A great question.
Justice Clarence Thomas is not certain that it did:
“There was always this underlying belief that we were entitled to be a
full participant in ‘we the people,’ ” Thomas told a crowd at the
National Archives last week.
“That’s the way we grew up. It was
the way the nuns, who were all immigrants, would explain it to us — that
we were entitled, as citizens of this country, to be full participants.
There was never any doubt that we were inherently equal. It said so in
the Declaration of Independence.”
Click here for the video of an interview with Thomas.
Catch up on commentary here, and here.
Some critics of originalism have argued that the original Constitution
was illegitimate because it excluded blacks. There is little doubt that
the original Constitution tolerated severe racial injustices, most
notably slavery. But there is nonetheless a difference between a
Constitution that left slavery and other injustices alone (in part
because abolition was politically impossible at the time), and one that
categorically denied all blacks any “rights which the white man was
bound to respect,” as [Roger] Taney put it.
