Ask most Americans about the relationship between the Bill of Rights and African-Americans and you draw either a blank stare or the erroneous claim that Article I of the. Constitution permanently fixed African slaves as three-fifths of Europeans.

Perhaps the blank stare is to be expected. After all, the Bill of Rights, or the first 10 Amendments to the Constitution, made no direct mention of blacks. In fact, until ratification of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, the Constitution creatively avoided mention of race or racial groupings save native Americans.

The fact that some people mistakenly confuse the original Constitution, which became effective. on March 4, 1789, and the Bill of Rights; which was ratified on Dec.15, 1791, speaks to a broader set of issues. The Bill of Rights made no mention of African Americans. Article I of the Constitution referred to slaves only as three-fifths of all other persons."

To conclude, however, that the Bill of Rights had no direct bearing on African-Americans radically rewrites more than 200 years of history. In his widely acclaimed study IN THE MATTER OF COLOR, A. Leon Higginbotham dates the beginning of the inextricable link between race and the law with the colonial period. As early as the 1670s, statutes. in Virginia and Maryland codified slavery into a system of permanent bondage for Africans and their descendants. These laws, moreover, became the basis for similar legislation throughout British North America

Meanwhile, from Massachusetts to South Carolina, African peoples used the same laws to petition for freedom and rights. The case of Quock Walker vs Jennison (1781), for example, is widely viewed as cementing the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts in 1783. Walker sued Jennison, charging assault and battery. 3ennison responded that Walker was his property and not his neighbor., and, as property, he could be punished. A jury disagreed.

which were exacerbated by the retreat from the ennobling principles of the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution. As David Brion Davis sketched in THE PROBLEM OF SLAVERY IN THE AGE OF REVOLUTION, the Constitution's framers evinced considerable ambivalence about the presence of slaves and the practice of slavery Few could say they had never engaged in the "execrable commerce." Fewer yet believed Africans their equals. Consequently, scores of African- Americans found themselves in legal limbo as they traversed the nation as free or enslaved people.

Did the right to petition the government for redress of grievances include them? Could they comfortably assume that the 4th Amendment, which protected all citizens from unlawful search and seizure, safeguarded them from slave catchers and bounty hunters? Contemporaries and scholars agree:

They could not be so assured. Instead, the question of citizenship and unlawful search and seizure awaited the Supreme Court's landmark ruling in Scott vs. Sandford (1857).

The Dred Scott decision momentarily settled the question of citizenship. Writing for the majority, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney concluded that African-Americans could be citizens of individual states but not the U.S. although poorly reasoned and badly researched, the opinion proved politically expedient--temporarily protecting Southern and some Northern interests by limiting what it meant to be free and black in our republic. If blacks were not citizens of the U.S. they had no right to petition the court for redress, no right to claim benefit from the Bill of Rights.

Fortunately, the Bill of Rights proved a living document, open to new interpretations, new protections. Following the Civil War, the country eliminated the ambiguities of the previous century by amending the Constitution once again. The new statutes of liberty--the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments--expanded upon the rights and privileges articulated in the Bill of Rights.

The 13th Amendment abolished slavery, putting into the Constitution language stricken from the Declaration of Independence and excluded from the Constitution altogether. The 14th Amendment determined the grounds for citizenship, ensured equal protection and due process, and, among other things, endowed Congress with the powers to enforce the laws. And the 15th Amendment granted male citizens of all races the right to vote. But to the chagrin of many, African-Americans had to remain ever vigilant lest their civil rights be eroded.

The retreat from equal protection came early and definitively. Between 1876 and 1896, a series of Supreme Court rulings severly narrowed the Bill of Rights and the post-Civil War amendments The first substantive hint of the new social order came in The Slaughter-House Cases (1873). A divided Supreme Court distinguished between the rights of a federal and state citizen by greatly restricting the former. Three years later, in United States vs. Cruishank, the court addressed the barbarous murder of 100 blacks in Colfax, La., and overturned a lower court ruling and found that the defendants had not violated the 1St, 2nd and 14th Amendments. The line of judicial reasoning culminated in the 1896 Plessy decision, which legalized the doctrine of separate but equal.

They had a dream: Over the course of the next century, new challenges and new opportunities to refer to the Bill of Rights arose. African-Americans, in their dogged determination to fulfill the dream of equality, helped expand the meaning of the law--the Bill of Rights.

Perhaps the most heralded and surprising example dates from the '30s. In 1931, nine black youths hopped a train and had a chance encounter with a smaller group of whites. To the later surprise of the nine blacks, two in the other party were females. When confronted by law officials and questioned about their presence on the train, the women alleged the most heinous of all interracial crimes had occurred: the rape of white women by black men. The black youths were charged and convicted.

The drama that unfolded became known nationally and internationally as the Scottsboro boys case. And, as Dan Carter noted in this classic study Scottsboro, the case changed both the nation and the Southern social landscape.

How the case changed the Southern social landscape is another story; how it changed the nation had a direct bearing on the Bill of Rights. The 6th Amendment guaranteed all citizens a speedy trial before an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed. It also assured all the assistance of competent counsel for their defense.

The defendants in the Scottsboro boys case charged that they were denied competent counsel and an impartial jury during the hastily concluded initial trial, which lasted six days and resulted in the death penalty for all nine, the court-sanctioned attorneys lacked the time, the will and the skills to defend. Moreover, African-Americans in that part of Alabama had been systematically excluded from the jury rolls. In Powell vs, Alabama (1932), the Supreme Court upheld the right of the accused to counsel. Because the 6th Amendment granted protection t6 defendants in federal trials, the court turned to the equal- protection clause of the 14th Amendment, which offered protection at both the state and federal levels.

Three years later, in Norris vs Alabama, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the exclusion of blacks from juries violated the 14th Amendment. Each case extended the rights first expressed in the 6th Amendment, proving once again the enduring nature of the Bill of Rights

The men who authored the original Bill of Rights recognized what it ignored as well as what ft covered: Since that time we have struggled to improve on their enduring genius. That they were imperfect is beyond dispute. Nonetheless, their undeniable concern for democratic values--despite their skirting the issue of slavery--enabled others to modify or amend their work.

Most importantly, the ideals that fueled the writing of the Bill of Rights also inspired African-Americans to struggle for two centuries to keep the Bill of Rights a living document. In the process, blacks helped the nation examine the importance of freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, due process and justifiable bail and punishment.

Today, as we debate the legality of ordinances prohibiting hate crimes, we do well to recall the historical relationship between the Bill of Rights and African-Americans.

Earl Lewis, associate professor of history and Afro-American studies and director of the Center for Afro-American and African Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, is the author of IN THEIR OWN INTERESTS: RACE, CLASS AND POWER IN TWENTIETH CENTURY NORFOLK, VIRGINIA.