The Importance of Individual Rights

The original Constitution permitted slavery to continue; it did not secure the right of women to vote; and it provided no protection for religious freedom, not to mention other rights.

The framers of the Constitution understood that it needed amendments, and in fact it the Bill of Rights—the first ten amendments—were necessary to convince voters that they should adopt it. Other amendments would follow later, and they would end slavery and guarantee women the right to vote.

Did a slave who lived in a free state deserve his freedom?

• The Dred Scott decision by the U.S. Supreme Court announced on March 6, 1857, that added fuel to the bitter sectional controversy over slavery and pushed the nation further along the road to civil war.

• The Supreme Court ruled that: Blacks were not citizens and therefore could not sue in the federal courts; A slave's residence on free soil did not make him a freeman upon his return to slave territory; slaves were property and did not have rights but slaveholders were property owners and did have rights. The Thirteenth Amendment was necessary to end slavery in 1865.

Source: http://www.worldfreeinternet.net/news/nws19.htm

Did women deserve the right to vote?

• The Fifteenth Amendment granted black men, but not black women, the right to vote in 1870, eighty-one years after the adoption of the Constitution.

• The Nineteenth Amendment finally granted women the right to vote in 1920, 131 years after the United States Constitution gave white men that right.

• When did Mexicans obtain the right to vote?

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo guaranteed Mexicans “the enjoyment of all the rights of citizens,” but state lawmakers and judges frequently violated such stipulations, primarily because the treaty made no explicit reference to race.

Article IX, included in Richard Griswold del Castillo, The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo: A Legacy of Conflict (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990), 190.

•The legislatures of the ceded territory immediately curtailed the rights of a significant portion of the Mexican population by conferring constitutional rights only to white Mexicans, a stipulation the treaty never made.

•Thus, all the civilized Indians and afro-mestizos who had enjoyed the rights of Mexican citizenship were suddenly ineligible to vote, hold important offices, practice law, testify in court (in cases involving whites), and serve on juries.

The U.S. Congress granted states these prerogatives in 1849. These restrictions on citizenship existed throughout the ceded territory and in Texas (whose sovereignty the treaty recognized). Martha Menchaca, Recovering History, Constructing Race: The Indian, Black, and White Roots of Mexican Americans (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2001), 215-228.

•As early as 1857, a California court forbade a Mexican landowner who signed the California constitution from testifying in court because of his Indian ancestry.

•The year before, the California Assembly had passed an anti-vagrancy ordinance informally known as the “Greaser Act,” which targeted people “commonly known as ‘Greasers’ or the issue of Spanish or Indian blood.”

•In 1869, white businessmen in Santa Barbara contested the election of Pablo de la Guerra as district judge, arguing that he retained “the character of a Mexican citizen.” The California Supreme Court validated the citizenship of the defendant, but stipulated that the government could deny rights to non-white Mexicans.

•In Tucson in 1893, when white political opponents argued that Lucas Estrella, a city marshal, was not an American citizen. Estrella successfully deflected the

attacks, but his political career soon ended.

De la Guerra had also been a delegate in the constitutional convention and a state senator. Martha Menchaca, Recovering History, Constructing Race: The Indian, Black, and White Roots of Mexican Americans (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2001),, 221-22.Rodolfo Acuña, Occupied America: The Chicano Struggle Toward Liberation (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 117.

Sheridan, Los Tucsonenses (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1986), 118-19.

• Texas district court finally established the legitimate right of Mexicans to American citizenship. It determined (In re Rodriguez, 1897) that Mexicans indeed qualified, but their endorsement came with a distressing explanation. They based their decision on international treaties between the U.S. and Mexico, and added that the claimant was probably not white in the anthropological sense, which in this case meant that he did not look white.

Ian F. Haney López, White by Law: the Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 1-3, 5-9, 61, 203.

• Can an INS officer search a person who looks Mexican?

• “Although the Supreme Court has held that searches and seizures motivated entirely by Mexican appearance are unconstitutional, much INS activity has been held by federal courts to fall outside ______ Amendment scrutiny.”

Robert Alan Culp, “The Immigration and Naturalization Service and Racially Motivated Questioning: Does Equal Protection Pick up Where the Fourth Amendment Left off?” Columbia Law Review, Vol. 86, No. 4. (May

1986), 801.

Miranda Rights

In 1966, the U.S. Supreme Court decided the historic case of Miranda v. Arizona, declaring that whenever a person is taken into police custody, before being questioned he or she must be told of the _________ Amendment right not to make any self-incriminating statements. As a result of Miranda, anyone in police custody must be informed of his rights before being questioned:

1. You have the right to remain silent.2. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of

law.3. You have the right to an attorney.4. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you.

Source: http://criminal.findlaw.com/crimes/criminal_rights/your-rights-miranda/miranda.html

Ruiz v. Hull (Arizona, 1998)

•Elected officials, state employees and public school teachers brought action to challenge constitutionality of constitutional amendment requiring state and local governments to "act" only in English.

•The Supreme Court, ruled that the law violated the _________ Amendment and Equal Protection Clause of Fourteenth Amendment.

Source: http://www.languageandlaw.org/TEXTS/CASES/RUIZ.HTM

Pennsylvania, 2003• A Hispanic man who spoke to his 5-year-old daughter

in Spanish has been ordered to use primarily English around the girl as a condition of his visitation rights.

• "The principal form of communication during the periods of visitation is going to be English," the judge said. "That does not mean that you can't instruct and teach her the Hispanic language.”

• Does the judge’s order violate any amendments?

Source: http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/news.aspx?id=12085

Kansas, 2005 • Junior Zach Rubio was suspended for one and a half days from

Endeavor Alternative School in Kansas City for speaking Spanish, his father's native language. According to one Washington Post report, the teen says another boy asked him a question in Spanish in the school hallway during a bathroom break, and it only felt natural to Rubio to reply in the same language, which he did.

• A teacher who overheard the two students' exchange in Spanish sent Rubio to the office, where school principal Jennifer Watts ordered him to call his father and prepare to leave the campus. She says this was not the first time Rubio and other students had been told not to speak Spanish at school.

• Did the school violate any amendments?

• Source: http://headlines.agapepress.org/archive/12/afa/142005c.asp

Compiled by Sal Acosta

Other Sources:•http://www.pbs4549.org/constitution/ppvid3.htm•http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/eousa/foia_reading_room/usam/title9/crm00121.htm •Source: Robert A. Goldwin, Why Blacks, Women, and Jews Are Not Mentioned in the Constitution, and Other Unorthodox Views (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1990).•Achievement, Discrimination, and Mexican Americans Samuel J. Surace Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 24, No. 2. (Apr., 1982), pp. 315-339. •Chicano Indianism: A Historical Account of Racial Repression in the United States Martha

Menchaca American Ethnologist, Vol. 20, No. 3. (Aug., 1993), pp. 583-603.