Today’s Constitution is a realistic document of freedom only because of several corrective amendments. Those amendments speak to a sense of decency and fairness that I and other Blacks cherish.

Thurgood Marshall made this point in the late 1980s while reflecting on the U.S. Constitution’s meaning for Black Americans and other historically excluded groups. In public remarks tied to the Constitution’s bicentennial, he emphasized that the original 1787 document did not fully embody liberty for everyone and that later amendments—especially those adopted after the Civil War and during the long struggle for civil rights—were necessary to make constitutional freedom more real in practice. The statement fits Marshall’s broader critique that constitutional ideals must be measured against lived experience and expanded through amendment, interpretation, and enforcement to meet standards of fairness and human dignity.

Marshall argues that the Constitution’s promise of “freedom” is not self-executing and was not, in its original form, equally available to Black people. The “corrective amendments” point to constitutional change as moral progress: the nation had to repair foundational injustices (slavery, unequal citizenship, denial of voting rights) through explicit textual commitments and their later application. By grounding his claim in “decency and fairness,” he frames constitutional legitimacy as ethical as well as legal—suggesting that the Constitution earns its authority when it is amended and interpreted to protect those once excluded. The quote also implies vigilance: freedom is maintained by continuing commitment to those corrective principles.