The 1790 Naturalization Act drew a racial color line excluding Black people from citizenship

Evidence

This ambiguity frustrated clergy member Absalom Jones and the men and women of Philadelphia’s Free African Society. By the end of the eighteenth century, their city was home to a community of formerly enslaved people and their descendants—free Black Americans—that had burgeoned after 1780, when Pennsylvania began to gradually abolish slavery. They busily built churches, mutual aid societies, and their own political culture even as their lives were plagued by racism. Federal laws, such as the 1790 Naturalization Act, set in place a color line that excluded Black people from citizenship by way of naturalization, further creating an atmosphere of uncertainty about where they stood before the law. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 695

Categorization

• XREF: The 1790 Naturalization Act limiting naturalization to ‘free white persons’ is a precise dated claim worth keeping for the reframing vs. contested-claims distinction. — connects to: The 1921 quota law locked in racial composition as nationality limits — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 1878