The Constitution's Bicentennial: Commemorating the Wrong Document?

Tomorrow, I launch a new course designed for undergrads at UIUC. The title? “Immigration and Race: Inequality in Work.”

My 20 or so students will debate whether the U.S. Constitution is worth celebrating.

They’re reading (among other things) Justice Thurgood Marshall’s short, clearly written, negative appraisal of our original Constitution. Marshall, the first black Supreme Court justice, wrote in 1987.

I’m appending a link below in case you want to read and perhaps comment on (see end of post). Let me summarize his case for not celebrating:

The Constitution counted slaves as 3/5 of a person for apportioning representation in the House. Two major problems: 1. Enslaved blacks were treated as property, not human beings. 2. The South was rewarded with more representation in proportion to the size of their slave population.

The Constitution politically ratified a divided nation—the North, with abolitionist impulses, and the South, with an economy built on racism. We are bedeviled by that polarity today, significantly along lines created in the Constitution.

“We the people” meant “we, free white men.” Women were not “we.” Indentured white men (serving out labor contracts) were not “we.” Enslaved blacks were not “we,” and free blacks were not “we.” Native Americans were not "we."

Art. IV, Section 2 of the original Constitution was a fugitive slave law proposed by Southern states: "No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, But shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due."

A Civil War that left more than 650,000 soldiers dead was needed to correct this odious inequality.

The constitutional drafters had a chance to do so much better. The first draft of the Declaration of Independence—the document that inspired the Constitution 11 years later— had a paragraph that rejected British laws that permitted slavery in the colonies. The framers debated this-- and voted to keep out any objections to slavery (because Southerners threatened to walk out).

PS: You might ask, where’s the “inequality in work” part of this? Good question. 1. Slavery is forced labor. 2. Indentured servants— some “free willers,” others, such as children sold to pay off debts from their parents in England—had to work for their freedom. Coerced labor was written into our Constitution.

For more, see this: http://racism.org/index.php/articles/185-articles/laws/lawsconstituion/2152-the-constitution-s-bicentennial-commemorating-the-wrong-document