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Foner the second founding6/22/2023 The Founding Fathers, he pointed out, couldn’t have been so very enlightened and far-sighted: after all, the slavery they tolerated caused untold suffering, and ended in a civil war that claimed 600,000 lives. Noting the quasi-religious reverence in which the framers of the constitution are held in America, Marshall expressed some scepticism about routine proclamations of their ‘wisdom, foresight and sense of justice’. In M ay 1987, as part of the festivities marking the 200 th anniversary of the United States constitution, Thurgood Marshall, the first African American to sit on the US Supreme Court, delivered a hugely controversial speech. He appropriately opens the review by recalling the words of our first Black Supreme Court Justice: Kennedy is a well-known Harvard Law School professor who has immersed himself in the study of the ways the laws sustain White Supremacy. Foner’s The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution is a concise history of the constitutional revolution wrought by the Reconstruction amendments. Legal scholar Randall Kennedy reviews Eric Foner’s new bookon the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments in the London Review of Books.
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