Frederick Douglass was a citizen for only months under the Fourteenth Amendment’s terms.

Evidence

When the 1869 National Convention of the Colored Men of America met in Washington, D.C., it did so under new terms. Over four days, men from twenty-one states and the District of Columbia moved between meetings at the Union League Hall and Israel Bethel Church. Among them were luminaries including Frederick Douglass, who was fifty-one years old but had been recognized as a citizen for only five months by the new Fourteenth Amendment. Or perhaps he’d been a citizen for two years, by the terms of the 1866 Civil Rights Act. Douglass was among the more than five million Black Americans who were finally assured their place in the body politic by way of Congress’s grand democratizing act. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 731

Categorization

• CANDY: Douglass being a citizen of the country for only five months at age fifty-one is a striking, tweetable reframing of a familiar figure.