On the 150th Anniversary of the 14th Amendment, we’re talking about a promise of equality that was bookended by violence. On the front end was the vicious enslavement of Black people; on the back-end was the Jim Crow era, a response that successfully and brutally reinforced racial segregation in opposition to the rights afforded Black people by the 14th Amendment. In both cases, violence was protected and condoned by the legal system in the laws as written during slavery, and in the failure to provide equal protection of the law in the face of that violence during Jim Crow.