There is no reason why the Thirteenth Amendment cannot be reinvigorated as a weapon against enduring inequalities rooted in slavery, or the Fourteenth’s clause related to the privileges or immunities of citizens must remain a dead letter, why it cannot be understood to encompass rights denied by slavery and essential to full membership in American society today, such as access to an adequate education, or even the “reasonable wages” to which Lincoln said the freed slaves were entitled in the Emancipation Proclamation. Why, in the twenty-first century, should the right to vote not be considered
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