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Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)
Ratified in 1865 at the end of the American Civil War, the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution abolishes slavery—“except as a punishment for crime”—and gives Congress the “power to enforce [the abolition of slavery] by appropriate legislation.” In 1866, Congress passed such “appropriate legislation”—a Civil Rights Act that banned anything that “perpetuated the characteristics of slavery.” Because the United States’ de jure residential segregation “perpetuate[s] the characteristics of slavery,” Rothstein thinks this practice clearly violates the Thirteenth Amendment (in addition to the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments). The Supreme Court originally disagreed with this conclusion, but changed its mind in 1968.
Thirteenth Amendment Quotes in The Color of Law
The The Color of Law quotes below are all either spoken by Thirteenth Amendment or refer to Thirteenth Amendment. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 8
Quotes
The Milpitas story illustrates the extraordinary creativity that government officials at all levels displayed when they were motivated to prevent the movement of African Americans into white neighborhoods. It wasn’t only the large-scale federal programs of public housing and mortgage finance that created de jure segregation. Hundreds, if not thousands of smaller acts of government contributed. They included petty actions like denial of access to public utilities; determining, once African Americans wanted to build, that their property was, after all, needed for parkland; or discovering that a road leading to African American homes was “private.” They included routing interstate highways to create racial boundaries or to shift the residential placement of African American families. And they included choosing school sites to force families to move to segregated neighborhoods if they wanted education for their children.
Taken in isolation, we can easily dismiss such devices as aberrations. But when we consider them as a whole, we can see that they were part of a national system by which state and local government supplemented federal efforts to maintain the status of African Americans as a lower caste, with housing segregation preserving the badges and incidents of slavery.
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Thirteenth Amendment Term Timeline in The Color of Law
The timeline below shows where the term Thirteenth Amendment appears in The Color of Law. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Preface
...it violates not only the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution, but also the Thirteenth, which both outlaws slavery and gives Congress the power to enforce this through legislation. One...
(full context)
