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One of the truly great things about America is that it was in fact founded by virulently racist white men, but those racist white men created a document in the Constitution that could not exist simultaneously with either state-supported enslavement or Jim Crow.
Frederick Douglass broke with his initial political allies (the Garrisonites who believed that the Constitution was an inherently pro-slavery documentation) on this matter. He used the Constitution to whack pro-slavery Americans over the head with their own hypocrisy.
From 1852, his legendary Fourth of July speech. aaihs.org/frederick-doug… 
The Constitution created a bar high enough that none of the people who wrote it could clear it, but Douglass, and Tubman, and Ida B. Wells, and a host of legends, many of whom died in service of the cause, spent their lives in part begging the American populace to live up to it.
Ida B. Wells in 1900. speakola.com/ideas/ida-b-we…
(Here is James Earl Jones reading the full speech: )
