March 31, 2025
Civil rights lawyer and scholar Sherrilyn Ifill will head the challenge.
On March 27, Howard College launched its 14th Modification Heart for Legislation and Democracy, housed inside Howard College’s Legislation Faculty. Civil rights lawyer Sherrilyn Ifill was lately appointed as Howard’s inaugural Vernon Jordan Endowed Chair in Civil Rights and as such, the middle is the primary challenge formally launched by Ifill in her new place.
In response to a press launch that each introduced Ifill’s appointment and the creation of the middle, Ifill mentioned the need of the challenge and alluded that the tenets of democracy itself are beneath assault from the Trump administration.
Ifill was beforehand the chief of the Authorized Protection Fund from 2013-2022, when she stepped down from her place.
“At this second of democratic disaster in our nation, we should return to the 14th modification and its highly effective and pragmatic conception of a post-Civil Struggle America grounded within the values of equality, justice and a reimagined imaginative and prescient of citizenship,” Ifill stated.
She continued, “That imaginative and prescient features a clear-eyed confrontation with the cussed persistence of white supremacy and its ongoing menace to the promise of our new nation. For that motive, launching this heart at Howard within the twenty first century right now of profound democratic disaster, surrounded by Howard’s spectacular school and extraordinary college students, appears not solely acceptable, however crucial.”
In response to Numerous Schooling, the middle will undertake a multidisciplinary method to finding out the 14th Modification, exploring its rules by the lenses of legislation, enterprise, and the humanities to grasp their relevance throughout these fields.
The 14th Modification addressed the fallout of the Civil Struggle, guaranteeing birthright citizenship and equal safety beneath the legislation.
Initially, these precepts have been created to offer Black People full citizenship and the protections that include being a citizen which they have been beforehand denied for hundreds of years by the USA.
Latest arguments from the Trump administration and different conservatives have twisted the equal safety clause right into a nonsensical place that such a factor as anti-white racism exists.
As Ifill instructed NPR‘s Michel Martin in a March 28 interview, the 14th Modification doesn’t solely impression immigrants, however touches a variety of individuals on this nation, together with Black People. Ifill additionally laid out her imaginative and prescient for a way the middle engages with the general public in the course of the interview.
“There are folks throughout this nation who will proudly and passionately inform you about their Second Modification rights. However when was the final time you heard any person, an peculiar American, inform you about their 14th Modification rights, regardless that these are the rights that assure equality on this nation, that be sure that the state can not take issues from you with out offering you with some due course of, and that assure birthright citizenship? And the purpose of the middle is to create the curriculum, each formal and casual and the form of narrative that People can get their arms round in order that they are going to come to cloak their conception of those rights that we take without any consideration in constitutional phrases,” Ifill instructed NPR.
Ifill concluded, “There are different provisions of the 14th Modification that I wish to discover as a part of the work of this heart. It’s the longest modification to the Structure…And a part of the aim of this heart is to totally familiarize People with the richness of this essential Constitutional modification. And that would come with all of its provisions that I believe are fairly related for the challenges that we face in the present day.”
RELATED CONTENT: Howard College Formally Turns into Solely HBCU With Analysis One Carnegie Classification