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In the next few months, the Supreme Court will issue a spate of potentially landmark rulings on the meaning of the Reconstruction Amendments. In Louisiana v. Callais, currently the earliest-heard case remaining to be decided on the court’s docket, the justices will rule on an incredibly important voting rights case about race and redistricting that conservatives hope will significantly undermine the Voting Rights Act. In Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J., meanwhile, the court confronts whether the 14th Amendment’s universal guarantee of equal protection safeguards transgender women and girls who seek to play on sport teams and clubs. Last, but certainly not least, in Trump v. Barbara, the court will decide the lawfulness of the Trump administration’s frontal assault on the constitutional promise of birthright citizenship.

In each of these upcoming rulings, the Supreme Court cannot do justice to the Reconstruction Amendments without reckoning with the ways Black Americans shaped these transformational amendments and the principles of freedom, equality, and multiracial democracy they guarantee. Yet when the Supreme Court discusses the text and history of the Reconstruction Amendments, it generally omits this part of the story, instead telling a story of what white men—predominantly white congressmen who passed the Reconstruction Amendments and contemporaneous landmark federal legislation—intended in fundamentally altering the Constitution. This erases the critical role Black Americans played in their liberation struggle and the making—and meaning—of the Reconstruction Amendments.

Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern

One Justice Just Took........

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