Amend: The Fight for America

 

Starring: Will Smith, Mahershala Ali, Lavern Cox

Creators: Robe Imbriano, Tom Yellin

Available on Netflix

Reviewed by: Steve Halpern

Recently, I viewed the Netflix documentary Amend: The Fight for America. This film series centers around the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. I found this documentary series to be worth watching for several reasons. However, this series also has severe limitations. 

One of those limitations is in the title, “Amend: The Fight for America.” The documentary gives ample evidence that this nation has always had persistent and vicious divisions. These divisions illustrate how there are conflicting interests that have been battling each other throughout the history of this country. Therefore, I believe we need to ask the question: Whose interests have working people been struggling for and against throughout the history of this country?

Before answering that question, there are other aspects of this documentary that we might consider. I believe there are three episodes of Amend that deal with the history of the 14th Amendment with respect to slavery, reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation, and the civil rights movement. Much of this history isn’t known to many viewers, and uncovering that information makes the documentary worth seeing. 

Then, there were segments about women’s liberation, gay rights, and immigrant rights. All these segments are tied together with the idea in the 14th Amendment about “equal protection under the law.”

One problem with this documentary is that it views the 14th Amendment as a hope or a promise, and not a law. After the ratification of the 14th Amendment, Will Smith argued that there were many people who didn’t like it. 

One of the arguments segregationist racists used was that they thought they were defending a “way of life.” We might recall that during the years of slavery, most of the white population lived in dirt-poor poverty under the coercive rule of slave owners. The vast majority had no access to education or health care.

 

The reconstruction governments began to provide education for both black and white residents for the first time. So, when people argued that they wanted to defend their “way of life” they were arguing for a life of abject poverty with no possibility of educating themselves.    

The defeat of radical reconstruction

Amend showed how the government sent the armed forces to the former slave states to actively repress those who tried to reimpose slavery with the Black Codes. Then, President Rutherford B. Hayes made a deal that took the federal troops out of the former salve states in 1877. In that same year, those federal troops were used in a war against the Native Americans known as the Nez Perce. Also, in 1877 federal troops were used to murder rail-workers who were on strike against a corporation owned by Cornelius Vanderbilt.

President Hayes’ actions were in concert with several decisions made by the Supreme Court. 

First, there was the Slaughterhouse case of 1873. This case made it clear that the Supreme Court had no intention of defending the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court concluded that state law can supersede the federal law and the Constitution.

Then, there was the Cruikshank v. United States case. In this case we see how the Supreme Court of the United States openly supported mass murder. In Colfax, Louisiana there was a mass murder of between 100 and 280 people. Federal troops supported those who were murdered. These murders were about a Democratic Party effort to circumvent an election. In order to enforce their will, these terrorists carried out a mass murder. 

This decision gave the green light for racists in the Ku Klux Klan to carry out murders, known as lynchings of thousands of African Americans, as well as people of other nationalities. The federal government refused to prosecute those murders. Therefore the government became complicit  in each and every lynching.    

The Supreme Court ordered that those charged with this mass murder to be freed. Again, we see how the Supreme Court defended the right of states, not only to violate the Constitution, but to carry out mass murder.

Then, there was the Plessey v. Ferguson decision. Here the Supreme Court declared that while Black people had the right to so-called “equality” they could be forced to use separate facilities that were clearly unequal. 

The news media in this country went along with the flagrant violations of the 14th Amendment by the government. This documentary showed how the media actually glorified slavery for many years. Museums and statues that glorified confederate generals were all over the former states. Many of those statues have recently been removed because of mass protests. 

President Woodrow Wilson viewed the film “Birth of a Nation” that glorified the Ku Klux Klan. Amend had a film clip of President Donald Trump when he argued, “Bring back Birth of a Nation.”

When we look at this sordid history, we can begin to see why the names Frederick Douglass and Ida Wells were largely unknown in the academic community for many years. To this day, I don’t know of a feature film that portrayed the lives of these two genuinely heroic individuals. To its credit, the documentary Amend featured brief biographies of these two genuine leaders.

While some things changed, much remained the same 

As the political climate changed, actions by the government also changed. First, the Supreme Court, in their Brown v. Board of Education decision, declared that segregation in education is illegal. Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy both ordered federal troops to escort African American students into the then segregated schools in Arkansas and Georgia. So, here we see that when the government has had the political will, they have forced that will on those who organize to deny Black people citizenship rights. 

Then, the government bowed to the civil rights movement and passed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. These laws were mere redundancies of the 14th and 15th Amendments. The government passed these laws because they didn’t want to admit that federal, state and local authorities had been in flagrant violation of the Constitution for close to a century.

However, my high school education in Newark, New Jersey received considerably less funding than the funding of the education of students in more affluent neighborhoods. After many years of litigation, the state court in New Jersey ruled that this discrimination was illegal in their Abbot v. Burke decision. 

As a result, the New Jersey state court ordered the government to come up with hundreds of millions of dollars to equalize educational funding in the state. The New Jersey state government got the money for education by raising real estate taxes. In other words, former students, like my old classmates, needed to pay astronomical taxes to fix a system we did not break. 

This kind of litigation didn’t happen in the state of Connecticut. There, the state sentenced Tanya McDowell to five years in prison for “stealing education.” McDowell was a homeless mother who lived in Bridgeport, Connecticut. She used the address of a babysitter to send her son to an upscale Norwalk school. Initially the so-called crime of “steeling education” was a felony. The governor of the state set that aside, and this took two years off McDowell’s five-year prison sentence. 

Today, McDowell is on probation and she has a debt of $6,500 for sending her son to a school in Norwalk. This is a different state of affairs from New Jersey where the state paid hundreds of millions of dollars to modernize inner city schools. By the way, the state of Connecticut is one of the most affluent, per capita, in the nation.

So, we see how routine and vicious racist discrimination, has been a constant feature of the history of this country. The police murders George Floyd, Brianna Taylor and many others underscore this horrendous reality. The massive international protests of those murders also underscore the fact that masses of people are determined to end the political climate that has allowed those murders to happen. 

Other violations of the 14th Amendment

The founding document of the United States was the Declaration of Independence. In their ten-point program the Black Panthers quoted from this document. The Vietnamese government headed by Ho Chi Minh also quoted from this declaration. 

To paraphrase from this Declaration, When there is a “long train of abuses” resulting in “despotism” the people not only have a right, but a “duty” to throw off that power and establish new guards for their “security.”

So, now we can ask the question: If the Black Panthers and the Vietnamese both supported aspects of the Declaration of Independence, why did the United States government use considerable resources to carry out wars against the Panthers and the Vietnamese? 

One of the complaints listed in the Declaration against the British was that the British restricted immigration to the thirteen colonies. The revolutionaries wanted unlimited immigration. People from many nations came to the thirteen colonies to support the revolution against the British. In fact, one of the reasons for the victory of the revolution had to do with the support it received from France. 

All the recent Presidents of this country have made it one of their top priorities to deport millions of immigrants who lived in this country. Most of the deported immigrants came here from Mexico. The Mexican people have a Native American heritage. This means that their ancestors have lived in this part of the world for tens of thousands of years.

Amend also told the story of the Chinese rail workers who endured horrendous conditions to build the transcontinental railroad. That work transformed the United States by opening up a rail line that could go from New York to California in six days. After, the completion of this railroad, the federal government adopted the Chinese Exclusion Act that barred Chinese from immigrating to this country.

After the passage of the 14th Amendment, the federal government organized a genocidal war against Native Americans. In all, the government violated about 400 treaties with Native Americans. 

President Andrew Jackson violated a Supreme Court decision, and stole the land of the Cherokee in the area that is now the state of Georgia. Thousands of Cherokee died in the forced march to what was supposed to be their homeland in Oklahoma. President Jackson signed the treaty saying that the Cherokee would have that land “forever.” After the Civil War, the government violated another treaty and stole the Cherokee land in Oklahoma. The government then gave this land to settlers free of charge.

During the Second World War 110,000 Japanese citizens of the United States were placed in concentration camps. Because of a sustained campaign, the government eventually agreed to give each Japanese resident of those concentration camps a check for $20,000. 

One aspect of history that Amend completely overlooked was the decades long struggle by workers in labor unions who demanded a decent standard of living. The 14th Amendment claims that there is supposed to be “equal protection under the law.” 

However, when we look at the history of the labor movement, we see how the police and the National Guard have been consistently used to defend employers, while attacking and even murdering striking workers. There is a direct connection between the labor movement and the Montgomery Bus Boycott that launched the civil rights movement. A leader of that boycott was E.D. Nixon who was a member of the Sleeping Car Porters Union. 

Another Vision – The Russian and Cuban Revolutions

The Russian Revolution

In the year 1917 Vladimir Ilyich Lenin wrote a pamphlet titled State and Revolution. In that pamphlet, Lenin argued that in the political economic system known as capitalism the state was invented as a “special instrument of repression” to rob workers of the enormous wealth we produce. 

Malcolm X made a similar statement about the United States when he said, “Stop talking about the South, if you’re south of Canada, you’re in the South.”

In my opinion, these clear statements give an excellent summary of the reality of this country. Instead of arguing that the 14th Amendment is a hope or a promise, we can make the statement that the government in this country has always been extremely repressive. The documentary Amend gives a clear history of this.

Lenin wrote another pamphlet where he identified the gross inequality in the world. He called this pamphlet, Imperialism – The Highest Stage of Capitalism. In that pamphlet, Lenin gave the evidence of how industrial cartels were dominating the politics and economics of the capitalist nations in the world. As a result, people were driven to leave their homeland and immigrate to nations where they could make a living. Lenin argued that immigrants were a part of the working class and the Bolsheviks needed to defend their interests. 

Lenin also wrote about the many nations that experienced routine and horrendous repression living under the regime of the Czar. Lenin didn’t argue that the Russian people needed to “hope” that things might get better. No, Lenin argued that the Russian people could only achieve liberation if they joined the struggle to give all those nationalities self-determination. 

Lenin felt that if the Bolsheviks failed to advance that course, the Russian Revolution would have been an impossibility. After the victory of the Russian Revolution, the new name of the nation became the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

The Soviet Union became the first nation in the world to give women the right to vote. The Bolsheviks invited representatives from the colonial nations of the world to the U.S.S.R. to discuss how they might advance their struggles for genuine liberation.

Workers who experienced ruthless repression in the past, took control of their work environment. For a time, there was a cultural and scientific flowering in the Soviet Union in spite of the immense difficulties people experienced in those days. Then, because of the unimaginable difficulties experienced at that time, Joseph Stalin managed to take power and reverse most of the gains of the Revolution. 

The Cuban Revolution

However, the fire of revolution erupted in Cuba. After the Cuban Revolution, the new government organized a literacy drive that succeeded in teaching everyone on the island how to read. This meant that people who had been illiterate could now get skilled jobs and improve their standard of living. People who had little access to health care and education, now had a lifetime right to these services. 

Afro-Cubans and women became fully integrated into the economy. While Cuba made serious errors initially with respect to gays, those errors have been corrected. Instead of merely passing laws to undue the centuries of discrimination, Cuban leaders work with everyone stressing the importance of combatting all forms of discrimination.

Today we can see the results of those efforts. Pennsylvania and Cuba have populations of about 12 and 11 million. While Pennsylvania has had about 24,000 COVID-19 deaths, Cuba has had about 300 COVID-19 deaths. While the Black and Latino communities in this country have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic, Cuba is 100% Latino and about 40% Afro-Cuban. Why has there been this dramatic disparity?

No Cuban pays for health insurance. All Cubans have a lifetime right to health care. Cuba has three times more doctors per capita as the United States. Every Cuban neighborhood has their own doctor. This system enabled health care workers to visit every Cuban checking for pandemic related symptoms. Cuba also has a world renown scientific community that has invented treatments and vaccines for COVID-19.

While it is becoming more and more difficult to get abortions in this country, abortion is an absolute right in Cuba. In other words, Cuban women have the right to decide if and when they will become mothers.

Karl Marx

In the year 1848, at a time when there was chattel slavery in the United States, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote their Manifesto of the Communist Party. In that document, they identified one of the persistent problems of the capitalist system. This is the crisis of overproduction.

Marx and Engels argued that this problem never existed in human history before capitalism. When Native Americans had more food than they needed, they had a party and celebrated. When there were more auto parts being produced than could be sold, a factory where I worked for fourteen years closed its doors. As a result, 2,500 workers were thrown out, like we were worn out garbage.

Marx continued to look at this problem in his pamphlet Wage, Labor, and Capital. Here Marx wrote about how human labor power produces all wealth, while the owners of capital produce nothing. While workers only receive the means to sustain ourselves, the owners of capital control the enormous wealth workers all over the world produce. When we look at this reality, we can see why capitalist governments will never allow for an environment where there is “equal protection under the law.”

The Pledge of Allegiance

In the documentary Amend, the Pledge of Allegiance was mentioned. In this country, teachers are routinely required to ask students to stand up, place their hands on their hearts, and pledge allegiance to a flag they claim represents liberty and justice for all.

Most people don’t know that Francis Bellamy wrote this Pledge of Allegiance. Francis Bellamy’s first cousin was Edward Bellamy who wrote a novel in 1888 titled, Looking Backward. That novel imagined a future socialist world that was based on the idea of human solidarity. In that imaginary future world, poverty and discrimination would no longer be a part of the human experience.

In his original Pledge, Francis Bellamy wrote the words, “I pledge allegiance to my flag.” Francis Bellamy believed that his flag would have liberty, justice, and equality for all. These were the ideas his cousin Edward imagined in his novel Looking Backward. This idea also came to Francis Bellamy from the French phrase adopted after their revolution, liberty, equality, and fraternity. 

However, just about 28 years after the ratification of the 14th Amendment, the word equality was too controversial. At that time, women, Blacks, and Native Americans did not have the right to vote. Apparently, Edward Bellamy became interested in the controversy surrounding this word. So, the title to his sequel to Looking Backward was Equality.

The people who have power in this country have had about 245 years to fulfill their promise of equality along with liberty and justice for all. The history of this country demonstrates that only an international working class movement can liberate humanity from the bondage of capitalism. As Marx and Engels argued “Workers of the world unite!!! You have nothing to lose but your chains.”