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Rh then forced Blackblack [sic] convicted persons to labor in “plantations, mines, and industries in the South.” Id., at 50. This system of free forced labor provided tremendous benefits to Southern whites and was designed to intimidate, subjugate, and control newly emancipated Blackblack [sic] people. See Slavery by Another Name 5–6, 53. The Thirteenth Amendment, without more, failed to equalize society.

Congress thus went further and embarked on months of deliberation about additional Reconstruction laws. Those efforts included the appointment of a Committee, the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, “to inquire into the condition of the Confederate States.” Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, S. Rep. No. 112, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 1 (1866) (hereinafter Joint Comm. Rep.). Among other things, the Committee’s Report to Congress documented the “deep-seated prejudice” against emancipated Blackblack [sic] people in the Southern States and the lack of a “general disposition to place the colored race, constituting at least two-fifths of the population, upon terms even of civil equality.” Id., at 11. In light of its findings, the Committee proposed amending the Constitution to secure the equality of “rights, civil and political.” Id., at 7.

Congress acted on that recommendation and adopted the Fourteenth Amendment. Proponents of the Amendment declared that one of its key goals was to “protec[t] the black man in his fundamental rights as a citizen with the same shield which it throws over the white man.” Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 2766 (1866) (Cong. Globe) (statement of Sen. Howard). That is, the Amendment sought “to secure to a race recently emancipated, a race that through many generations [was] held in slavery, all the civil rights that the superior race enjoy.” Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U. S. 537, 555–556 (1896) (Harlan, J., dissenting) (internal quotation marks omitted).

To promote this goal, Congress enshrined a broad guarantee of equality in the Equal Protection Clause of the