[On June 12th,
1967, the Supreme Court ruled
in Loving v. Virginia to strike
down all remaining laws prohibiting interracial marriage. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy
Loving and four other cases in which
the Court helped advance social progress, leading up to a special weekend post
on the role of courts and judges in our own society!]
On a surprisingly
positive and a surprisingly negative side to comparing two Supreme Court
decisions.
In 1895, a Chinese
American resident of San Francisco named Wong
Kim Ark returned from a visit to China and was denied re-entry to the
United States and detained for five months on a ship off the coast of
California. Wong had been born in San Francisco to Chinese immigrant parents a
couple decades earlier (his exact birth year is unknown), but the Scott
Act (1888), a
follow-up law to and extension of the Chinese Exclusion Act, had made it
illegal for most Chinese Americans to leave the United States and then seek to
return. With the help of legal aid from the Chinese Consolidated
Benevolent Association, a community and historical association that had
been formed in 1882 (the same year that Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion
Act), Wong filed a writ of habeas corpus in federal district court, seeking not
only to end his detention but also and especially to establish his birthright citizenship
under the 14th Amendment. The case eventually made its way to the
Supreme Court, which in March 1898 ruled
6-2 in favor of Wong, noting that “the American citizenship which Wong Kim
Ark acquired by birth within the United States has not been lost or taken away
by anything happening since his birth.”
This
ground-breaking and progressive Supreme Court decision was pleasantly surprising
for a number of reasons, including the Court’s own recent history. For one
thing, in Chae Chan Ping v.
United States (1889) the Court had ruled that both the Chinese
Exclusion Act and the Scott Act were Constitutional, enshrining the exclusion
era’s ethnic discriminations and blatant xenophobia in national law. For
another thing, just two years before the Wong
Kim Ark decision the Court had issued the Plessy
v. Ferguson (1896) ruling, a legal validation of Jim Crow racial
segregation (under the guise of “separate
but equal”) that I would argue comprised one of the true low points in
Supreme Court and American legal history. That the exact same Court could rule
as they did in Wong Kim Ark (and do
so overwhelmingly, with the 6-2 ruling providing a nearly obverse reflection of
the 7-1 decision in Plessy), while of
course also reflecting the complexity of law and precedent and the like, was nonetheless
a very happy surprise, and one that has had hugely significant legacies for both
Chinese Americans specifically and the concept of birthright
citizenship overall.
Yet history is
messy and complicated, and comparing the Wong
and Plessy decisions also yields a
more negative surprise. The lone dissenter in Plessy had been Justice John Marshall
Harlan, who wrote a long and eloquent
dissent that opposed segregation and argued that “Our Constitution is
color-blind” and “in respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal under the
law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful.” Yet in a lesser-known
section of that dissent, Harlan compares African Americans to “the Chinese
race,” calling the latter “a race so different from our own that we do not
permit those belonging to it to become citizens of the United States” yet
noting that Chinese Americans are still allowed to ride in white railroad cars
under Jim Crow. And this anti-Chinese sentiment foreshadowed Harlan’s
dissent in Wong Kim Ark, in which
he (along with Chief Justice Melville Fuller) once again reiterated his belief
(stated in a
public lecture just before the Wong decision)
that “this is a race utterly foreign to us and never will assimilate with us.”
Better remembering the Wong Kim Ark decision,
then, at one and the same time improves the image of the Plessy court and yet complicates our collective memories of Plessy’s inspiring dissent.
Next decision
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other Supreme Court decisions or contexts you’d highlight?
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