krebscycle

Pennsylvania’s Gouvernor Morris provides an example. He opposed slavery and the counting of slaves in determining the basis for representation in Congress. At the Convention he objected that

“The inhabitant of Georgia [or] South Carolina who goes to the coast of Africa, and in defiance of the most sacred laws of humanity tears away his fellow creatures from their dearest connections and damns them to the most cruel bondages, shall have more votes in a Government instituted for protection of the rights of mankind, than the Citizen of Pennsylvania or New Jersey who views with a laudable horror, so nefarious a Practice.”

And yet Gouvernor Morris eventually accepted the threefifths accommodation. In fact, he wrote the final draft of the Constitution, the very document the bicentennial will commemorate.

Thurgood Marshall.

The “conservative” approach to the Constitution is generally hostile to the post-Civil War amendments even though the Constitution was specifically designed to permit amendment. Certainly the Civil War showed flaws in the original document – flaws resulting from the immoral compromise made by the Founders on slavery.

While the Union survived the civil war, the Constitution did not. In its place arose a new, more promising basis for justice and equality, the 14th Amendment, ensuring protection of the life, liberty, and property of all persons against deprivations without due process, and guaranteeing equal protection of the laws. And yet almost another century would pass before any significant recognition was obtained of the rights of black Americans to share equally even in such basic opportunities as education, housing, and employment, and to have their votes counted, and counted equally. In the meantime, blacks joined America’s military to fight its wars and invested untold hours working in its factories and on its farms, contributing to the development of this country’s magnificent wealth and waiting to share in its prosperity.

It is unfortunate that while the mean-spirited shallow word play that Bork and Scalia and a host of other right wing anti-Americans offer continues to be widely reported as Constitutional Scholarship. Thurgood Marshall’s works have gone underground.