Portuguese colonization in the 1400s inaugurated an era of aggressive European expansion across the Atlantic. The Spanish, threatened by the Portuguese monopoly on enslaved Africans and expansion in the Atlantic, started their own colonization project with Christopher Columbus in 1492
The Fourteenth Amendment grants citizenship to people who were born in the United States. This was a huge deal, as it included former slaves.
The Fourteenth Amendment was part of the Civil War Amendments, which were composed of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. These were all created to protect the rights of former slaves and try to include them as part of the United States.
With the Fourteenth Amendment, former slaves were now counted as actual citizens of the United States. This role made it so they had "<em>equal protection of the laws</em>." This meant they also had the right to "<em>due process</em>" and obtain all of the rights listed in the United States Constitution
University's use of racial "quotas" in its admissions process was unconstitutional, but a school's use of "affirmative action" to accept more minority applicants was constitutional in some circumstances.
