In Thurgood Marshall's "A Bicentennial View From the Supreme Court", Thurgood Marshall argues that the United States Constitution bicentennial celebration should not be commemorated with narrow views concerning the birth of the document, but rather should be seen as a living document, one which has been dramatically altered to reflect the changing views or society. Born from this ideal, Marshall contends that the Constitution should be placed into perspective with events in U.S. history, which followed its inception. Marshall adds that society should neither view the Constitution as a flawless governmental charter, nor its "framers" as sheer geniuses. He instead points to the paper's subsequent alterations, which helped it evolve to its current state. Marshall maintains that the framers were individuals who either compromised their own moral beliefs or were obvious hypocrites.

Marshall's draws his logical conclusions from specific events in U.S. history. Marshall does not believe the United States is an impressive nation because of its Constitution and its founders, but rather it is only recently noble because of those individuals who "suffer[ed], stuggle[d],

Nevertheless, Marshall does not place all fault with the framers. Observing the actions of the Supreme Court 70 and 170 years later, he concludes that the court continued the mistakes of the past. Marshall cites the court's opinion in the Dread Scott case as an example of the continued ignorance of the legal system toward the black race. Marshall illustrates that Chief Justice Taney accepted the notion that the founding fathers were flawless because he took their opinions as pure fact. " 'We [Supreme Court] think they [slaves] are not, and that they are not included, and were not intended to be included....They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order' " (Marshall 303). Marshall demonstrates that Taney and the Court made their decision on the basis of historical precedence. Instead of reevaluating the meaning of "all men are created equal"(Declaration) and the morality and humaneness of slavery, the Court merely reaffirmed a hypocritical idea of 70 years ago because of the narrow view of infallibility granted to the Constitutional framers, Marshall argues. Despite the addition of the 13th and 14th amendments, which ended slavery and quaranteed equal rights to all men, respectively, it was another 100 years before the Court eliminated

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