" he said. "Because I live among men and not among angels." In 1869, the last of the three reconstruction era amendments passes, the 15th Amendment. It gives African-American men the right to vote. But it does so in sort of a backwards way. It says, essentially, that a state can't deny anyone the right to vote because of race. The Republicans were not too happy with this. They wanted a positive amendment stating, "Who should vote?" And it would have said something like, "All male citizens, 21 years of age and older, have the right to vote." But that's not what it says. It says, "No state can deny you the right to vote because of race." It left open many other grounds for denying people the right to vote. So, there is no qualification, literacy tests, poll taxes. Today, as you know, there are efforts to deny people the right to vote because they don't have the right kind of public identification. Those are not barred by the 15th Amendment unless you can prove that they are racially motivated. Nonetheless, putting in the Constitution, the principle that black men have the right to vote was a remarkable change in the political system of the United States. It's less than 10 years since 4 million people were slaves. And now, suddenly, they are equal members of the society in terms of civil rights, in terms of political rights, etc. So, the 15th Amendment is the last of the reconstruction era amendments, and it's a major step forward, although it is not sufficient, really. As soon as the period of reconstruction officially ends, around 1877, when the last federal troops leave their occupation into oversight of the South, the promise of the blessings of liberty, of racial equality, of voting rights, the promises that all these three amendments represent begin to vanish. They pass forward to the 1950s, and they are nowhere to be found. People cannot register to vote simply because of the color of their skin. People stood in what I call a movable line trying to register. They were totally cannot read or write well enough. There had to pass a so-called literacy test in many places, a simple advice. People were harassed, beaten, some people were murdered. So, about a hundred and about a thousand people stood protesting. The 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments mark the first time that politicians, other than those who started our nation, successfully changed the language of the Constitution. The first ten amendments were the Bill of Rights. The next two amendments were passed in 1794 and 1803. It seemed certain that what this Congress had accomplished after the Civil War was momentous, definitive, permanently altering. During reconstruction in this brief twilight after the three amendments passed, Black men voted. They held political office. The President's Rebels was the first Black U.S. Senator, and John Rainey was the first Black U.S. Representative, both taking office in 1870. Racial equality seemed suddenly to actually be within reach. But then, this stimulated a very violent reaction to Ku Klux Klan and other terrorist organizations arose to combat reconstruction. The KKK started in Tennessee in 1866 with a group of former Confederate soldiers, but the White Supremacy Group soon spread to almost every state in the South. Black politicians were killed. Republican voters who supported reconstruction, black and white were kept from the polls. Innocent people were terrorized, lynched, all in an effort to keep racial equality from truly setting in. Racism revives very radically by the 1880s, 1890s. A general assumption takes hold north and south that black people are just not capable of taking part in democratic government. And also, the old tradition of federalism, that is that the state governments should be the basic units for dealing with the rights of citizens, becomes more and more prevalent. States themselves start stripping away African-Americans' ability to vote by devising ways to keep them from the polls. That technically don't deny voting based on race, like literacy tests and poll taxes, these were the same kind of vote blocking techniques that John Lewis was still witnessing in the South by the mid-20th century. They started here during the collapse of reconstruction. They had property qualification or what they called understanding clauses. You had a proof that you understand the section of the state constitution. That left it up to the local voter registrar and somehow they would rule that every black person didn't understand the state constitution and every white person did. But they said it's not about race. It's not about race at all. We're just talking about whether they know anything about the state government or not. They crafted those measures to avoid violating the 15th Amendment. So it was not a strong amendment as it should have been to permanently guarantee the political rights of African-American men. So the states are keeping black voters from the polls and groups like the Ku Klux Klan are using violence and intimidation to undo the gains of reconstruction. At the same time, the Supreme Court is also issuing a slew of decisions that defang the intent of these amendments. Well, you know, there's an old saying the constitution is what the Supreme Court says it is, right? And increasingly in the late 19th century, the Supreme Court retreated from a broad definition of rights and equality. Increasingly interpreted the Civil War amendments in a very, very narrow manner. Until by the early 20th century, they were virtually deadletters on the books. But it's not just nine guys on the Supreme Court. The country itself was retreating from reconstruction, was retreating from the principle of equality. Now this takes place over a long period of time. It's not just one moment, one decision. It's a generation or two. In the 1876 Crookshank decision, the Supreme Court overturned the conviction of white supremacists who had mass occurred about 100 African-Americans. The court said that it was up to the states to deal with these sort of crimes. And that essentially stripped power from the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause. There are numerous other significant cases that unravel the gains of reconstruction. And one of the most famous and destructive was Plessy versus Ferguson in 1896. This case involved segregated railroad cars in Louisiana. And the Supreme Court ruled in an eight to one decision that, again, despite the wording of the 14th Amendment, segregation was constitutional. Plessy made separate but equal the law of the land. And it was all the way up to the Civil Rights Revolution of the 1950s. And it provided the legal foundation for racial segregation. It's certainly the most disreputable period in Supreme Court history in many ways. This idea of separate but equal would come to define life in the South. It would mean separate schools, separate water fountains, separate stores. But it never meant equal. In 1956, when I was 16 years old with some of my brothers and sisters and cousins, going down to the public library in a little town of Troy, Alabama, trying to get library cards. And we were told by the librarian that the library was for whites only and not for color. I never went back to that library until I became a member of Congress. By the time John Lewis was growing up in Alabama, it was almost as if these three equality amendments never existed. But they had. And technically, they still did. In 1914 and 15th amendments, they were deadletters throughout the South, but they were in the Constitution. Half a century later, the Civil Rights Revolution of the 1950s and 60s, you might say reawakened them. The Civil Rights Revolution did not need any constitutional amendments. What it needed was the Constitution that we had to be actually enforced. The Constitution to be made whole. In 1954, a decision came down from the Supreme Court. It was more than 50 years after Plessy versus Ferguson had established separate but equal. This new case was Brown V Board of Education and it overturned Plessy's logic. It ruled that having separate schools for black children and white children was unconstitutional. I remember very, very well. May 17, 1954. I was in high school really getting ready to enter the ninth grade. I thought I really thought that the next year, I'll be attending a desegregated school. There's some high and some way the law was going to work. The Constitution was going to become real for all of us. It didn't. Not right away. Schools resisted. People resisted. But the Supreme Court decision showed that something in America was shifting. About to shift. A year later in 1955, Rosa Parks refused to move from her seat on a bus in the white section. That set in motion, the boycott to desegregate the buses in Montgomery, Alabama, led by Martin Luther King, Jr. That, in turn, gave strength and hope to a new generation of Americans that the promise of racial equality that came after the Civil War might yet be realized. The struggle of civil rights was to really redeem the soul of America, to get us to come to that point and lay down the burden of race, that under the Constitution, or with the Constitution, you have sent rights that are guaranteed and protected. The right to participate in a democratic process, the right to vote, we had to interpret the essence of the Constitution. So we wanted America, we wanted America, we wanted our people to live up to disparate the Constitution. The efforts to make the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments whole, to make them real, that involved sittings at lunch counters and peaceful marches that were met with extraordinary violence, and efforts to pass new civil rights laws through Congress, and battles that went all the way to the Supreme Court again. People involved in this ongoing struggle put so much faith in the Constitution and interpretation of the Constitution by members of the court. And when the decision came down to do segregate the buses in Montgomery, there was an old woman who said something like God Almighty has spoken from Washington. It was the essence of what the Constitution had been saying from the existence of our country. We kept saying we have a Constitution to write, that we haven't had a right to protest as Dr. King was saying, but what is right in an orderly, peaceful and non-violent fashion, that we had a right to march from Selma to Montgomery to see regents of our grievances. We protected against the Constitution. We saw the Constitution as being on our side, being on the side of the right. The power of the civil rights movement brought into being the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It banned all discrimination and segregation based not just on race, but also on color, religion, sex, national origin. It also resulted in the passage of the Voting Rights Act, which explicitly outlawed things like literacy tests, but also more generally prohibited any other actions that would result in racial discrimination at the polls. We also got the passage of one more amendment, ratified in 1964. It was the 24th amendment banning poll taxes. These were immense victories for racial equality, huge steps toward reviving the spirit of those three amendments passed after the Civil War. But if the birth and death and rebirth of these constitutional ideals of equality can teach us anything, it's that America's story is not neat, and the ending is never assured. We will not stop all of the forces of Eastland, Barnett, Wallace, and Thurman. We will not stop this revolution. If we do not get meaningful legislation out of just Congress, the time will come, but we will not find our mark into Washington. We will march through the South, through the streaks of Jackson, through the streaks of Denville, through the streaks of Cambridge, through the streaks of Birmingham. John Lewis, after his speeches and his marches and his jailings as an activist in the 50s and 60s, he became and still is a congressman. He's working in yet another era, from yet another vantage point, on issues that are at their heart part of the same ongoing effort. This is our demand, our determination, and our numbers. We shall split into segregated styles into a thousand pieces and put them together in an image of God and democracy. We must wake up America, wake up, for we cannot stop, and we will not and cannot be patient. History is not, as some people seem to think, just a straight line of greater and greater progress. We have had rights can be gained and rights can be taken away, and fought for another day. What's amazing is that we're still debating reconstruction questions. Who should vote? That's on the agenda right now. Who's the citizen? Who should be a citizen? That's a political issue right now. What are the powers of the federal government in relation to the state governments? That's a political issue right now. How do you combat terrorism? In other words, reconstruction is the origin of a lot of our current politics, even though we don't really often appreciate that. I guess the point is we have to be vigilant about maintaining our rights, because they can never be taken for granted, even when they're written into the Constitution, they cannot be taken for granted. I feel all of you to get in this great revolution that has been in this nation, get in and stay in the streets of Arizona, every village and homeland of this nation, until truth freedom comes, until the revolution of the 17th-16th century is complete. We must get in this revolution and complete the revolution. Revolution is the dramatic ushering in of progress and change, and that's part of the story of America. But revolution also implies a cycle, a revolving, gains, losses, regains, having to fight over and over again for rights that were supposed to be secured before. And that's also the story of America, because the Constitution is only as good as we are. They never gave up. They would win a victory here and lose, moments of success, and it was a great unbelievable setbacks, but they kept trying. It's up to each generation to continue to push, to pull, to help move us closer to what more than the change in your call, the beloved community. That every generation, whether it's the members of Congress, the presidents, the average citizens, must do what we can to move us to more equal society. We all can enjoy the fruits and blessing of the American Dream. Many thanks to this week's guests, Eric Foner, a professor at Columbia University, Erica Armstrong Dunbar, a professor at the University of Delaware, and of course, Congressman John Lewis. What a music is by Oath the Turner and the rising star, Fife and Drum Band, special thanks to Sharday Thomas and the rest of the Turner family for its use. Our theme music and additional compositions are by Ryan and Hayes Holiday, the original artwork for our podcast is by Michelle Thompson, and many thanks to Ted Muldoon, my producer here at The Washington Post. If you liked the show, we'd really appreciate if you'd rate and review us on whatever platform you're listening to this. And if you want more info about the series, just go to WashingtonPost.com/constitutional. And you've heard it before, but as a thank you for listening to Constitutional, the post is giving listeners $100 off on a one year, all access digital subscription to the Washington Post. WAPO.ST/podcastoffer to redeem it. 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