“During observance of the bicentennial of the Constitution in 1987, Justice Thurgood Marshall made a public attack upon the celebration in which he disparaged the achievements of the Constitutional Convention and said that he did not "find the wisdom, foresight, and sense of justice exhibited by the framers particularly profound." According to Marshall, the original Constitution was defective because it excluded women and Negroes from the right of suffrage, and, most egregiously, it perpetuated and reinforced the institution of slavery. The men of 1787 actually contributed little, he maintained, to the modern American constitutional system, with its "respect for individual freedoms and human rights."sl”