Thirteenth Amendment freedom includes equal market power for black Americans

Evidence

Negro citizens, North and South, who saw in the Thirteenth Amendment a promise of freedom—freedom to “go and come at pleasure” and to “buy and sell when they please”—would be left with “a mere paper guarantee” if Congress were powerless to assure that a dollar in the hands of a Negro will purchase the same thing as a dollar in the hands of a white man. At the very least, the freedom that Congress is empowered to secure under the Thirteenth Amendment includes the freedom to buy whatever a white man can buy, the right to live wherever a white man can live. If Congress cannot say that being a free man means at least this much, then the Thirteenth Amendment made a promise the Nation cannot keep. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 580

Categorization

• XREF: The legal argument — that equal economic participation is a core incident of freedom — is the doctrinal grounding a reparations brief must cite; connects to Brown’s ‘accounting not charity’ framing. — connects to: The 1906 Hodges court confined the Thirteenth Amendment to literal slavery — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations: How Building a…, 401
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how does the equal-purchasing-power reading of the 13th Amendment interact with modern equal protection doctrine and the Court’s narrowing of the Amendments’ enforcement powers? This is the legal crux an opponent would attack.