Kenneth Dantzler Corbin

Judicial Aspects of Race in the United States Kenneth Dantzler Corbin

This book is about the Judicial aspect of race in the America. In the United States, legislation aimed at regulating interactions between racial or ethnic groups has grown through various historical periods, beginning with European colonization of the Americas, the triangular slave trade, and the American Indian Wars. Racial legislation has been linked to immigration laws, which have sometimes contained explicit clauses targeting certain nations or ethnic groups, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act and the 1923 US Supreme Court decision the United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind. In the antebellum period, all slave states and a few free states enacted similar legislation. Ozawa v. the United States and the United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind are the two most notable instances. Takao Ozawa, born in Japan and lived in the United States for 20 years, sought citizenship but was rejected because he was not deemed white. Americans of Italian and German ancestry and Italian and German citizens were also imprisoned, although on a far lesser scale, even though Italy and Germany sided with Japan in the war against the United States. In 1954, in Hernandez v. Texas, a federal court determined that Mexican Americans and all other ethnic or "racial groups" in the United States may have equal protection under the 14th Amendment.