Frederick Douglass extended his citizenship argument to Chinese immigrants as early as 1867.

Evidence

Frederick Douglass knew, of course, that no constitutional amendment alone would settle the long struggles over national belonging. He understood that the pernicious tentacles of racism extended beyond his immediate constituency of Black Americans. In an 1867 lecture, composed the year before the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, he had directed attention to related questions about the belonging of Chinese immigrants and their children. His position was unequivocal: they too must be made citizens. “Would you,” he asked, “have them naturalized, and have them invested with all the rights of American Citizenship? I would.” Douglass then plunged into a broader debate: “I want a home here not only for the negro, the mulatto and the Latin races, but I want the Asiatic to find a home here in the United States, and feel at home here, both for his sake and for ours.” — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 738

Categorization

• XREF: Douglass’s 1867 inclusive citizenship stance complicates a common assumption that mid-19th-century Black leaders’ rights advocacy was limited to their own race — an example of a surprising claim usable in the controversy case study.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing whether Douglass’s 1867 lecture influenced later Asian-American rights arguments and whether it was cited in citizenship cases.