By Jake Coyle
Contributing Writer
NEW YORK (AP) — Award-winning filmmaker Ava DuVernay says she’s produced a new documentary on the 14th Amendment — which gave liberty and rights to former slaves after the Civil War — and which has come under legal attack from President Donald Trump.
The film, produced for Netflix, will be released later this year, officials said. It will mark a return to nonfiction for DuVernay, the filmmaker of “Selma” and “Origin,” and a follow-up to DuVernay’s 2016 film “13th,” her examination of the legacy of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery.
The 14th Amendment has been a prominent target of Trump’s. On the first day of his second term, he signed an executive order that would have heavily restricted birthright citizenship as protected by the amendment. In June, the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s order by a 6-3 vote.
The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868 during Reconstruction states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
The constitutional amendment nullified the 1857 Supreme Court decision Dred Scott v. Sandford, which had held that those descended from slaves couldn’t be citizens and that Black people had no rights a white person was bound to respect.
DuVernay said her film will detail how the 14th Amendment became “a permanent argument.” It will feature politicians, historians and cultural voices.
“If ‘13th’ asked who gets caged, then ‘14th’ asks who gets counted,” DuVernay said in a statement. “This is not a film about the past tense of freedom. I’m not interested in asking you to look back. The film asks what kind of country is being written beneath our feet now … while we’re busy believing the stories we’ve all been told.”
Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the court, upheld the protections found in the amendment, which says anyone born in the U.S. is automatically a citizen — with very limited exceptions.
“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights — to freely participate in our political community. The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land,’” Roberts wrote. “We keep that promise today.”
Trump has vowed to continue to contest the Supreme Court’s ruling. Following the decision, he wrote on Truth Social: “This miscarriage of justice will destroy America if they don’t change their absolutely insane decision.”
Jake Coyle writes for the Associated Press.
