February is Black History Month, an especially opportune time to reflect on the role played by African Americans in helping the United States live up to the principles of its founding fathers. And yet since its establishment, black intellectuals, educators, and leaders have seen fit to use Black History Month as a way of attacking the founders and their ideas — to accuse them of creating, from the point of view of blacks and other minorities, what historian Nathan Huggins terms a “model totalitarian society.”

Leading black scholars such as John Hope Franklin say the framers of the Constitution were racist because they approved a document in which a black person was regarded as three-fifths of a human being. Others, such as the late Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, charge Washington, Jefferson, and Madison with establishing a regime “defective from the start” because they endorsed the proposition that “all men are created equal” while permitting slavery.