Guest column: Celebrate the freedoms protected in the Constitution
Today we celebrate the 226th birthday of our Constitution. But what precisely should we celebrate?
In the summer of 1787, the founders created a remarkable framework for our democracy, but their document was deeply flawed.
Since individual liberty was not protected from the power of government in the original Constitution, a Bill of Rights was added. The Bill of Rights reflected a broader vision of freedom.
Even with that, the Constitution remained flawed; it protected slavery.
The Constitution we celebrate today, a document guaranteeing equality before the law, required a bloody civil war before amendments brought black Americans within the Constitution.
But it would take another century before black Americans began to redeem the promise of the Civil War amendments. During that time, race discrimination became deeply imbedded in our laws, our political institutions and our culture.
And what is true for the struggle for racial equality is also true about the struggle for other liberties.
The Constitution tolerated the subjugation of women. It was not until 1920 that the 19th amendment gave women the elementary right to vote. This was not due to the wisdom of the founders and the original Constitution but to the struggle in the streets that followed.
If the framers knowingly left out blacks and women, they didn't even consider the rights of gays, children, students, prisoners, the mentally ill and the disabled. For most of our history, these groups were largely unprotected by the Constitution. But one by one, they and their advocates fought to have the Constitution apply to them.
But what happens when the government violates the Constitution, when it makes a law restricting free speech or religious liberty?
The conventional answer is the courts will step in. But courts are powerless to fulfill their function unless an aggrieved person challenges violation.
In 1910, the NAACP was established followed in 1920 by the ACLU. They gradually developed the resources to challenge constitutional violations on behalf of people who could not have done it alone: Tennessee school teacher John Scopes would not likely have challenged the law making it a crime to teach evolution without the help of the ACLU and its volunteer attorney, Clarence Darrow.
And it's not likely that Oliver Brown could have challenged school segregation in 1950 without the NAACP.
More than 130 years after the Bill of Rights was adopted a minister was sentenced to 15 years for saying World War I was un-Christian, racial segregation was the law of the land and sex discrimination was firmly institutionalized.
That began slowly to change. People whose constitutional rights had been violated were able to go to court. The NAACP and ACLU were the keys that ignited the judiciary.
So when we celebrate our Constitution, we celebrate not only the remarkable document drafted 226 years ago.
THE CHANGE AGENTS
We also celebrate the men and women who took that document seriously, who fought to make those rights a reality and expand its protections to those left out.
We celebrate Frederick Douglass in the 19th century and Jackie Robinson, who broke baseball's "color line" in the 20th century.
We celebrate Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., the students at Little Rock's Central High School, Medgar Evers, Viola Liuzzo and the murdered civil rights workers who were dumped in a Mississippi dam in 1964.
And we celebrate those who had the vision to create organizations like the NAACP and the ACLU that make it possible to enforce the Constitution and allow people to assert and defend their constitutional rights and challenge government abuses.
Howard Simon is executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida.