NAACP as a counterweight to Washington's powerful grass roots organizations. Racism was the main target of Du Bois's polemics, and he strongly protested against lynching, Jim Crow laws, and discrimination in education and employment. His cause included people of color everywhere, particularly Africans and Asians in colonies. He was a proponent of Pan-Africanism and helped organize several Pan-African Congresses to fight for the independence of African colonies from European powers. Thurgood Marshall Evaluating the original Constitution Thurgood Marshall was the first African American justice of the Supreme Court. At the 200th anniversary of the Constitution in 1987, he argued: I do not believe that the meaning of the Constitution was forever “fixed” at the Philadelphia Convention. Nor do I find the wisdom, foresight, and sense of justice exhibited by the framers particularly profound. To the contrary, the government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and momentous social transformations to attain the system of constitutional government, and its respect for the individual freedoms and human rights, we hold as fundamental today. When contemporary Americans cite "The Constitution," they invoke a concept that is vastly different from what the framers began to construct two centuries ago....While the Union survived the civil war, the Constitution did not. In its place arose a new, more promising basis for justice and equality, the 14th Amendment, ensuring protection of the life, liberty, and property of all persons against deprivations without due process, and guaranteeing equal protection of the laws. Additional images See also Civil rights movement (1865–1896) Civil rights movement (1896–1954) and Nadir of American race relations Civil rights movement (1954-1968) Founding Fathers of the United States Reconstruction Amendments Twenty-fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution History of civil rights in the United States List of African-American abolitionists List of civil rights leaders Quakers in the abolition movement Timeline of the civil rights movement Black Lives Matter Post–civil rights era in African-American history Notes Further reading Carter Jr, William M. "The Second Founding and the First Amendment." Texas Law Review 99 (2020): 1065+. online Davis, Hugh. "We Will Be Satisfied with Nothing Less:" The African American Struggle for Equal Rights in the North during Reconstruction. (Cornell University Press, 2011). Davis, Thulani. The Emancipation Circuit: Black Activism Forging a Culture of Freedom (Duke University Press, 2022). Epps, Garrett. "Second Founding: The Story of the Fourteenth Amendment." Oregon Law Review 85