Quote of the Day (Marshall)

“And so we must be careful, when focusing on the events which took place in Philadelphia two centuries ago, that we not overlook the momentous events which followed, and thereby lose our proper sense of perspective. Otherwise, the odds are that for many Americans the bicentennial celebration will be little more than a blind pilgrimage to the shrine of the original document now stored in a vault in the National Archives. If we seek, instead, a sensitive understanding of the Constitution's inherent defects, and its promising evolution through 200 years of history, the celebration of the ‘Miracle at Philadelphia’ will, in my view, be a far more meaningful and humbling experience. We will see that the true miracle was not the birth of the Constitution, but its life, a life nurtured through two turbulent centuries of our own making, and a life embodying much good fortune that was not.”—Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, Remarks at the Annual Seminar of the San Francisco Patent and Trademark Law Association in Maui, Hawaii May 6, 1987

(One of the people who surely gave the Constitution its “life” was Justice Marshall, born on this date in 1908. Though he might be most famous as a trailblazer—the first African-American justice on the nation’s highest court—his greatest service might have been as the architect of the legal strategy that produced Brown v. Board of Topeka, Kansas, in 1954, the first major salvo in the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.)