It is often noted that the "Original Sin" of the United States of America took place at its very inception. That the framers of the Constitution provided for slavery in this fledgling nation debased the loftier, nobler ambitions expressed in the founding documents. As a consequence, the plight of the African American in the United States has been at times grotesque, and at times triumphant. The collective battle of the African American has, however, at no time been easy. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall made clear this facet of American history when, in 1987, he cautioned that for many Americans, the bicentennial celebration was "little more than a blind pilgrimage to the shrine of the original document". Where we refuse to recognize that the African American has, in the United States, been "enslaved by law, emancipated by law, disenfranchised and segregated by law" (Marshall), we forget that for many years, the African American was a prisoner in the United States.
The language of the Thirteenth Amendment supports the assertion that slavery is tantamount to imprisonment. Following the basic premise of the Declaration of Independence that "all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights" and the famed first words of the Constitution, "We the People", Marshall insists that for the framers, the "People" were simply free men. "Negro slaves", he recalls, "were excluded" (Marshall). The Thirteenth Amendment, ratified by the states on December 6, 1865, made slavery illegal in all of the states of the Union, including those territories that had not yet achieved statehood. A brief amendment, it states quite simply that "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United Statesà " (emphasis added). A simple reading of this amendment makes clear that the degraded condi...