I'm Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, and welcome to We the People, a weekly show of constitutional debate.

The National Constitution Center is the only institution in America chartered by Congress to disseminate

information about the US Constitution on a non-partisan basis and today we

will address a big constitutional question is the Constitution colorblind. The idea of the

colorblind Constitution comes most famously from Justice John Marshall Harlan's

loan dissent in the Plessy versus Ferguson case from 1896 in which the court upheld separate but equal

racial segregation in public accommodations.

Justice Harlan said,

Our Constitution is colorblind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens

in respect of civil rights.

All citizens are equal before the law.

The broader issue of race in the Constitution, of course, extends all the way back to our nation's

founding when delegates to the Constitutional Convention in 1787 compromised on the issue of slavery. The current amendments that

we will be focusing on are those passed after the Civil War in the Reconstruction

era, the 13, 14th, and 15th amendments whose 150th anniversary we at the

Constitution Center will be commemorating over the next five years the 13th

amendment turns 150 on December 6th and on December 7th at the National Archives we are going to have a great

bipartisan commemoration with our friends at the Constitutional Accountability

Center and today we have two of the leading experts in America

to address the question of whether the Constitution is colorblind.

Joining me here in studio is Theodore Shaw. He is the Julius L. Chambers Distinguished Professor of Law

and Director of the Center for Civil Rights at the University of North Carolina

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