We the People: THE AMERICAN CONSTITUTION AFTER 200 YEARS : Seeds of Conflict : By sidestepping the slavery issue, the Founding Fathers shackled the nation to a future of racial discord.

America’s problems that began with slavery just won’t go away.

The moral and political questions raised by “the peculiar institution”--as it came to be called shortly before the Civil War--have plagued the nation since its birth. They threatened to break up the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia 200 years ago, and the repercussions of slavery continue to fuel bitter disputes today.

During the Constitutional Convention, the Founding Fathers dared not even write the word slavery into the document. Those opposed to the institution declared angrily that the word itself would sully the charter, yet all delegates recognized that Southern states would bolt and doom the new government if slavery were tampered with.

Unable to resolve the problem, historians and others now agree, the delegates worked out a formula for tiptoeing around it: In return for Southern delegates’ support of the new charter and acceptance of broad federal authority over the states--considered a vital principle by advocates of a strong national government--the Founding Fathers allowed slavery to continue without sanctioning it by name.

In the process, they left undisturbed the seeds of endless future conflict.

The effects of the compromise “have remained for generations,” Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, the only black ever appointed to the high court, said in a speech last May. “They arose from the contradiction between guaranteeing liberty and justice to all, and denying both to Negroes.”

The Constitution is still “evolving,” he said, noting that blacks and women were excluded from voting until the 15th and 19th Amendments were passed in 1870 and 1920, respectively.

Marshall’s speech set off howls of protest because he criticized the Constitution’s framers for creating a government that was “defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war and a momentous social transformation to attain the system of constitutional government, and its respect for the individual freedoms and human rights, we hold as fundamental today.”

Benjamin L. Hooks, executive director of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, agreed with Marshall. “The failure of the framers of the Constitution to come to grips with slavery caused serious problems for this country,” he said in an interview. “We have paid for it in blood, sweat and tears.”

In a mixed assessment of post-slavery racial progress, Wade J. Henderson, associate director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said: “On one level, we’ve made tremendous leaps, socially, politically and economically. On another level, we’re faced with some incredible problems. For example, in 1987, we still debate whether a black person can run for the presidency of the United States.”

Orators of every generation have railed against what abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass called “this Hydra-headed monster” of slavery--but the moral outrage has seldom led to a consensus on dealing with the problems it raised.

During his October, 1980, debate with then-President Jimmy Carter, for example, Ronald Reagan commented that he had grown up in an era “when this country didn’t even know it had a racial problem”--a remark that many whites found unexceptionable but struck many blacks as insensitive.

Similarly, whereas many whites see current government programs for helping the disadvantaged as adequate, political science professor Ronald W. Walters of Howard University, a black, said in a recent interview that “many black people believe the government participated in the process of racial subordination and blacks are owed reparations.”

Walters and some other black scholars are pressing the idea that the 13th Amendment opens the way for black people to be guaranteed access to resources, not just to civil rights. Others assert that white people have hidden behind the First Amendment in stereotyping black people in movies.

And as the buoyant celebration marking the end of the Constitutional Convention nears, another Howard University professor has prepared a graphic display of racial memorabilia to show the black side of history.

Some of the 55 men--all of them white--who attended the Philadelphia convention in 1787 envisioned the future as they wrestled with the issue of slavery.

One, George Mason of Virginia, saw and was frightened.

“Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant,” he warned on Aug. 22, breaking the Virginia delegation’s silence about whether the federal government could regulate states’ slave trade. “They bring the judgment of heaven on a country. As nations cannot be rewarded or punished in the next world, they must be in this. By an inevitable chain of causes and effects, Providence punishes national sins by national calamities.”

The irony of Mason’s impassioned speech escaped no one. As the owner of perhaps more slaves than any of the 17 slaveholders at the convention, he was especially vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy.

Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut tore into Mason with a blistering attack, pointing out that he himself had “never owned a slave” and thus “could not judge of the effects of slavery on character.” He challenged Mason not only to attack slavery “in a moral light,” but to “go farther and free those already in the country.”

But Mason did not. And the episode stands as a metaphor for the country’s failure to erase the legacies of slavery. Mason had been the architect of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which declared on June 12, 1776--in language echoed less than a month later in the Declaration of Independence--that “all men are naturally equal.” So he felt compelled to speak out against the odious institution, just as other Americans--having proclaimed “that all men are created equal”--have felt compelled to decry first slavery and then discrimination on a moral level.

But on a practical level, Mason had to consider how to create broad support for the fledgling government, and this meant appeasing the slaveholding Southern states to prevent their bolting the convention.

The debate went on and on. Northern delegates, knowing that Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina would not join the new nation if slavery or the slave trade were outlawed, searched for a compromise and found it. In exchange for keeping hands off the Southern slave trade until 1808, the national government would be allowed to regulate maritime--and thus slave--trade as a general principle.

At the same time, South Carolina succeeded in further protecting slavery by getting passed a motion that came to be known as the “fugitive slave” clause. It ensured that escaped slaves would be returned to owners--an issue that would become a focal point of the tensions precipitating the Civil War.

The Founding Fathers also agreed that for tax purposes and for congressional representation, each slave would be counted as three-fifths of a person.

In her book, “Miracle at Philadelphia,” Catherine Drinker Bowen said: “Thus far Mason and (John Dickinson of Delaware) had won their point: A matter that concerned the public good should be transferred from local to central authority, from state to Congress.”

Bowen went on, writing that no one had expected to abolish slavery at the convention. “It was the business of delegates to create a constitution for the country as it existed,” she wrote, “and if slavery made a mockery of the words freedom, liberty, the rights of man, then those who thought so could have their say on the floor. Without disrupting the convention and destroying the union, they could do no more. The time had not yet come.”

Don E. Fehrenbacher, a retired history professor at Stanford and a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, said that as a practical matter: “You can imagine what would have happened to a Constitution that gave women the right to vote and freed the slaves. They had to write a Constitution that was going to be acceptable.”

Compromised, the convention proceeded to complete its historic work. But contrary to the Founding Fathers’ hope that slavery was not an overriding issue and would die out on its own, the institution survived almost 80 years, during which Mason’s state of Virginia became a veritable breeding ground of slaves for all who wanted them.

The nation’s slave population increased by 1 million in the first 30 years of the 19th Century and had reached a total of 3.5 million by the time the 13th Amendment emancipated slaves in 1865.

In the years leading up to emancipation, abolitionists agitated constantly. Douglass, a brilliant abolitionist, appealed to the practical side of the American conscience, the desire to put on a good face in the international arena.

In a speech in Rochester, N.Y., on Dec. 8, 1850, he called slavery “the sin and the shame of the American people: It is a blot upon the American name, and the only national reproach which need make an American hang his head in shame, in the presence of monarchical governments.”

And in the same city two years later, in a Fourth of July speech that foreshadowed the current attitude of many black Americans toward patriotic holidays, Douglass said: “I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you this day rejoice are not enjoyed in common.

“The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you had brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.”

Even after emancipation, there was much to mourn: A system of segregation lived on after slavery. Whites, rushing to pass laws that kept blacks in second-class status, reflected a “temporary anarchy that followed the collapse of the old discipline,” wrote C. Vann Woodward in his book, “The Strange Career of Jim Crow.” The situation “produced a state of mind bordering on hysteria among Southern white people,” he said.

Tensions grew once more. As the federal government passed laws to ban racial discrimination, the constitutional battleground gradually shifted to questions of states’ rights versus federal rights. Beneath the fine-spun legal arguments over the boundaries of state and federal power, however, race remained the issue.

Today, the battles have not ended.

Howard University’s Walters, for one, criticizes conservatives who assert that blacks must rely solely on self-help without government assistance and he cites constitutional law to support his point.

In a 1983 article in the Black Law Journal, Walters said that a month after Congress passed the 13th Amendment in 1865 to abolish slavery, it passed the first Freedmen’s Bureau Act providing fuel, food and clothing to destitute black people.

This, Walters said, “appeared to be an explicit recognition of the fact that to merely confer civil rights upon the newly freed black population would not enable them to begin to exercise those rights without a nearly simultaneous grant of resources.”

Gary L. Bauer, President Reagan’s chief adviser on domestic affairs, questions the desirability of increased government action to help blacks. “Why is it that when spending for those programs has gone up, there has been no improvement in the poverty rates?” he asked recently.

For his part, Charles E. Simmons, a communications professor at Howard University, believes that part of the reason lies in the negative ways blacks have been portrayed publicly. Because the Constitution sanctioned slavery and treated slaves as unequal to whites for purposes of voting and taxation, he said, “we still are not taken seriously as equals. In the media, whites are shown as both serious people and clowns. We’re either bums or clowns or crooks.”

In a kind of “counter-Constitution” exhibit at Howard, Simmons--who treats the Constitution and the Bill of Rights as a whole even though the latter was not adopted until afterward--has put on display his personal collection of artifacts, memorabilia and artwork depicting black people over the last two centuries.

Advertisements for minstrel shows, movies, chewing tobacco and pancake mix show bloated black women, black men with huge red lips and big white eyes. There is a collage of black and white signs like “Colored Served in Rear,” “No Dogs Negroes Mexicans” and “Help Wanted No Irish Need Apply.”

Attached to the collage, an explanation says: “In the worst of times the First Amendment has been used to its discredit by those who saw it as a tool for disinformation, a vehicle for distortion and half-truths, deception and flagrant stereotypes.”

The First Amendment, which guaranteed the right of free speech, “became the plaything for those who sought to perpetuate stereotypes” of blacks, women, Asians and European immigrants, the collage says. Simmons said the exhibit has attracted visitors from all over the country and abroad and that he will take it to several other U.S. cities, including Boston and Los Angeles.

“The Constitution itself should not be the focus of the commemoration,” he asserted. “It should be the struggles that took place to expand democracy.”