By The Editors

Most Americans undoubtedly consider America’s Constitution, that set of principles and regulations set down by the Founding Fathers in Philadelphia in 1787, as essentially a static document. It was, after all, the foundation of the nation.

John Payton, President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., spoke to the students, faculty and others about "The Constitution and Democracy" at the September 16 Constitution Day Convocation at Oberlin College. Photos by Stacey Patton.

But that’s “a mistaken notion,” John Payton, President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, told a rapt audience of students, faculty and others September 16 at the Constitution Day convocation of Oberlin College.

Instead, Payton asserted, the Constitution has continually posed a series of questions that go to the heart of the American democratic experiment that came into being with the rebel colonists’ victory over Britain now more than two centuries ago.

“What do we mean when we say that we are a democracy?” Payton said to the audience, identifying one question. “What do we mean when we refer to the Rule of Law?” he added as another. And, referring to the Constitution’s beginning with the words ‘We the People,’ he suggested that the most important of all the questions is “Who is included in ‘We the People’?”

These seemingly simple questions “are really quite complex,” Payton declared, and, today more than ever, discussing the answers to them isn’t merely an exercise of historical inquiry. A chief reason is that society is aflame with significant white opposition to the policies and the person of Barack Obama.

Payton said that, of course, not all who oppose the President’s policies are driven by racial animus or anxiety.

But it is undeniable that “[r]ace has leapt into the foreground. Hatred and suspicion are the emotions on parade,” Payton asserted, at many of the rallies against the Administration’s proposals on health care reform and other issues.  It is evident in the vituperative criticism and loopy conspiracy theories hurled at and about Obama.

Such extremism and extremists have always been a marked feature of American society, Payton noted.  But Barack Obama’s victory “has pushed paranoia to a level we’ve never seen before. And they have never had such access to the media as they do today.”

Payton suggested that the combination of the election of Obama and the increasing diversity of society, set against the personal and societal dislocations caused by the economic crisis, have introduced “a degree of desperation and nastiness to partisan politics that is [in modern times] unprecedented and quite scary.”

Payton’s speech, “The Constitution and Democracy”, explored the nation’s unending battle with the complexities and outright contradictions embedded in the Constitution.

On the one hand, the Constitution pledged allegiance to soaring ideals of national and individual liberty.

On the other hand, Payton pointed out, the Constitution “as adopted in 1787 is a proslavery document,” crafted to serve a country which, for its first 78 years of existence, “was a slave nation. …

John Payton, right, President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., talks with students at Oberlin College in observance of Constitution Day.

“Slavery was central [in this period] to the country’s culture,” he reminded those gathered in West Lecture Hall in the college’s science center, “to its economy, to its social structure, to its political structure, to its legal system. But it was also the moral issue of that time, an issue that reverberates through our culture and memory to this day.”

Constitution Day is a federal day of observance established by Congress in 2004 to mark the date in 1787 that the Constitutional Convention ratified the U.S. Constitution. The law requires all publicly-funded educational institutions to take note of the day with appropriate educational programs.

Payton said his coming to Oberlin for the holiday had a special poignancy because of the college’s remarkable history.

In the 1830s, as the issue of the abolition of slavery and the status of black Americans was increasing to the fever pitch that would ultimately lead to the Civil War, the college was organized by students who left a Cincinnati theological seminary in order to put fully into practice the principle of racial and gender integration. Blacks and women were included in Oberlin’s student ranks at a time when almost all other colleges barred them completely. As Payton reminded his listeners, “the result was the first interracial and coeducational college anywhere.”

Payton urged the students in the audience to see themselves “as inheritors of the legacy that rejected unjust laws,” to pursue “the rule of just law,” to push the larger society to recognize “diversity as one of our most important strengths.” In that way, they would  help America realize the full meaning of the gleaming first words of the Preamble to the Constitution: “We the People.”