Citizenship was understood by Black leaders to carry voting rights with it.

Evidence

The new amendment had finally affirmed the principles for which the colored conventions—dozens of them over nearly four decades—had stood: Black Americans were citizens of the United States by virtue of birthright. That and nothing more made them equals to all other Americans. Those who had instigated the 1869 meeting rooted their urgings in an expansive view of the Fourteenth Amendment: “Surely, citizenship…carries with it the rights of citizens.” That, they insisted, included the right to vote. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 732

Categorization

• DEFINE: Shows the interpretive contest over the Fourteenth Amendment’s scope — whether citizenship logically entailed suffrage — which is central to the reader’s case study of how contested constitutional texts function.