Today the nation pauses to observe Constitution Day, the day in 1787 that delegates to the Philadelphia Convention completed drafting what would become the Constitution of the United States of America.

But what is appropriate for this anniversary? Do we observe, commemorate or celebrate?

It is not unpatriotic to acknowledge that our nation’s founding document, remarkable as it is, was deeply flawed.

The founders were brilliant men. We certainly don’t see their ilk populating the halls of Congress today. But we owe it to the truth not to mythologize and to acknowledge that they were limited in their perspective. Case in point: about one third of the delegates owned slaves.

Their Constitution displayed defects that result from political compromises, and by the failure — as in the case of John Adams, to heed the plea of his wife Abigail not to ignore the rights of women.

More than a decade earlier, Abigail had written to John urging him and the other members of the Continental Congress not to forget about the nation’s women when declaring independence from British rule. “In the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make,” she wrote, “I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors.”

Nevertheless, it took another 130 years for women’s rights to have constitutional status – not until the ratification of the 19th Amendment did women have the right to vote. (The voting rights of Black women were not protected until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.) Decades later, in the 1960s and 70s, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized a right to privacy giving women control over reproduction, an essential requirement for equality. The defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment, however, meant that full equality guaranteed in the Constitution would not be achieved.

So, what is there in Constitution Day for women to celebrate?

Then there is the institution of slavery. It was baked into the Constitution and created the conditions for our bloody Civil War some 75 years later. It was not excised until the post-Civil War amendments.

The original Constitution contained the “great compromise” to count those enslaved as three-fifths of a person in apportioning representation. The original Constitution also prohibited Congress from outlawing the Atlantic slave trade, and gave the federal government the power to put down slave insurrections. And it required the return of runaway slaves to those who enslaved them.

The Federalists accepted that concessions protecting the vile institution of slavery were the price required to secure the support of southern delegates for a strong central government.

But as former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall noted, the framers left out a majority of Americans when they introduced their Constitution in the name of “We the People.” The unamended Constitution, he noted, on an anniversary of its ratification, was “defective from the start.”

And then there is the matter of guarantees for individual freedoms. The price of ratification was an agreement to add protections for individual rights against a tyrannical central government and the tyranny of the majority.

Four years later, in 1791, the result was the adoption of the Bill of Rights, the first 10 Amendments to the Constitution. These amendments protect freedom of speech, conscience and religious exercise. They contain rudimentary protection for privacy by prohibiting unreasonable searches, and they promise a fair process in criminal proceedings, and a ban on cruel and unusual punishments. But not only were whole classes of people left out and guarantees for individual rights overlooked, the original Constitution contained no mechanism to ensure protection against an abusive government. That required an independent judiciary and, to ensure access for everyone not just those who could afford lawyers, that required public interest organizations like the NAACP and the ACLU, created in 1910 and 1920.

So this September 17th, we should honor not only John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and the other founders who crafted a remarkable, if seriously flawed document during that hot summer in Philadelphia in 1787. But we should also honor those who fought and died to ensure that the protections of the Constitution apply to everyone. We should also honor those who fought and died to end slavery, and others like Rosa Parks, John Lewis and Martin Luther King, Jr., and the suffragettes. And we should honor those who today are continuing the fight for racial equality, voting rights and abortion rights, which are under the most serious threats.

Those who took the baton after the first Constitution Day, sometimes at great risk and sacrifice, labored to make the promise of American freedom and equality more than just words on paper.

Howard L. Simon, of Sanibel, served as Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida from 1997 – 2018.