Equal Protection: Origins and Legacies of the Fourteenth Amendment (Short Film)

Equal Protection: Origins and Legacies of the Fourteenth Amendment  (Short Film)

On March 31, 2016, in honor of the 150th anniversary of the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, the Gilder Lehrman Center (GLC) for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University sponsored a public panel and discussion. Moderated by GLC Director David Blight, the panel included four prominent scholars of Reconstruction and the Constitution: Akhil Reed Amar (Yale Law School), Tomiko Brown-Nagin (Harvard Law School), Eric Foner (Columbia University), Amy Dru Stanley (University of Chicago), and John Fabian Witt (Yale Law School). From the perspective of their academic traditions and their own research, each scholar addressed the most significant legacy of the Fourteenth Amendment. This short film drawn from the panel sheds light on how this amendment, which granted citizenship to all U.S.-born persons, lies at the heart of what many historians term the “Second American Revolution.”