The Necessity Of Birthright Citizenship For Black People
The idea of citizenship has always been a thorny one for Black people. The original United States constitution allowed the enslaved to be counted for purposes of determining congressional representation, but only as three-fifths of a person. The struggles for liberation during enslavement reached their nadir in the 1857 Supreme Court case of Dred Scott v. Sandford , in which not only were an enslaved man and his family wrongly deprived of their freedom, but Chief Justice Roger B. Taney infamously declared that not only were the Scotts not free, but that no Black person had any rights “which the white man was bound to respect.”