The 1857 citizenship ruling excluded black people from Homestead Act land

Evidence

Black Americans, unlike their white peers, had little or no access to the federal government’s 160-acre-plot land grab. They were not considered citizens in 1862, thanks to an 1857 Supreme Court decision that held that black people were ineligible for citizenship, whether free or enslaved, because they were “so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 330

Categorization

• XREF: The Dred Scott citizenship bar is the direct legal mechanism linking pre- and post-emancipation exclusion — a load-bearing link in Brown’s accounting argument. — connects to: The Homestead Act never delivered free land to ordinary settlers — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 2414