African American inequalities of rights and civil abuses have been part of our country’s infamous history even before the birth of our nation. Those unfortunate discriminatory practices followed their “slave” status, even when the “negro” was freed from slavery or involuntary servitude as stated in the Thirteenth Amendment, and ratified on December 6, 1865.

On July 28, 1868, the 14^th Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified. The amendment grants citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States” which included former slaves who had just been freed after the Civil War. It forbids any state to deny any person “life, liberty or property, without due process of law” or to “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Down through the centuries, African Americans have had to scrape and claw to win all the freedoms and rights that other races have received by virtue of being Americans and citizens of this great country.

Just what I described in the last paragraph is an example of a part of our ugly history which illustrates that civil demonstration ultimately will occur whenever our Constitutional principles are consistently and wantonly violated, where no successful quelling of such violations of the rights of the minority is effectively squelched.

An example of such an abuse was when injustices continued to occur to a minority group, which involved shameful prejudice and discrimination of the white Americans against our fellow citizens, the African American population.

I would imagine those were the kinds of feelings our courageous patriots felt when they fought the British during the Revolutionary War, or were the same kinds of feelings that our brave civil-rights leaders experienced and were willing to demonstrate and die for in the early 1960s. As a result, they marched in demonstrations to protest the despicable racial abuses the African Americans had experienced for many years.

What the demonstrators demanded was that James Meredith, a black 29 year old, be the first African American admitted to Old Miss. University, at Oxford, Mississippi. On October 1, 1962, he became the first African-American student to be admitted to the all segregated University of Mississippi.

Meredith’s admission caused an unseemly and shameful riot to occur, involving white students and pro-segregation supporters who protested his enrollment. This event resulted in two deaths, hundreds wounded and many others arrested, after the Kennedy administration called out some 31,000 National Guardsmen and other federal forces to enforce order. Ultimately, Meredith graduated with a degree in political science.

In addition to the loss of life and serious injuries, the shameful, disgraceful and scandalous behaviors that occurred to Meredith was the type that should not have occurred under any circumstances, considering The Fourteenth Amendment to the U. S. Constitution which guarantees the same rights for all American citizens, regardless of sex, race, color or ethnic origin.

President Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights act on July 2, 1964 is considered a landmark piece of legislation because it outlawed major forms of discrimination against racial, ethnic, national and religious minorities and women. It ended unequal application of voter registration requirements and racial segregation in schools, at the workplace and by facilities that served the general public i.e. public accommodations.

It is unfortunate we needed to pass this most sweeping civil rights legislation since the Civil War Reconstruction period in our nation’s history, since the Fourteenth Amendment spoke to our Constitution guaranteeing the same rights for all American citizens, regardless of sex, race, color or ethnic origin. If we had all familiarized ourselves with the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and all the other amendments that were in effect at that time, and applied that understanding in our 21^st century environment, we would not have needed to pass such an all inclusive law to ‘accommodate’ the basic rights that are found in our 14^th Constitutional amendment, since they would have already been addressed in that document in the first place.