Blogcritics The critical lens on today's culture & entertainment
14th
Ava DuVernay’s documentary 13th was featured at the opening night of the 54th New York Film Festival in 2016. That film implicated the 13th Amendment’s failures in the mass incarceration of Black Americans. Now DuVernay’s 14th expands our knowledge of the Constitution’s importance in our lives.
The film emphasizes the current administration’s attacks on our civil rights in an attempt to vitiate the 14th Amendment and the power it gives citizens. 14th had its world premiere at the closing night film of the 2026 NYFF.
DuVernay’s documentary explores what law scholars refer to as the second constitution, or “second founding” of our civil rights. A chorus of experts and commentators expounds upon this in the film, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), senators former and current (Jeff Flake (R-AZ), Alex Padilla (D-C)), activists like Stacey Abrams, and social commentators like Hasan Piker to name a few.
Liberty for All After the Civil War
In covering the history of the amendment, the participants discuss its necessity after the Civil War, so Republican leaders could move towards completing what the founders began: guaranteeing liberty for all. Thus, to ensure that the bloodshed during the Civil War was not in vain, Republicans worked to safeguard Lincoln’s plans of liberty for African Americans. John A. Bingham (responsible for birthright citizenship), Thaddeus Stevens, and others expanded the people’s voice in their state and federal governments.
DuVernay selects Sherrilyn Ifill as a key narrator because Ifill is the Howard University professor who leads the 14th Amendment Center for Law & Democracy. Ifill identifies the five-section structure of the 14th Amendment. For example, Section One, best known as the birthright citizenship section, includes equal protection under the law and due process.
Five Sections of the 14th
The experts clarify the five sections with illustrations, video clips (past and present), archived photographs, and more. Section Two apportions representation, and removes it if men have their voting power denied. The third section disqualifies members of the branches of government from holding any office if they have committed insurrection. The fourth validates public debt but not for insurrectionists. Finally, the 14th Amendment gives Congress the power to enforce each of the sections via legislation.
DuVernay focuses on how the country avoided employing the 14th Amendment after Reconstruction. The experts discuss how the South’s attempt to remove rights at that time parallels the current administration’s attempt to dismiss our citizens’ rights using unconstitutional executive orders.
Dismissing the 14th via Plessy v. Ferguson’s ‘Separate but Equal’
Empowered by the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson’s “separate but equal” ruling (the “equal” never was), the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) took hold from 1900 through the 1930s. Spinning romantic, nostalgic notions of “the lost cause,” the women reframed the brutal losses of the Civil War. Indeed, they propagandized a new, invisible war against the Union by celebrating their treasonous Confederate leaders who fought, they say, for states’ rights, not against freedom. As they triumphantly flew their Confederate flags, they normalized their quaint Confederate symbolism throughout the country.
During this propaganda war, the South rewrote history books and softened the horrors of slavery. To reinforce their power, they lynched and burned African Americans alive and torched their successful businesses and communities. DuVernay includes archived photos of the Tulsa, Oklahoma Race Massacre. Also, she doesn’t shy away from showing photos of Black American lynchings.
Hate Propaganda Works
As evidence of their disemboweling the 14th, DuVernay and her experts reveal how the UDC’s propaganda worked to great effect, just like Trump’s bigoted rhetoric and “merch” work to stoke his white-supremacist supporters’ hate. This love for Confederate symbols and their meaning carried into the 21st century, where it shows up at Trump’s rallies.
Noting this nostalgia for the “lost cause,” Du Vernay quotes commentator Steve Schmidt on how MAGAs brought the Confederate flag into the Capitol Building on January 6, 2021, the first time ever. Thanks to the Trump administration, paid-for rioters attacked the union’s strongest symbol, the Capitol, and uplifted the “lost cause” in another treasonous rebellion.
Confederate Statues, Memorials, and Symbols
From 1900 to WWII, the UDC women and their backers erected somewhere between 830 and 1,500 statues, monuments, memorial parks, etc., affirming the triumph of Jim Crow segregation laws and the disenfranchisement of Black Americans. Congress never enforced Section Five of the amendment to stop the lies and violent behavior.
DuVernay devotes time to filming the removal of the General Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson monuments in Charlottesville, Virginia. Though the Virginia governor affirmed the backlash as an insult, and a treasonous hate crime, it continued, even spilling onto the owner of the company charged with the removal. He got death threats and had to have security details. But after 160 years of defeat and over 100 years in the park as if Lee never surrendered, the state melted these symbols of Confederate “heroes” who fought against freedom.
The Myth of ‘The Lost Cause,’ and Bigotry, Die Hard
The struggle continues to this day. As DuVernay’s experts explain each section of the amendment, they also identify its violations by the Trump administration using videos, for example of George Floyd protests, the January 6th insurrection, the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and immigration kidnappings.
The film draws lines from the racists of the past to the Trump administration’s current racist attempts to vitiate citizen’s rights with executive orders eliminating birthright citizenship, due process, and equal rights. Trump unconstitutionally has immigrants kidnapped by masked, ill-trained ICE agents.
Violations of Due Process by ICE
DuVernay includes clips of ICE’s unsettling violence and excessive force with citizens, with senators, with migrants. Thus far, the murders of U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti have received no justice. Children disappear into detention camps, more like concentration camps, where horror stories of inadequate conditions, sexual abuse and violence leak out.
Congress has the inherent power to enforce the amendment. But the film shows how both Republicans and Democrats aren’t using the power they have against the executive branch. Congress violates the amendment by not enforcing it. Trump violates every section of the amendment, even trying to get money for the insurrectionists he pardoned. States’ rights, which could counter the illegal activities of the executive, haven’t been used, as seen with the accumulating murders by ICE agents.
Between the Laws of the 14th and the Criminal Reality
The filmmaker exposes the gulf between the sanctity of the amendment and the human lack of will at all levels to enforce it unequivocally. On the other hand, 14th makes a superb case for proving the president, cabinet, and Congress’ high crimes and misdemeanors in attempting to dismantle the 14th when they swore to uphold it. All the insurrectionists in our government are illegitimate.
Their unconstitutionallawlessness can’t stand. Not to remove the unfit, unqualified, illegitimate lawbreakers and hold them to account is also criminal.
Ifill and the others proclaim that hope lies with “we the people” and our votes. The conclusion settles into an anticlimax, where the experts tell us to vote. We will! And as Robert DeNiro has adjured loudly, if Elon Musk or the Republicans get anywhere near the midterm ballots, we say, “Get your stinking hands off our votes.”
DuVernay’s 14th shines with brilliance but sounds a terrifying warning with an unsatisfactory conclusion. The documentary will be given a limited release in theaters around November 27, 2026. Netflix will stream it on December 4, 2026.
