It captures how the 14th Amendment restarted America, provoking a backlash that extends to today, when its freedoms are being trampled. It’s rare to see a dramatic feature filmmaker move into the realm of documentary with the craftmanship and authority and insightful power summoned by Ava DuVernay. The film was despairing and inspiring in equal measure; it cleansed you with the truth.
Tonight, the New York Film Festival presented the premiere of “14th,” a documentary follow-up in which DuVernay sets her sights on the 14th Amendment, a Constitutional addendum, ratified in 1868, that was so monumental — it guarantees equal protection under the law, but also encompasses five intricate sections that deal with issues from insurrection to due process — that one observer calls it “a Constitution in and of itself,” and another hails it as “the everything bagel of democracy.” “14th,” I’m pleased to report, exerts the same kind of historical/topical force that “13th” did. DuVernay, while she works in an extremely accessible and mainstream way, has a singular gift for making the nuances of history come alive. Instead, DuVernay cuts through the dusty complacency with which we tend to regard the Constitution (just hearing that word can make you feel like you’re back in school) and shows you that the Constitution is a living, breathing document, one that we fail to heed at our peril.
Which is more or less what’s happening today. A potent movie about history almost has to surprise you. It needs to show you that what you think you know isn’t the half of it.
Yet we don’t necessarily talk about them that way. Everyone knows who “the framers” of the Constitution were (Hamilton, Jefferson, Franklin), but “14th” argues that the period just after the cataclysm of the Civil War had its own framers, who were nearly as significant. Thaddeus Stevens, a member of the House of Representatives who was part of the Radical Republican faction of the 1860s, is a figure who, according to one of the film’s observers, “created the world we live in today.” With the abolition of slavery, four million people who were formerly enslaved were suddenly added to the fabric of American society.
DuVernay tell the story of Reconstruction through fresh eyes, and part of the power of her chronicle is that she doesn’t stint on the joy and liberation that were part of it. Black Americans, who were now citizens, formed communities and industries, they became newspaper editors and law enforcers, as well as politicians (there were 1,000 newly elected Black representatives). The point is made that Black people, for the first time in American life, could create a fully realized dream of who they wanted to be as individuals.
But this would not work unless their citizenship was enshrined. That’s the first thing the 14th Amendment did. It guaranteed equal protection under the law, and it established birthright citizenship for all people born in the United States — a radical idea, one designed to apply to both the children of former enslaved people and the children of immigrants, because what that represented was a stepping up of the rejection of the European aristocratic system (i.e., citizenship by legacy) that had first been overthrown by the American Revolution.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
