Extemporaneous musings, occasionally poetic, about life in its richly varied dimensions, especially as relates to history, theology, law, literature, science, by one who is an attorney, ordained minister, historian, writer, and African American.
Saturday, July 23, 2016
TITANIC LEGAL TRIBULATIONS
TITANIC LEGAL TRIBULATIONS
The ratification of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution are written in, and with, the betrayed blood of black men, who fought SO fiercely for the Union, and who won, literally, that Conflict, that preserved our nation, United States of America.
The 13th Amendment abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, unless "duly" convicted of a crime.
The 14th Amendment gave blacks the incidents of "citizenship" : due process of law; equal protection of the law; privileges and immunities of the same sort held by white people; and section 2 of the 14th, also called for a state's proportional reduction in Congressional representatives, for any breach of any part of it.
The 15th Amendment gave blacks the right to vote the same as white men.
These high-sounding laws are partial spoils that were paid by a relieved nation to these brave black men for their heroic patriotism in that conflict that was also their fight for freedom!
These laws have come down to us in theory, but rarely in substance. For, it yet appears that, despite these laws, that a "black man still has no rights" that a white man is bound to respect!
For "freedom" is an abstraction , as is "equality" subject to judicial scrutiny .
That scrutiny would be passed upon by essentially the same Supreme Court, which gave us Dred Scott V. Sanford in 1857, the catalyst for war!
https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&hl=en-us&q=1857+supreme+court+justices&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj5lcLVr4bOAhWoz4MKHcOpDJ8Q1QIIRygA&biw=320&bih=529
Not only did these same jurists strangle the life and substance from the Civil War Amendments, they, or their fellow cretin, "copperheads," Confederates, did the same to the Civil War Amendments' enabling statutes, through 1883, when they reversed the Civil Rights Act of 1875 as unconstitutional in the combined agglomeration "Civil Rights Cases." http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0101281.html
There the law still remains in 2016, despite many contradictory surface appearances. Various "immunities" created by the Courts have not only shielded racist judges, prosecutors, legislators from civil rights suits but they have also shielded police and sheriffs from civil suits or criminal prosecutions for injuries or deaths, inflicted on blacks in violation of law!
From this icy glacier streams the icy waters that stills and kills our motions.
This accreted, crystalline blockade of ice is the challenge confronting black judges, lawyers and patriotic jurists in America. Defrosting, blasting, melting this frozen, obstructive, crafted, legal mountain; this racist iceberg must be removed, must be blown into the sea!