It’s rare to see a dramatic feature filmmaker move into the realm of documentary with the craftmanship and authority and insightful power summoned by Ava DuVernay. “13th,” the documentary she made back in 2016, was a revelation — it told the lacerating story of how the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which abolished slavery, was a revolutionary act of law that, at the same time, opened the door to the way that numerous dimensions of slavery would be perpetuated in America under different names and tactics. The film was despairing and inspiring in equal measure; it cleansed you with the truth.
Tonight, the New York Film Festival presented the premiere of “14th,” a documentary follow-up in which DuVernay sets her sights on the 14th Amendment, a Constitutional addendum, ratified in 1868, that was so monumental — it guarantees equal protection under the law, but also encompasses five intricate sections that deal with issues from insurrection to due process — that one observer calls it “a Constitution in and of itself,” and another hails it as “the everything bagel of democracy.”
“14th,” I’m pleased to report, exerts the same kind of historical/topical force that “13th” did. DuVernay, while she works in an extremely accessible and mainstream way, has a singular gift for making the nuances of history come alive. “14th” is steeped in history, but it’s not a dry lecture. Instead, DuVernay cuts through the dusty complacency with which we tend to regard the Constitution (just hearing that word can make you feel like you’re back in school) and shows you that the Constitution is a living, breathing document, one that we fail to heed at our peril. Which is more or less what’s happening today.
A potent movie about history almost has to surprise you. It needs to show you that what you think you know isn’t the half of it. “14th” kicks off with the cutting insight that the three amendments to the Constitution that were passed in the aftermath of the Civil War — the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments — represented nothing less than a restart of American life and society. Yet we don’t necessarily talk about them that way. Everyone knows who “the framers” of the Constitution were (Hamilton, Jefferson, Franklin), but “14th” argues that the period just after the cataclysm of the Civil War had its own framers, who were nearly as significant. Thaddeus Stevens, a member of the House of Representatives who was part of the Radical Republican faction of the 1860s, is a figure who, according to one of the film’s observers, “created the world we live in today.”
With the abolition of slavery, four million people who were formerly enslaved were suddenly added to the fabric of American society. How would that work? DuVernay tell the story of Reconstruction through fresh eyes, and part of the power of her chronicle is that she doesn’t stint on the joy and liberation that were part of it. Black Americans, who were now citizens, formed communities and industries, they became newspaper editors and law enforcers, as well as politicians (there were 1,000 newly elected Black representatives). But it’s more than that. The point is made that Black people, for the first time in American life, could create a fully realized dream of who they wanted to be as individuals. But this would not work unless their citizenship was enshrined. That’s the first thing the 14th Amendment did. It guaranteed equal protection under the law, and it established birthright citizenship for all people born in the United States — a radical idea, one designed to apply to both the children of former enslaved people and the children of immigrants, because what that represented was a stepping up of the rejection of the European aristocratic system (i.e., citizenship by legacy) that had first been overthrown by the American Revolution. Birthright citizenship continued what the original Constitution started.
In recent years, it’s become a stylistic tic in documentaries to keep the talking heads offscreen, letting their words simply flow on the soundtrack without interrupting the images. DuVernay is having none of that. She has assembled an extraordinary roster of scholars, politicians, and commentators, led by the Civil Rights attorney Sherrilyn Ifill, who becomes the film’s oratorical star. We see the speakers and absorb the play of their personalities, as they describe, with a big-picture yet highly personalized passion, how the law of the land actually played out in the creation of the second America that rose from the ashes of the Civil War. DuVernay makes history organic by capturing how the very texture of people’s lives was changed by the law. And she’ll go wherever she needs to illustrate that, even to comedy clips from George Carlin and the great Paul Mooney, who does a bit about the happiness of white people when they were slave owners that must be seen to be believed. (His bit isn’t really about the slave era; it’s about today.)
As the film captures, the rise of the new Black citizenry during Reconstruction was rapid. For one thing, Black Americans did not waste time or spirit on vengeance. But the fall was every bit as rapid, as a culture of systematized violence and murder rose up in the South to try to stuff the genie of emancipation back in the bottle. The Ku Klux Klan was one half of it. The other half is captured in DuVernay’s fascinating portrait of the Lost Cause — the culture of defiance and regret and literal whitewashing that came to represent the Southern consciousness of what life had been before the Civil War. Slavery itself, the obscene horror and inhumanity of it, was washed out of the collective memory, and the Civil War was recast as “the war of Northern aggression.”
What remained were totems and symbols that were somehow infused with nobility. The film traces the history of the Confederate flag as signifier, showing us how rock stars from Tom Petty to ZZ Top used it as a badass backdrop, and spotlighting how the flag was imprinted on the roof of the General Lee, the orange 1969 Dodge Charger driven by the heroes of “The Dukes of Hazzard.” This was one of the most popular TV shows of its time (it debuted in 1979, just as Jimmy Carter’s presidency was winding down), and it was basically using the semiotics of the Civil War — of those who went to war to maintain slavery — as a signifier of cool.
This consciousness extended to the erecting of Confederate monuments in public squares, a movement so widespread — there were 2,629 such monuments built across the South — that it became larger than the sum of its parts. The message to Black citizens, according to one the film’s observers, was, “You matter so little that we’ll celebrate the people who wanted to enslave you.” The film looks at what the movement to remove those monuments, notably the statue of Robert E. Lee that stood in the capital of Virginia (the former capital of the Confederacy), was really about and what it entailed. It’s all part of how the Lost Cause myth became what the film calls “the greatest lie in American history.”
But what does that have to do with the 14th Amendment? DuVernay is getting to that. The true subject of the movie is the power of law, and the erosion of law. The dehumanization of Black people represented by the persistence of Confederate iconography in mainstream culture became an underground signifier of the precariousness of the freedoms enshrined by the 14th Amendment. The rise of the Klan, who took their cross-burning imagery from “The Birth of a Nation” (1915), wasn’t simply a matter of domestic terrorism. It was an attempt “to overthrow biracial democracy.” Between the Civil War and World War II, there were 4,400 lynchings. So entrenched was the backlash against Reconstruction, which was institutionalized with Jim Crow (a system of “law” that was really a culture of fascist violence), that it wasn’t until Brown vs. Board of Education, in 1954, that the might of the 14th Amendment began to reassert itself.
Documentaries tend to lessen in impact when they catch up to recent events, but as “14th” moves into the current era something remarkable happens: The film’s themes of racial oppression begin to mutate into themes of generalized oppression. The section of the 14th Amendment that deals with “insurrection” could not be more explicit. It states that anyone who has been responsible for fomenting an insurrection against the United States government cannot run for public office. This means that Donald Trump, after the unambiguous insurrection of Jan. 6, should not have been allowed to run for president in 2024. In that sense, he trampled on the Constitution simply by being re-elected, and the trashing of the 14th Amendment continued unabated. Birthright citizenship? Ignored. Due process? Out the window with ICE.
The degree to which the United States has been in the ugly thick of a Constitutional crisis since the beginning of 2025 has been persistently understated by the media. But Ava DuVernay states it with meticulous boldness. I don’t agree with her attempt to posit DEI as a Constitutional issue on the level of the Voting Rights Act. (The film itself acknowledges that the DEI movement, whatever one’s opinion of it, represented nothing so much as a “cultural shift.”) But where she shows us the big picture is in capturing how the freedoms of the 14th Amendment have been under siege, and how this may be nothing less than the ritual growing pains — the built-in trauma — of American democracy. Advance, backlash, conflict spilling over into violence…and then re-advance. That’s the rhythm, the moral and spiritual roller-coaster of perfecting our imperfect union. “14th” makes you see that we’re in the heat of the backlash now. But it also lets you feel that a re-advance is waiting in the wings.
