Nikole Hanna-Jones: 1619 Project, “Citizenship” Notes and Summary by Martha S. Jones  

1. Colored National Convention, Rochester, 1853
   • Northern Blacks debated and pondered citizenship
   • Abolition
   • Frederick Douglass
   • They worked to establish a black political agenda culminating with citizenship
   • Douglass thought, even in that year, that Blacks were essentially American citizens.  This, he averred was a constitutional principle.
2. Citizenship 
   • From ancient times citizenship entailed rights and responsibilities involved with belonging and being an insider
   • Citizenship is most associated with birthright, which we forget was only explicit in the 14^th amendment. 
   • House of Representatives attempted to exclude children born of illegal immigrants from citizenship.
   • Trump and the republicans in general have questioned and criticized birthright citizenship.
     • These challenges to birthright citizenship erase decades of black political effort and 150 years of settled law from the 14^th amendment.
   •  This underscores the Right’s restiveness with Black inclusion in the experience of being an American. 
3. The Founders and Constitution There has always been a sizeable minority of Americans who have assumed that the US is a White person’s enclave, and that Black citizenship was never part of the Founder’s vision.  The constitution never defines citizenship which led to a series of debates as to whether Black people have citizenship rights, like the right to vote or move about freely.
   • The constitution did not originally define citizenship.
   • The Articles of Confederation did not define citizenship, did not lodge that responsibility with the states of federal government, and though identified paupers, vagabonds, and fugitives as excluded.
   • Blacks, Paul and Jonathan Cuffe, were taxed but not deemed citizens.  They petitioned in 1780 (the state of Massachusetts) for a definition of citizenship
   • The US constitution had citizenship requirements for holding elected office, but still didn’t define citizenship.
   • The ambiguity encouraged a range of opinions.
   • In the constitutional period the citizenship question was debated
     1. Petition by Black Philadelphians 1799 (p. 223)
   • The states appeared to have different views of citizenship in the early 19^th century.  Virginia did not deem blacks as citizens, Massachusetts and New York did
   • Congress was muddled about citizenship.
   • Excursus: Usually, when you have repeated intellectual muddle there is some assumption or premise that is wrong.  In this case, slavery is the wrong premise.  It was fundamentally inconsistent with the emerging American polity.
   • Missouri compromise:   Slavery was permitted in Missouri but nowhere else in the new Louisiana purchase territories north of the 36º 30’ parallel.
   • 1821 debate over the question whether Blacks could migrate to Missouri.  Some in the North believed that blacks enjoyed the same rights as Whites; others did not.
   • Could blacks be seized and enslaved?
   • The American Colonization Plan 1816 was the most popular solution for the question of Black citizenship. The plan was to ship Blacks abroad.  This would ensure America’s Whiteness by permanently denying Black’s citizenship.
     • The West Africa colony of Liberia was established in 1822.
     • The was that life in America was too onerous and Blacks would want to immigrate to Africa.
     • 4000 Black Americans went to Liberia
4. Colored Convention Movement
   • Blacks meeting both before and after the Civil War.
     • Hezekiah Grice attempted to prove from the Declaration of Independence and other foundational documents that Blacks were citizens and established the Legal Rights Association.
     • This was a claim to birthright citizenship
   • Women had citizenship but no voting rights
   • Fugitive Slave Act 1850 was a setback for the argument for Black citizenship.  Any Black person was at risk for being branded a fugitive.
     • Could laws be passed denying free Black children the right to public schooling, access to skilled vocations?  Could free Blacks be pressured to emigrate?
     • The prospect of leaving took energy out of the citizenship movement.
   • Frederick Douglas advocated staying and becoming citizens; Martin Delany held for leaving for Africa or elsewhere.  Both agreed on the principle of birthright citizenship.
5. Other institutions
   1. The U.S. Supreme Court.  Several supreme court decisions in the decades leading up to the Civil War were influenced by chief justice, Roger Taney, who against the speculation by Black citizenship advocates, thought that Black citizenship was never written into the constitution.  The Taney Court’s infamous misstep was the Dred Scott decision.
      • Chief justice, Taney, led the court from 1836 to 1864 to rule that Blacks had no citizenship rights.
      • Taney felt that Black citizens did not share with Whites the right to travel, to enter any state.
      • At the peak of Taney’s influence, the court ruled against Dred Scott that he could not sue because he was an enslaved person and not a citizen.  Taney saw this principle in the founding of the country.  The constitution never intended for Black people to be citizens.
      • The Dred Scott Decision: Dred Scott was a powerful blow to the Black citizenship movement.  Blackness was the cause of non-citizenship.  There was a minority opinion which used the same arguments that the Black citizenship movement had long advanced.  Additionally, there were people who may have not wanted to abolish slavery but wanted to limit its spread in the western territories.  In short, there was a range of opinions.
      • The Dred Scott decision was widely disputed and often ignored.  Thus, it became part of an ongoing debate.
      • Taney thought that he was settling the dispute about citizenship.
6. Black citizenship after the Civil War.  The tone changed with the Civil War, especially with Edward Bates opinion.
   1. 1862 Black seamen were manning a ship off New Jersey coast against the federal law that prohibited ships from being captained by non-citizens. (p. 230)
   1. Lincoln’s AG, Edward Bates, studied and came down with the opinion that birth conferred citizenship on all people.
   1. 1864 at National Convention of Colored Men, Syracuse,
7. The Civil Rights Act. 1866
   • This made birthright citizenship explicit
     • Native peoples were regarded citizens of their sovereign nations
   • Various citizenship rights are also enumerated in this act.
   • Andrew Johnson vetoed the Civil Rights Act necessitating a 2/3 vote to pass.
     • Part of Johnson’s rhetoric was that the act was an affront to the white race, read White Supremacy
   • The act passed and became federal law.
8. The Fourteenth Amendment (The Fourteenth Amendment prohibits a State from depriving any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, and from denying to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, but it adds nothing to the rights of one citizen as against another.)
   • Guaranteed citizen’s privileges, due process, equal protection, penalizing states for denying males right to vote, limited office candidates to those who took an oath to uphold the constitution, denied former slave holders’ compensation for their losses in human capital.
   • Late in the discussion, birthright citizenship was added.
   • This amendment put birthright on solid footing.
   • The confederate states didn’t want to ratify the 14^th.  The Reconstruction Act 1867 made the re-inclusion of confederate contingent on ratification of the 14^th.
   • Kentucky, a border state, did not ratify the 14^th until 1976.
9. National Convention of Colored Men 1869 (p. 233) This convention was an early effort by Black men to contemplate Blacks becoming citizens and what the content of citizenship would mean for them.
   • There was, of course, an entirely different climate
   • The open questions were what “due process,” and “equal protection” meant.
   • There was a dispute at the convention whether women delegates could be seated, even though the convention was called for men.  Helen Johnson from Pennsylvania was seated at length.
   • The convention
   • n felt that voting rights were not adequately supported by the 14^th.  It advocated a 15^th amendment guaranteeing the vote for Black men.
     • Ratification of the 15^th became a condition for state’s readmission to the union.
10. Citizenship for other races
    • Frederick Douglass wanted all races to be included in US citizenship
    • Asians, esp in 1880’s, were restricted from immigration and some rights. (p. 235)
11. Return to White Rule (p. 236)
    • Black activists continued the conventions until the 1890’s
    • Southern whites reasserted white supremacy after a short period of multiracial governance.
    • Blacks were not citizens but despised by Whites.
    • Here begins the rise of lynching and Jim Crow

Summary: Chapter 8: Citizenship: Martha S. Jones

The Emancipation Proclamation, 13^th and 14^th amendments didn’t finally resolve the question of the meaning of citizenship of African Americans, notably former slaves.  During Reconstruction, Black activists, mostly men, met in a series of conventions to contemplate and plan for full citizenship.  At length, they called for a 15^th amendment which enumerated the right to vote for all citizens in the United States.  This eventually happened, before Reconstruction collapsed and White Supremacy surged back in the former slave states.  The chapter touches on the Colored Convention Movement, the Roger Taney Supreme Court that rendered the Dred Scott Decision, and the 14^th Amendment,