INTRODUCTION
The inaugural installment of this piece started with an overview of President Donald Trump’s Executive Order, which triggered the policy shift. It was followed by an analysis of its implications for Nigerians and Africans as a whole, starting with the legal and constitutional challenges, which have been mounted against it and its socio-economic impact especially on such things as suspension of foreign assistance programmes. Today, we shall continue with our previous discussion and proceed to x-ray a comprehensive analysis of the whole concept of Birthright Citizenship. Enjoy.
Suspension of foreign assistance programmemes (continues)
According to OECD statistics of Official Development Assistance, the US is the biggest foreign aid donor, distributing $48bn in 2021, with about a third of that sum going to sub-Saharan Africa. Over the 2023/2024 financial year, the US said it had donated almost $3.7bn. It’s hard to say what conclusions and potential changes the Trump administration’s assessment of the foreign development assistance will result in, says Mark Bohlund, a senior credit research analyst at emerging market research group REDD Intelligence. However, he tells The Africa Report that it seems likely that it will become more conditional, for instance, on recipients taking a tougher stance against China or favouring US companies in business dealings.
“It comes at a challenging time, as European donors who collectively are more important for Africa than the US, are spending a higher share of their aid budgets on so-called in-country assistance – on hosting refugees – and have reprioritised some aid towards supporting Ukraine rather than African partners,” Bohlund says (Sheriff Bonjang Jnr ‘Five Trump executive orders that will negatively affect Africa’ <https://www.theafricareport.com/374426/five-trump-executive-orders-that-will-negatively-affect-africa/> accessed on the 31st Jan 2025.).
President Trump’s executive orders have had significant impacts on African-American communities across the United States. One notable example is the executive order that ended diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmemes within federal agencies. This directive led to the closure of DEI offices in institutions such as the Smithsonian, which subsequently shut down its diversity office. The elimination of these programmemes has raised concerns about the erasure of significant parts of U.S. history and culture, particularly those related to African American contributions (Artlyst ‘Smithsonian Closes Diversity Office In Wake Of Trump Executive Order’
<https://artlyst.com/news/smithsonian-closes-diversity-office-wake-trump-executive-order> accessed on 31 Jan 2025.).
The crucible of birthright citizenship
At a certain point in history, it is possible to tell the story of the 14th Amendment’s adoption as one driven by the maneuvering of highly placed lawmakers—judges and members of Congress. But the story of the 14th Amendment, and in particular its birthright citizenship provision, is one of far more than court opinions and legislative acts. It is also a story of how African American activists set out to develop a framework that would let them combat racism. Over nearly four decades, beginning in 1830, delegates attending the so-called colored conventions defined, debated and advocated for the view that black Americans were birthright citizens. In 1868, with the ratification of the 14th Amendment, the rest of the nation caught up.
Delegates to the National Convention of Colored Citizens called upon the US House of Representatives’ Judiciary Committee in January 1869, did so as citizens. Six months earlier, ratification of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution had settled a thorny question: what was the status of black Americans, including former slaves, before the law? With black Americans thereby deemed birthright citizens—persons whose status derived from their birth on US soil—a constitutional revolution was underway. A delegation from eight Northern, Southern, and Midwestern states set out to meet with lawmakers and test the limits of their rights. Their foremost demand was the vote, a demand befitting their new status.
This is what the 14th Amendment looked like in its first months. A committee of nine men, traversing Washington, DC, from the Union League Hall to the Capitol, to petition their government. The meeting concluded with a promise from the committee head that Congress would consider “an amendment to the Constitution, declaring universal manhood suffrage throughout the United States” in the upcoming term. Birthright citizenship was taking shape that season, here in the form of a Saturday morning exchange between black citizens and their representatives.
The 14th Amendment was new in 1869. But the questions that it answered about black citizenship were not. Black activists had been promoting birthright as the basis of their national belonging for nearly half a century, emanating from their struggles to secure well-being in what was still widely considered a “white man’s country.” If they could win rights as citizens, former slaves had long believed, perhaps they could resist those who aimed to exile them from the nation. Congress and the state legislatures that ratified the 14th Amendment were, it turns out, latecomers to the question.
Rather than recipients of legislative benevolence, black Americans were the architects of an idea that eventually redefined the terms of citizenship for everyone in the country. Since the 1820s, legislatures and courts had fitfully examined the question of black citizenship, leaving a checkered record and persistent doubts about where such men and women stood. In response, black activists seized upon birthright citizenship, acting as much out of necessity as political ideals. Their efforts refined the issue, nurtured it, moulded it, and then held it out for lawmakers to formalize when the time was right. The aftermath of the Civil War and emancipation—in the era termed Reconstruction—was just that sort of moment.
The claim to birthright citizenship did not emerge wholly formed. Black activists began in 1830 to think their way through a range of ideas. There was the US Constitution that, while generally silent on citizenship, did require that the president be a “natural-born Citizen.” Perhaps they, too, were born members of the nation. They proposed that their military service during the American Revolution and the fact of their labor, much of it uncompensated, serve as bases for a claim to rights.
In the pages of the first black-owned newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, and in the proceedings of the so-called colored convention movement, black activists began to develop and discuss their ideas with one another. They even sought expert legal advice, as, for example, when Baltimore’s black-led Legal Rights Association solicited an opinion from former Attorney General William Wirt. As the delegates to the 1835 Convention for the Improvement of the Free People of Colour in the United States put it: “This convention recommends … the propriety of petitioning congress and their respective state legislatures to be admitted to the rights and privileges of American citizens, and that we be protected in the same.”
Circumstances worsened. Some colonization advocates proposed the forced removal of black people from the country, while black laws only expanded in scope, imposing harsher restrictions on African American travel, work, family, associations, and leisure. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 heightened the threat that free people would be kidnapped and illicitly sold as slaves. It was a discouraging period and doubts led to the formation of a black-led emigration movement that attracted those who saw more promise in Africa, Canada, or the Caribbean than in the US.
Some claims to citizenship took on a bold tone. Such was the case when Martin Delany insisted, “We are Americans, having a birthright citizenship” in his 1852 book, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States. Ironically, Delany made this claim just as he was planning to emigrate away from the US. He was not alone in concluding that, even if they were citizens, black Americans had no hope of an equal future in the land of their birth.
Others managed to eke out a semblance of rights, if only in a piecemeal fashion. In 1857, the US Supreme Court, in Scott v. Sandford, deemed black people noncitizens, without rights in the federal courts. The following year, the Maryland case of Hughes v. Jackson leaned in the other direction, rejecting the view that free black people were without rights. Jackson, a free black laborer, was entitled to use the state’s courts to protect his person and his property, including his children, who had been kidnapped and held as slaves. Struggles over citizenship rights continued, but the results were inconsistent.
This was the crucible of birthright citizenship. Black Americans scoured court decisions and legislative pronouncements. They read legal treatises and political commentary. They often confronted the problem of citizenship as it manifested in everyday life, making claims before local courts, clerks, and administrators. They even became historians of a sort, able to stitch together these varied sources into a legal chronicle that suggested that they had always been members of the nation’s body politic. A doctrine of citizenship was emerging, and it would have been familiar to anyone following the debate. As a delegate to an Ohio convention explained in 1857: “We are native-born inhabitants, and therefore, citizens. This is no newfangled doctrine of our making, nor is it the teaching of a hair-brained fanatic. This is a well-established principle of the law of Nature. It is a principle fully recognized and endorsed by all standard writers on law.”
The circumstances of the Civil War gave the question of black citizenship new urgency. As the conflict that many had believed was begun to save the Union was transformed into a war to end slavery, questions about black citizenship followed, on a grand scale. Emancipation proceeded unevenly as enslaved people freed themselves by fleeing plantations, farms, and urban workplaces, only to become freed again by military orders, acts of Congress, and even a president’s executive order, the Emancipation Proclamation.
Freedom did not, however, guarantee citizenship. Even the terms of 1865’s 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery, did not go so far as to define the status of former slaves before the law. The colored conventions resumed that year all across the country, and citizenship was on everyone’s mind. As had been the case before the war, convention delegates reached for the evidence at hand. New, for example, was an 1862 opinion issued by US Attorney General Edward Bates. Asked to determine whether black men could command American vessels, a privilege reserved to citizens of the US, Bates said yes. Speaking with federal authority, Bates affirmed the birthright citizenship long advocated for by black Americans. His text exhaustively reviewed their arguments, ones that had roiled the subject for decades.
For the first time, the work in black conventions was being complemented by official changes in Washington. At the 1864 National Convention of Colored Men, Ohio lawyer John Mercer Langston incorporated Bates’s opinion into his thinking about citizenship and, according to the proceedings, “claimed that that was a complete answer to the arguments and cavils against us.” Activists did not, however, leave it to lawmakers to steer the debate over citizenship. The 1865 National Equal Rights League convention committed to “agitate, entreat, and demand … the fulfillment of the nation’s pledges made to us … [until we are guaranteed] the full enjoyment of our liberties, protection to our persons throughout the land, complete enfranchisement, and until all are equal as American citizens before the law.” The convention concluded with the establishment of an independent National Equal-Rights League that would advocate for the realization of their birthright as American citizens.
(To be continued).
Thought for the week
“The criteria for serving one’s country should be competence, courage and willingness to serve. When we deny people the chance to serve because of their sexual orientation, we deprive them of their rights of citizenship, and we deprive our armed forces the service of willing and capable Americans”. –Dianne Feinstein