Unsung America. Prerna Lal
Singh Thind and Takao Ozawa
Even though the Fourteenth Amendment made citizens of all persons born in the United States, Congress still limited citizenship acquired through naturalization to white persons and, through an amendment, added those with African origins.32 In 1917, Congress specifically banned all Asian persons from immigrating to the United States. Asian Americans were caught in limbo and condemned to second-class status, even those here legally.
Since the process of naturalization at that time was a judicial function, it was up to individual judges to decide who was a white person, or a person of African nativity or African descent. This led to an interesting patchwork of court decisions whereby Iranians and Armenians were able to win naturalization, but Asian Indians and Japanese individuals were deemed to be non-white.33 Since Asians were excluded until the 1940s, courts heard many cases involving their naturalization. In nearly all of these cases, the applicants claimed whiteness.
One of these seminal cases involved a Japanese immigrant. Takao Ozawa was born in Japan but moved to the United States in 1894, when he was nineteen years old, and grew up in California. He graduated from Berkeley High School, studied at the University of California, Berkeley, and then moved to Hawai‘i. He sought naturalization in 1914 and fought his way up to the Supreme Court. In a brief that he wrote to the Court, Ozawa disavowed any connection with Japanese churches, schools, or organizations.34 He described how he had been educated in the United States. He claimed to speak mostly English and told the court that his children did not speak Japanese at home.
“In name, I am not an American, but at heart I am a true American.”
—Takao Ozawa
Ozawa essentially distanced himself from anything having to do with Japan and aimed to present himself higher on the racial pecking order based on his literal and metaphorical whiteness. He conflated being white with being American. Neither the Hawai‘i District Court nor the US Supreme Court agreed with him.35 The United States contended that the proper distinction wasn’t based on nativity or skin color, but that “white” was equivalent to European, and none of Ozawa’s ancestors had been European.
The Ozawa decision served as precedent until Congress removed barriers for Japanese naturalization in 1952. By the time Ozawa died in 1936, he had made Hawai‘i his home, although the United States had failed to consider him as one of its own.
Another major case involved Bhagat Singh Thind (1892–1967), who was born in Punjab, India and came to the United States in 1913. A wave of immigrants came from India at the turn of the century, and by 1910 there were between five and ten thousand Asian Indians in the United States. At the time, anthropologists generally regarded Asian Indians as Caucasian, not Mongolian. In 1918, Thind was actually granted citizenship, only for the document to be voided by the Immigration and Naturalization Service four days later. He served in World War I for the United States, and was honorably discharged, after which he once again applied for United States citizenship while residing in Washington State.
Once again, in 1920, Thind received citizenship, which the government appealed once more, despite his military service to the country. In 1923, the US Supreme Court heard his case. In contrast to Ozawa, Bhagat Singh Thind claimed that as an Asian Indian, he was Caucasian, and therefore white, particularly because of his high caste.As a matter of fact, Aryans had previously colonized India, so Thind based his claim on this history.
The Supreme Court disagreed with him, and ruled that Asian Indians were not eligible for US citizenship. (Even though Thind was Sikh, not Hindu, the courts used the term ‘Hindoo’ to describe all Asian Indians regardless of religion.)36 Unfortunately, more than sixty-five Asian Indians were denaturalized in the wake of Thind’s case, including A. K. Mozumdar, who had been the first Asian Indian to become naturalized as a white person in 1913.37
After the decision, Thind moved to New York, where he again applied for citizenship after Congress passed a law in 1935 that allowed US veterans to become naturalized. After three attempts, Thind finally gained citizenship in 1936 without a challenge from the government.
Thind went on to complete his doctorate degree in the United States, wrote riveting books on Sikh philosophy, and delivered lectures on metaphysics. He campaigned actively for the independence of India from Britain and helped Indian students in any way he could.
Thind and Ozawa tried to prove they were white. They tried to show they had assimilated and that they were deserving of American citizenship. The courts, engaged in trying to legally define the legal construction of race, failed Thind, Ozawa, and many others. Perhaps they would have had more success if they had challenged race-based naturalization laws as being per se inconsistent with the United States Constitution. But we will truly never know.
As history rolled on, undocumented immigrants would try to show that they deserved citizenship because they were Americans in every sense but their papers. They would also fail for at least two decades.
Kajiro Oyama
“I was aware that my rights were being violated but if that’s what the president wanted us to do—then we must evacuate. It was my intention to prove my loyalty and looked forward to joining the service. That is—until the property was escheated. My desire to join the service was to defend my country and, more specifically, to defend my home. When they took our home, I changed my attitude completely. I could never be hostile to the USA, but I was bitterly disappointed and felt like a man without a country.”
—Fred Yoshihiro Oyama, US citizen, son of Kajiro Oyama
During Oyama’s journey to justice, the United States remained opposed to the large number of Asian immigrants arriving through Mexico, Canada, Hawai‘i, and even the Philippines, which at the time was a US territory. Individual states could no longer enact immigration laws explicitly excluding people because the Fourteenth Amendment forbade it, so started to focus on creating “facially neutral” property laws that would dissuade the new immigrants from settling in the state. One example was California’s Alien Land Law of 1913 (also known as the Webb-Haney Act), which was specifically a response to the thousands of Japanese immigrant farmers who were perceived to be competing with their Anglo-American counterparts. It barred Japanese and other Asian immigrants who were “ineligible to citizenship” from owning agricultural property.38
Similar to the Chinese, early Japanese immigrants encountered discrimination in various aspects of their life. On the federal level, the government started to ban their entry into the country in 1907. On the state level, they were prevented from owning property, and schools started to segregate the children of Japanese immigrants.39 Initially, Japanese immigrants tried to bypass the land laws by purchasing the land in the name of their minor children who were US citizens. Then they could manage the land as the guardians of their childrens’ estate. In response to this tactic, in 1920 California amended the Alien Land Law to make anyone who was ineligible for naturalization also ineligible to serve as guardians to property owners. Furthermore, it specified that the purchase of property in the name of someone else would be presumed to represent an attempt to bypass the Alien Land Law and thereby subject to forfeiture.40
Over time, other states established anti-Japanese land laws, which for the most part were rarely enforced. But during World War II, after the United States rounded up thousands of Japanese and placed them in internment camps, California funded lawsuits to challenge their property ownership.41 The goal of the lawsuits were to show hostility toward the Japanese, extort them into selling their property to the state at less than full value, and dissuade them from returning to California.
With the help of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), in 1945, Kajiro and Fred Oyama challenged the Alien Land Law.42 Born in Japan in 1899, Kajiro Oyama came to the United States in 1914 hoping to study at California Institute of Technology.43 He was ineligible for United States citizenship because, at that time, the process of becoming a naturalized citizen was closed to Japanese individuals on racial grounds. Therefore, because of the Alien Land Law, he also could not own land, so he worked on farms that were leased by his uncle.
In 1923, Oyama bought twenty-three acres in Chula Vista, near San Diego, California, and deeded the property to a white acquaintance, Arthur Glower. Over time, Oyama’s farm prospered.