Civil Rights, Amendments, and Court Cases - AP Government and Politics

Adell Sherbert was a Seventh Day Adventist who refused to work on Saturday, as it was her religion's sabbath. When her employer fired her, she sued her employer, arguing she had a constitutional right to not be fired for freely exercising her religion. After her case made it all the way to the Supreme Court, the court found in her favor, and established the so-called Sherbert test. The Sherbert test was used to determine whether someone's ability to freely exercise his or her religion was being limited by the government.

Desegregation of the armed forces took place in 1948 and was ordered by President Harry Truman. Roosevelt had recently banned racial discrimination and segregation in government offices.

Grandfather clauses were established in the South during the Reconstruction era, after the Civil War, in an attempt to prevent many African-Americans from voting. In the Reconstruction era, many Southern states made laws declaring that any man voting had to pass strict literacy and property ownership tests, unless he could prove that his grandfather had been able to vote prior to the Civil War. Grandfather clauses were ruled unconstitutional in 1915.

The Wilmot Proviso is considered an important part of the build up to the outbreak of Civil War. It attempted to ban the extension of slavery into any states or territory acquired in the war with Mexico; however, it was repeatedly rejected in the Senate because the South had enough representatives to block such legislation from passing. The issue would be settled temporarily by the Compromise of 1850.

In 1857, the Supreme Court made a decision that black Americans were inferior, not-citizens that didn’t hold equal rights to white men (regardless of free or slave status). This decision also struck a blow against new-land abolitionists, ruling that the federal government couldn’t control the legality of slavery in new federal territories.

The 15th Amendment granted African Americans the right to vote, after the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery and the 14th Amendment establishing the equal protection clause.

Loving v. Virginia struck down laws banning interracial marriage. This case was later referenced as an argument in the 2015 case Obergefell v. Hodges that legalized same-sex marriages.

The Thirteenth Amendment passed in 1865 at the end of the Civil War abolished slavery in the reunited Union.

Korematsu v. US upheld the coerced relocation of Japanese Americans into internment camps during World War II. Despite its controversy, a later court has never explicitly overturned it.

Brown v. Board of Education was a case from Topeka, KS decided in 1954. It struck down separate white and black public schools, overturning Plessy v. Ferguson and the notion of “separate but equal.”

The Twenty-second Amendment to the US Constitution was passed through Congress in 1947, less than two years after the death of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was elected to four terms as President. The Twenty-second Amendment was largely proposed and supported by Republicans opposed to Roosevelt and his successor Harry S. Truman. Nonetheless, by 1951, the required 36 states ratified the Amendment.

The Eighteenth Amendment, passed in 1919, prohibited the sale and consumption of alcohol and represents the official beginning of the Prohibition era in American history. In 1933, fourteen years later, the Twenty-First Amendment repealed the Eighteenth Amendment and made the consumption of alcohol legal again. The Nineteenth Amendment granted women the right to vote. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments relate to the expansion of civil and democratic rights to freed slaves in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War.

The Twenty-Third Amendment, passed in 1960, granted citizens of the District of Columbia the right to vote in Presidential elections as if the district were a separate state. The Eighteenth Amendment prohibited the sale and use of alcohol, and the Twenty-First Amendment overturned it. The Nineteenth Amendment extended suffrage to women. The Twenty-Second Amendment set a term limit for the office of President to two terms.

Prior to the Presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Presidency was informally established with a two-term limit, based on the precedent laid down by the first President, George Washington; however, President Roosevelt served four consecutive terms, in large part due to the extraneous circumstances of the Great Depression and World War Two. In response to this, after Roosevelt died and Truman became President, Congress passed an amendment formally limiting the President to two-terms.

The Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified in 1920 and represented the culmination of the decades-long battle to enfranchise women in the United States. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments primarily concern the extension of voting rights, and other rights, to racial minorities. The Sixteenth regarded taxation. The Eighteenth Amendment prohibited the sale and use of alcohol.

The Seventeenth Amendment to the United States Constitution establishes that the Senate should not longer be chosen by State Legislatures, but should be the result of a direct election of the people. As part of the broader historical context of the United States, it may be seen as part of the gradual extension of suffrage rights to the common man that took place over the first century or so of American history. It was passed in 1913 as the culmination of the Progressive movement, led by figures like William Jennings Bryan and Theodore Roosevelt, who advocated for greater faith and power being placed in the hands of the common man. The prohibition of alcohol was passed with the Eighteenth Amendment, and repealed with the Twenty-First; women were granted the same suffrage rights as men with the Nineteenth Amendment; a two-term limit was established for the President with the Twenty-Second Amendment.

The Thirteenth Amendment, passed in 1864 during the Civil War, made slavery and involuntary servitude illegal under the United States Constitution. The Fourteenth And Fifteenth Amendments are concerned with establishing equal rights to protection and suffrage for people of all races. The Sixteenth Amendment established an income tax. The Seventeenth Amendment established direct election of senators by a vote of the people.

The voting age was lowered from twenty-one to eighteen by the passage of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, in 1971. The movement was some thirty-odd years in the making and gained a great deal of momentum in the 1960s. After Franklin D. Roosevelt had lowered the conscription age to eighteen during World War Two, it became rather obviously unjust that young men were being sent to fight in the Vietnam War without having any electoral say in whether their country should be there in the first place. This, coupled with the civic activism displayed by students and other young people in the 1960s, pressured the political powers to lower the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen.

The Twenty-Seventh Amendment to the Constitution was passed in 1992; it is the most recent amendment that has been made to the Constitution. It takes away the ability of Congress to regulate its own pay structure easily. Under the new amendment any changes to increase or decrease the wage of Congressmen will not come into effect until the beginning of the next term of office for representatives.