Congress could not even agree Black Americans held the right to petition

Evidence

In 1799, seventy-one Black Philadelphians lodged a formal claim and insisted on their entitlement to “Liberties and unalienable Rights” and likened themselves to “every other class of Citizen within the Jurisdiction of the United States.” The petition arrived in Congress in January 1800, where representatives managed to do little more than disagree. There was not even a consensus about whether Black Americans had a right to petition Congress in the first place, though the First Amendment guaranteed “the right of the people…to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” When it came to the question of whether Black Americans enjoyed the rights of citizens, the House considered the petition only long enough to send it to a committee, where it quietly died. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 696

Categorization

• XREF: A precise example for the reader’s case study of how historical controversy and institutional inaction work — Congress burying a petition in committee.