At Douglass Center Talk, Influential Civil Rights Lawyer Urges Audience to ‘Reimagine Next Iteration of This Democracy’

Sherrilyn Ifill aruged the 14th Amendment provides a template to reimagine democracy

By Kelly Blake
 

The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, is again at the center of a national reckoning. Legal challenges to it just over the past year have questioned who counts as a citizen, who is entitled to “due process” and who is fit to hold public office.
 

"I am not here to bring you joy," civil rights lawyer Sherrilyn Ifill told the audience gathered to hear her lecture “The 14th Amendment and the Crises of American Democracy,” organized by the Frederick Douglass Center for Leadership Through the Humanities on November 4. "But I am also not here to feed despair."
 

Ifill reckoned with the perilous state of U.S. democracy and called on the audience to remember the amendment's roots and to confront what its erosion could mean today.
 

Quincy Mills, director of the Frederick Douglass Center, introduced Ifill, whose leadership and influential career includes serving as president and director-counsel of the Legal Defense Fund from 2013-2022. “Humanistic inquiry is at the center of how she understands civil rights, human rights and litigation,” said Mills, who is also a professor of history and associate dean in the College of Arts and Humanities.
 

Ifill recently founded the 14th Amendment Center for Law and Democracy at Howard University, where she serves as the Vernon Jordan Distinguished Professor in Civil Rights. The center takes a multi-disciplinary approach to understanding and preserving the vision and values expressed in the 14th Amendment, which granted citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the U.S. and guaranteed all people “equal protection of the laws” and "due process of law" from state governments. It was passed after the Civil War to grant rights to formerly enslaved people.
 

Originally from New York, Ifill made her home in Baltimore in the mid 1990s, where she raised her children and taught at the University of Maryland School of Law. While there, she started three law clinics, focused on environmental justice, addressing the legal barriers facing formerly incarcerated persons and reparations to address human rights violations. “Over the course of 20 years, I had the opportunity to shape at least 2,000 Maryland lawyers,” Ifill shared proudly. “I knew that for many of my students, this was the first time they had sat under the authority of a Black woman. And I also knew that I was really good.”
 

Here are some of the key takeaways from Ifill’s talk:  
 

The Constitution calls us to reimagine our democracy 

“I am here to remind us of our responsibility and our obligation as citizens of this country. And I use that word citizens expansively. I mean, if you live in this country and it is your intention to have your future in this country, then you have a particular kind of responsibility. It is a responsibility that calls to us from the [Constitution]. … Within that document lies the call to do the thing that I believe this time in our country compels us and indeed requires us to do, which is to reimagine the next iteration of this democracy.”

This country has been founded and refounded and can be again 

Ifill asked the audience to shout out the names of the nation’s founders, to which audience members replied: Jefferson, Madison, Washington, Hamilton and so on. Then she questioned why people didn’t name the abolitionists Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner or John Bingham, who were all involved in what she described as the “refounding” of the country that took place during Reconstruction, the period after the Civil War ended. She explained that the 14th amendment, authored by John Bingham and passed in 1866 was the blueprint for the refounded nation. She also included Frederick Douglass and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others as founders and framers because of their contributions to the public dialogue about what citizenship meant and to whom it was available. 
 

“Founders are the people who are engaged in workshopping the ideas and who are engaged in activism and who are engaged in actions that give shape to the meaning of the words that end up being written on the paper. … [We] have the ability to be founders and framers of the next iteration of this democracy by what we do in the places that we do them, by your scholarship, by your activism.”

The 14th Amendment is critical to how we think of ourselves as citizens 

While most Americans have some familiarity with the protections outlined in the first, second and fifth amendment of the Constitution, even though they may get the details wrong, no one talks about their Fourteenth Amendment rights, Ifill explained. “Even if someone has been discriminated against, we say they've been discriminated against, they've faced bias, they've faced racism. You don't say, you know, my 14th Amendment rights were violated.” 
 

She would like to change that and make sure that people feel connected to what’s in the amendment. 
 

“One of the reasons I wanted to create this initiative [The 14th Amendment Center] is because here it is, this central part of our Constitution that is so critical to how we think of ourselves as citizens, and it's almost like air. People don't know what it is and don't feel connected to it.”

The 14th Amendment is the first time the word “equal” is mentioned in the Constitution

“The first founders did not include equality in our Constitution. And if you think that they included equality, it's because you're thinking not about the Constitution, but the Declaration of Independence: We hold these views to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. That's not in the Constitution. So the 14th Amendment reaches back over the Constitution to pull this concept from the Declaration of Independence into our founding document and says that all persons, not citizens, all persons are entitled to equal protection of laws. 
 

So to the extent you believe, as most Americans believe, that you don't have the right to discriminate against me because I'm an older person, because I'm disabled, because I'm a woman, because I'm Black, because I'm Latino, because I'm a man, that concept came to us courtesy of the 14th Amendment. ... All persons are entitled to equal protection of the law, and it includes that all persons are entitled to due process, which means that people can't take things from you without giving you a chance to appear before an impartial tribunal, to face your accuser, to present evidence, and so forth. And so when we hear people asking the question, are migrants entitled to due process? It says every person. These are not things that should be subject to polls. It's written in the words of the 14th Amendment.”

The 14th Amendment provides an historical template for democracy’s future

“I use the 14th Amendment as a template to help people begin to think about reimagining our democracy. I need to believe it doesn't take a bloody war and the death of 600,000 Americans to refresh my country. Activists did it in the Civil Rights Movement. They reset our democracy. They are the reason that this room looks like this room. So, we have no reason to believe that it is not possible to reset American democracy. What I want us to believe is that we are obligated to do so. What I want us to believe is that we have the power to do so. What I want us to believe is that there is a template for us doing so.
 

Democracy depends on people continually planting seeds for the future 

“Our democracy has been in trouble for a very long time. The people who could tell you that are the people who experience democracy at its weakest places. The people who are most marginalized. And they have known that for years, for decades. Now the cracks that we tried to explain were cracks have become fissures, and now the whole foundation is collapsing in on itself. So we're facing a very serious problem, and none of us are going to be able to 24/7 fight with the sword. None of us can do it…. There are times when we are out there punching with all our might, you know, but there are also times when we're called to do other things. Some of it is the reimagining. I've been telling people it's planting time, I do think it's very important for people to be planting for the future. Every single one of us in this room is living and has lived in the harvest. From the people who planted it before us. You live, we live in this room, you can go to this university, you could teach here, you do all that because people did work before us.