THURGOOD MARSHALL'S BICENTENNIAL ADDRESS One Supreme Court Justice’s Viewpoint

The Foresight of the Founding Fathers  Thurgood Marshall does not seem all that impressed with the wisdom of the Founding Fathers, who allowed slavery, sexism, and other forms of injustice to persist.  He finds the Constitution without a Bill of Rights to be unsatisfactory – as many Antifederalist would have agreed.  He gives credit to the reformers who ended slavery, gave African-Americans and women the right to vote, and changed the Constitution for the better.

Failures of the Constitution?  Slaves were not viewed as people and slavery was allowed.  Women were not allowed to vote; indeed, most Americans could not vote.  The international slave trade, or “The Middle Passage” was allowed to continue.  There was no Bill of Rights in the original document, meaning that all individual rights were insecure.

Slavery: S-L-A-V-E-R-Y  The Constitution specifically mentions slavery on three occasions, but the Framers of the Constitution never used the word slavery, because they recognized the hypocrisy of creating a nation based on liberty which allowed slavery… 1. The Three-Fifths Compromise for representation. 2. The Fugitive Slave Act. 3. The International Slave Trade – which could not be banned until the year (Happily, it was.)

Gouvernour Morris of Pennsylvania Thurgood Marshall singles out Gouvernour Morris of Pennsylvania as an example of the hypocrisy of the Founding Fathers. Morris was opposed to slavery, and fought against it during the Constitutional Convention. But he capitulated in the end, and the Constitution itself, with all of it’s acquiescence to slavery, was written with his pen!

Activism and the Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution  The 13 th,14 th, and 15 th Amendments are known as the “Reconstruction Amendments.” After the Civil War, the 13 th Amendment outlawed slavery, the 14 th Amendment gave citizenship rights to all men and women born in the United States (including slaves and ex-Confederates but not Native Americans) and the 15 th Amendment gave African-American men the right to vote. Thurgood Marshall was an activist judge, meaning he used the practice of judicial review to evaluate current laws, and sought to make appropriate changes to the Constitution, which he viewed as a flawed, living document, which could be amended and improved.

Celebrating the Living Document  Thurgood Marshall claimed that he would celebrate the Constitution as a “Living Document” and pay special homage to the Bill of Rights, which protects our individual rights and liberties.