On December 3, 1865, a group of Black Mississippians wrote to the state’s governor, demanding respect for their newly won freedom. “Now we are free,” they insisted, “we do not want to be hunted … All we ask is justice and to be treated like humane beings.” They recalled vividly “the yelping of bloodhounds and tareing of our fellow servants To pisces” by slave patrols, and called for an end to these violent abuses. The Fourteenth Amendment, written the next year and ratified in 1868, vindicated their demands for equal justice, human dignity, and bodily security.
The Fourteenth Amendment effected a fundamental transformation in the constitutional law of policing in two respects. First, it required states to respect basic fundamental rights, including those to life and personal security. State police could not indiscriminately search and seize Black Americans. Second, as Senator Jacob Howard—one of the amendment’s framers—explained in congressional debates, its guarantee of “the equal protection of the laws” demanded “one measure of justice” for all persons, regardless of race. The requirement of equal protection ended “the injustice of subjecting one caste of persons to a code not applicable to another,” according to Howard.
Together, these guarantees sought to put an end to racialized policing practices. In doing so, the Fourteenth Amendment embedded directly in the Constitution the idea that violence against Black people must stop. This reflected the obvious and most basic truth that bodily integrity and security are fundamental to freedom. The Fourteenth Amendment struck at centuries of history that permitted Black bodies to be violated indiscriminately, instead promising personal security to all. Open-ended police power, the framers of the amendment recognized, was a tool of racial oppression and violence. Equal citizenship and true freedom could not be enjoyed without limiting police abuses.
The history of how the amendment came to be reveals that foundational promise. In 1866, Congress formed the Joint Committee on Reconstruction to investigate conditions in the South. Some of the leading lights of the 39th Congress, including Senator Jacob Howard and Representatives John Bingham and Thaddeus Stevens, served on the 15-person bipartisan committee. The committee took testimony from white southerners, Black Americans seeking to enjoy freedom for the first time, and Union officers working in the South, learning firsthand of the gruesome violence and systemic violation of fundamental rights. The committee drafted the Fourteenth Amendment, and its findings and the testimony it heard bore directly on the amendment it wrote.