- May 6, 2003
- 64
- 0
POSITIVELY BLACK
Junious Ricardo Stanton
Why We Still Get No Justice In AmeriKKKa
“The 14th Amendment was not only perverted by corporate agents to gain initial ‘personhood’ rights but also to expand them. As Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black pointed out in Connecticut General Co. v. Johnson in 1938, "Of the cases in this court in which the Fourteenth Amendment was applied during the first fifty years after its adoption, less than one-half of one percent invoked it in protection of the Negro race, and more than fifty percent asked that its benefits be extended to corporations." Prior to the Santa Clara decision, women argued before the US Supreme court in 1875 that the denial of their vote was an infringement of their due-process rights under the 14th Amendment. The Court ruled against them. Thanks to the way former corporate attorneys then sitting on the US Supreme Court interpreted the 14th Amendment, corporations, a legal construct formed primarily to give business corporations directors, officers and wealthy investors protection from liability, gained important constitutional protections that women, Native Americans and most African Americans did not. The Santa Clara decision contradicted the long-standing principle that corporations were nothing more than artificial legal fictions subservient to sovereign citizens chartered only to conduct business defined in their charter. The court ruling opened the door to challenging the long-standing policy that corporations could not engage in political or even charitable activities. The decision paved the way for corporations to gain important Bill of Rights protections, including free speech and protections from search and seizure. That corporations and their agents can today influence and define public policy and engage in politics is a result in part of the perversion of the 14th Amendment in the Santa Clara decision.”- Northeast Ohio American Friends Service Committee Press Release March 11, 2003
Recently I was watching C-Span and I saw a Negro syndicated columnist I don’t recall his name, arguing against Reparations for African Americans. The forum being covered by C-Span was underwritten by the right wing. He kept quoting statistics from The Heritage Foundation a notoriously racist right wing ideological think tank to support his assertion Reparations were bad for black people. It was thoroughly disgusting. When he started talking about 9-11, how the “terrorists” didn’t give black Americans extra time to vacate the World Trade Towers because they were descendants of slaves, that we are all in this together as Americans, I turned it off. I turned it off because foreign terrorists didn’t execute 9-11 and because he implied anti- poverty programs, food stamps and subsidized housing were all designed to offset the effects of slavery and Jim Crow. Aside from his disingenuousness, the right wing’s goal is to eliminate “entitlement programs”, nevertheless the fact is, none of those programs, food stamps, anti-poverty or subsidized housing were designed or intended specifically for African-Americans! The right wingers, as usual play loose with the facts. The fact is AmeriKKKa is still racist to the core albeit more subtle. It has blatantly subverted the Constitutional amendments that were passed to redress the egregious injustices of slavery. If the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution passed in 1868 which states, “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States, nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty or property, without due process of law; nor deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” had been strictly and consistently enforced the Plessy v Ferguson ruling of 1896 would never have ushered in statutory apartheid in the United States and its concomitant abuses that still linger today such: as “racial profiling”, political disenfranchisement ala Election 2000, excluding blacks as jurors, the economic redlining of neighborhoods routinely those of people of color, housing, lending and educational discrimination and a host of others.
The ruling elites highjacked the Fourteenth Amendment in 1886 in a landmark Supreme Court decision, Santa Clara v Southern Pacific Railroad which determined corporations were to be considered “persons” in accordance with the Fourteenth Amendment. Except for civil rights attorneys battling US apartheid, after Santa Clara, almost all legal references to the Fourteenth Amendment dealt with corporate matters rather than humans in general and Africans in particular as originally intended! This is why we are in the predicament we are in today. The Santa Clara case foreshadowed how white males would use “affirmative action” programs to benefit their wives, sisters, daughters, nieces and concubines, thwarting the purposes “affirmative action” was originally intended for. When you discern history from this perspective, you understand why real reparations are indeed in order.
Junious Ricardo Stanton
Why We Still Get No Justice In AmeriKKKa
“The 14th Amendment was not only perverted by corporate agents to gain initial ‘personhood’ rights but also to expand them. As Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black pointed out in Connecticut General Co. v. Johnson in 1938, "Of the cases in this court in which the Fourteenth Amendment was applied during the first fifty years after its adoption, less than one-half of one percent invoked it in protection of the Negro race, and more than fifty percent asked that its benefits be extended to corporations." Prior to the Santa Clara decision, women argued before the US Supreme court in 1875 that the denial of their vote was an infringement of their due-process rights under the 14th Amendment. The Court ruled against them. Thanks to the way former corporate attorneys then sitting on the US Supreme Court interpreted the 14th Amendment, corporations, a legal construct formed primarily to give business corporations directors, officers and wealthy investors protection from liability, gained important constitutional protections that women, Native Americans and most African Americans did not. The Santa Clara decision contradicted the long-standing principle that corporations were nothing more than artificial legal fictions subservient to sovereign citizens chartered only to conduct business defined in their charter. The court ruling opened the door to challenging the long-standing policy that corporations could not engage in political or even charitable activities. The decision paved the way for corporations to gain important Bill of Rights protections, including free speech and protections from search and seizure. That corporations and their agents can today influence and define public policy and engage in politics is a result in part of the perversion of the 14th Amendment in the Santa Clara decision.”- Northeast Ohio American Friends Service Committee Press Release March 11, 2003
Recently I was watching C-Span and I saw a Negro syndicated columnist I don’t recall his name, arguing against Reparations for African Americans. The forum being covered by C-Span was underwritten by the right wing. He kept quoting statistics from The Heritage Foundation a notoriously racist right wing ideological think tank to support his assertion Reparations were bad for black people. It was thoroughly disgusting. When he started talking about 9-11, how the “terrorists” didn’t give black Americans extra time to vacate the World Trade Towers because they were descendants of slaves, that we are all in this together as Americans, I turned it off. I turned it off because foreign terrorists didn’t execute 9-11 and because he implied anti- poverty programs, food stamps and subsidized housing were all designed to offset the effects of slavery and Jim Crow. Aside from his disingenuousness, the right wing’s goal is to eliminate “entitlement programs”, nevertheless the fact is, none of those programs, food stamps, anti-poverty or subsidized housing were designed or intended specifically for African-Americans! The right wingers, as usual play loose with the facts. The fact is AmeriKKKa is still racist to the core albeit more subtle. It has blatantly subverted the Constitutional amendments that were passed to redress the egregious injustices of slavery. If the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution passed in 1868 which states, “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States, nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty or property, without due process of law; nor deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” had been strictly and consistently enforced the Plessy v Ferguson ruling of 1896 would never have ushered in statutory apartheid in the United States and its concomitant abuses that still linger today such: as “racial profiling”, political disenfranchisement ala Election 2000, excluding blacks as jurors, the economic redlining of neighborhoods routinely those of people of color, housing, lending and educational discrimination and a host of others.
The ruling elites highjacked the Fourteenth Amendment in 1886 in a landmark Supreme Court decision, Santa Clara v Southern Pacific Railroad which determined corporations were to be considered “persons” in accordance with the Fourteenth Amendment. Except for civil rights attorneys battling US apartheid, after Santa Clara, almost all legal references to the Fourteenth Amendment dealt with corporate matters rather than humans in general and Africans in particular as originally intended! This is why we are in the predicament we are in today. The Santa Clara case foreshadowed how white males would use “affirmative action” programs to benefit their wives, sisters, daughters, nieces and concubines, thwarting the purposes “affirmative action” was originally intended for. When you discern history from this perspective, you understand why real reparations are indeed in order.