Skip to main content

The timeline can be navigated with the “Scroll Left” and “Scroll Right” buttons or by dragging the pointer to a date on the timeline waveform (located at the bottom of the screen on the desktop version and on the left of the screen on mobile). To filter by a particular topic and see a smaller section of the data, make a selection on the dropdown “Filters” menu or click “Search” to do a keyword search. Hover over the abbreviated filter tags in the blue boxes to see the complete name of the filter, or click a filter to display all the data with this tag. If you want to take a deeper dive into a specific topic by viewing a narrative essay page and a curated timeline, click on “Stories.”

Read More

The U.S. Supreme Court rules in Ozawa v. United States that Japanese people are ineligible for U.S. citizenship.

1922

IM
LEG
API
HISR

Takao Ozawa is a Japanese American student fighting for his right to naturalization. The U.S. Supreme Court rules that since Ozawa is neither a "free white person" nor an African by birth or descent, he does not have the right of naturalization as a "Mongolian."

All "free white persons" were made eligible for U.S. citizenship by Congress in 1790. "Aliens of African nativity and persons of African descent" were similarly designated for citizenship by Congress in 1870. Some 420 Japanese people had been naturalized under the category of "free white persons" by 1910. However, a ruling by a U.S. attorney general to stop issuing naturalization papers to Japanese ended the practice in 1906. Ozawa filed his naturalization papers in 1914.