'Before the Fourteenth Amendment was passed in 1868, numerous laws in both the North and the South specified different treatment for black and white citizens. More such laws were passed in the South after the Civil War and—particularly in the case of sweeping “vagrancy” laws—virtually reenslaved the emancipated Negro. Other laws had existed even before the Civil War to control the half million “free persons of color” and to deny them such fundamental rights as the right to testify in court (except against other blacks), to move freely from place to place, or even to educate their own children at their own expense. The sweeping and extreme nature of these denials of the most ordinary and basic rights must be understood as a background to the words of the Fourteenth Amendment. The “equal protection of the laws” had a very plain and simple meaning—and a very limited meaning, falling far short of a social revolution. So too did the ban on any state action to deprive anyone of “life, liberty, or property” without “due process.” The writers of these words explicitly, repeatedly, and even vehemently denied any interpretations going beyond prohibition of the gross abuses all too evident around them. Even voting rights were not included.' Sowell, Thomas. Knowledge And Decisions (p. 247).