“All men are created equal,” Jefferson wrote in our Declaration of Independence, yet a few years later in the Constitution his fellow Founding Fathers designated slaves as 3/5^ths of a human being.

Which brings up a point. The genius of our Constitution, and the Founders who created it, is that they knew it was a far-from-perfect document, just as they were a far-from-perfect people. That is why they gave the Constitution the power to amend itself — to change for the better both the government and the country.

And as it happened, in the years since the Constitution was created, more amendments to it have dealt with “equality” than with any other issue. The 13^th Amendment abolished slavery, the 14^th guaranteed equal protection under the law, the 15^th guaranteed the right to vote regardless of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” and the 19^th afforded the same right regardless of sex.

And then there is the 24^th Amendment, which was ratified this week (Jan. 23) in 1964 as one answer to the attempts by many southern states to circumvent federal law — and preserve inequality — by passing state laws that defied both the spirit and intent of federal law.  For example, even though the right to vote was guaranteed by the 15^th Amendment, several Southern states passed laws that imposed a variety of conditions on black Americans to deny them that right.  One such condition was a poll tax, which black voters had to pay before they could enter the voting booth.  Many southerners defended the tax by saying that a property qualification (i.e. having enough wealth to be worthy of voting) was as old as America itself, but Civil Rights advocates countered that because the tax fell disproportionately on blacks, it violated the 14^th Amendment’s equal protection clause.

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This week (Aug. 18) in 1963, James Meredith graduated from the University of Mississippi with a degree in history, which is fitting because when he entered “Ole Miss” he himself made history.  Meredith, of course, was the first African-American to enroll in that historically all-white school, and it took a court order and an escort of armed federal marshals for him to accomplish it.

He actually had been admitted to Ole Miss a year earlier, but when the school’s registrar realized that Meredith was black, his admission was rescinded, forcing Meredith, assisted by the NAACP, to file a lawsuit demanding that he be admitted. That suit eventually came before the U.S. Supreme Court, and in September of 1962 that court ordered the university to desegregate.

Unsurprisingly, the governor of this deep-South, proudly segregationist state, Ross Barnett, decided to defy the Supreme Court, vowing that Meredith would “never, never” be allowed to enter Ole Miss, and when Meredith went to register for the 1962 school year, Barnett was there to personally block the door to the registrar’s office.

Immediately Barnett was found guilty of civil contempt and threatened with arrest and a fine, and a constitutional crisis seemed imminent between the civil rights movement, backed by federal law, and state’s rights advocates claiming the preeminence of state law.

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