Black Lives Matter, the activist movement that began in 2013, focuses on violence against African-Americans -- perpetrated not only by the police but also by private vigilantes. Its central goals are to prevent such violence and to hold people accountable when it occurs.
Its supporters proclaim that this is something new, “not your grandmamma’s civil rights movement.” Maybe so. But it may well be your grandmamma’s grandmamma’s civil rights movement. Black Lives Matter taps into an often forgotten, but nevertheless defining, element of our constitutional heritage.
After the Civil War, the nation ratified the 14th Amendment, much of which adopts phrases from the original Constitution and Bill of Rights. But one line was startlingly new: “nor shall any state . . . deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
Here’s one way to understand the central meaning of the equal protection clause: Black lives matter.
Nowadays, the idea of “equal protection” is understood as a broad prohibition on discrimination. But the clause refers not to equality in general but specifically to “equal protection.” It was conceived as a direct response to the states’ failure to prevent private and public violence against the newly freed slaves. As summarized more than 20 years ago by the great constitutional scholar David Currie, the clause means that “the states must protect blacks to the same extent that they protect whites: by punishing those who do them injury.”
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