 Dow v. United States |
|
In Dow v. United States, the Court of Appeals ruled that people from Southwest Asia could be considered white and were eligible for citizenship. This decision came seven years before the Supreme Court ruled that migrants from Japan and India were not white enough to be eligible for citizenship.
|
| Hernandez v. Texas |
|
Hernandez v. Texas showed racial discrimination in all-white juries, reflected in Juan Crow segragation.
|
| In re Halladjian et al. |
|
In this case, a Massachusetts circuit court ruled that people from West Asia were so intermixed with Europeans that the Armenian plaintiffs should be considered white and admitted to U.S. citizenship.
|
| Korematsu v. United States (1944) |
|
In this case, the Supreme Court ruled that war-time exclusion against Japanese-Americans was valid.
|
| Korematsu v. United States (1984) |
|
In this case, Korematsu challenged his 1942 conviction by filing a writ of coram nobis, which asserted that his original conviction was so flawed as to represent a grave injustice and should be reversed. The judge granted the writ, thereby voiding Korematsu's conviction.
|
| Mann Act |
|
The Mann Act was a federal law that focused on interstate sex trafficking, specifically of white women. The act was responsible for the targeting of inter-racial couples by law enforcement.
|
| Ozawa v. United States |
|
The Supreme Court found in Ozawa v. United States that Japanese immigrants were not eligible for naturalization, based on a contested category of whiteness. The case considered the meaning of "free white persons" from the 1906 Naturalization Act and whether factors like assimilability should be considered. While the court determined in Ozawa that the words "white person" were meant to indicate a person of the "caucasian race," the decision in U.S. v. Thind just months later stated that the word "caucasian" was meant to refer to the "common understanding" of race and not a scientific one.
|
| United States v. Cartozian |
|
In this case, the District Court of Oregon debated whether an Armenian immigrant was white enough to be naturalized. Just two years after the Supreme Court ruled that Ozawa, a Japanese man, and Thind, a South Asian man, were not white enough for naturalization, the Oregon court ruled that people from Asia Minor were close enough to European descent to be naturalized.
|
| United States v. Thind |
|
The Supreme Court found in U.S. v. Thind that Indian immigrants were not eligible for naturalization, based on a contested category of whiteness. Contradicting their 1922 ruling in Ozawa naming caucasian identity as a requirement for naturalization, as a South Asian immigrant, Thind was deemed ineligible for citizenship because, despite being racially caucasian, he did not appear white.
|