Inventing Equality

October 12, 2020
Historian Bellesiles (A People’s History of the U.S. Military) takes a stirring look at the fight to pass the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the U.S. Constitution and their subsequent circumvention by Supreme Court rulings. He examines how the framers of the Constitution failed to “address the nature of citizenship” and caved to the demands of wealthy slaveholders from Georgia and South Carolina with the three-fifths compromise, and contends that the participation of Black soldiers in the Civil War contributed to the swift passage of the “equality amendments.” The phrasing of those amendments, however, excluded women, many of whom had fought to achieve equality for Black men with the understanding that they too, would be granted the same rights. Bellesiles traces Supreme Court decisions that shaped the ebb and flow of equality, including the 1857 Dred Scott ruling that led to the Civil War, and Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, which established the deceptive principle of “separate but equal.” In the epilogue, he draws a clear line from the struggles of the late 19th and early 20th centuries to today’s battles for equality. The result is a worthy historical primer for today’s progressive activists.