The 14th Amendment was written for one people

OPINION:

I am a historian. More important for this debate, I am a descendant of the babies of slaves — the first Black Americans whose citizenship was guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.

That is why I have something to say about the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Trump v. Barbara.

This is America’s 250th birthday year, a good year to tell the truth. The 14th Amendment did not fall out of the sky, and it was not written for everybody. It was written after the Civil War to overturn Dred Scott v. Sandford and to settle, once and for all, whether formerly enslaved Americans and their children were citizens of the United States.

It was written for a specific people, for a specific reason, after a specific debt came due. That people was us.

Our ancestors did not come here with one foot out the door. They had nowhere else to go and no one else to answer to. They learned the language. They pledged allegiance to one nation. They built churches and schools and businesses under one government, because one government was all they had.

That was what “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” meant to the men who wrote it.

On the floor of the Senate in 1866, Jacob Howard, one of the amendment’s chief authors, described citizenship as belonging to “every person born within the limits of the United States, and subject to their jurisdiction” — and he was explicit about who fell outside that promise: those “who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers.”

One allegiance. One country. That was the whole point.

We have spent nearly 250 years proving we were worth it, long before the debt of citizenship was ever paid. Crispus Attucks died for this country in 1770, six years before it existed. Black Americans fought in the American Revolution, the War of 1812 and the Civil War, defending a nation that had not yet agreed to call them citizens.

Once the 14th Amendment finally kept its promise, we kept fighting in every major American conflict since, defending the Constitution overseas while demanding it protect us at home. We sought no special exception. We demanded equal treatment under a promise we had already paid for twice over: first with loyalty before citizenship, then with the citizenship the 14th Amendment finally secured.

Every civil rights case, every march, every vote we fought to cast ran through the Constitution, not around it. No 14th Amendment, no Brown v. Board. No 14th Amendment, no Voting Rights Act.

We held this country to the promise it made on paper until it started keeping that promise in practice.

For more than a century, courts have read the citizenship clause broadly, and I have never believed that reading matched what the framers intended. This was a concern that Black conservatives raised directly with President Trump, notably through Black Voices for Trump.

There was a sense that this promise had drifted, and someone in Washington needed to force the question. Mr. Trump said he would. Nearly a decade later, he did. Trump v. Barbara is the result. Even in defeat, it brought this historical argument back before the Supreme Court for the first time in generations.

The court’s majority relied on long-standing precedent and said birth on American soil is enough, no questions asked. It does not matter whether the parents are here legally or illegally, or just passing through.

Justice Clarence Thomas argued in dissent that this amendment was written specifically to secure citizenship for freed slaves. Stretching it into an open invitation for anybody with a plane ticket does not honor that history; it erases it.

People have been cashing in on that erasure for years. Federal prosecutors have already broken up birth tourism rings where foreign nationals paid tens of thousands of dollars — up to $100,000 in one case — for the exact thing my great-grandparents earned with their lives.

Days after Barbara, reports said the Justice Department directed prosecutors to prioritize birth tourism cases, targeting visa fraud, money laundering and identity theft tied to these schemes. That is not a birthright. That is a business model, and even the government that just lost this case knows it.

This is not an argument against anyone else’s child. It is an argument for historical honesty. As America marks 250 years of independence, it should remember the constitutional promise that made my ancestors full citizens and why.

The 14th Amendment was written for the babies of slaves. That history deserves to be remembered, not rewritten.

One flag. One allegiance. One country.

• Jimmy Lee Tillman II is a historian, founder of the Martin Luther King Republicans, author of “Tillman Handbook on Great Black American Patriots,” a Heritage Foundation academy fellow and a Heritage Action sentinel.