The 1857 Dred Scott ruling barred black Americans from homestead 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

• DEFINE: Lays out the direct causal chain from the citizenship ruling to exclusion from the federal land grant program — civil status gates access to wealth-building policy.