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Sens. Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, two of the only ten Black American citizens who have served as United States senators
A woman is elected to high office with a bright political future before her. But then her male opponent claims that she is not a citizen of the United States eligible to serve her nation.
I’m not talking about the baseless claim that the presumptive Democratic vice-presidential nominee, Sen. Kamala Harris, is not a citizen eligible for that office. I am referring to another successful female politician, U.S. Rep. Ruth Bryan Owen. Owen’s story is long forgotten, but it shouldn’t be. What happened to Owen keeps happening, in one form or another, to those who seek to access power once reserved to white men alone.
In 1928, Floridians elected Owen to the U.S. House of Representatives by a landslide. A popular speaker on the Chautauqua lecture circuit and the daughter of perennial Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, Owen was a widely known public figure even before her election. She would be one of only seven women elected to the 71st Congress, and the first woman from her region to serve in that body. The papers dubbed her the “First Lady of the South.”
But Owen’s male opponent, Republican William C. Lawson, could not stomach being trounced at the polls. So he challenged her eligibility to serve on the ground that she failed the Constitution’s citizenship requirement.
What happened to Ruth Bryan Owen keeps happening, in one form or another, to those who seek to access power once reserved to white men alone.
Article I of the U.S. Constitution requires that all members of the House of Representatives have “been seven years a citizen of the United States.” Owen was born in the United States, making her a U.S. citizen at birth under the 14th Amendment’s birthright citizenship guarantee. But then in 1910, when she was 24 years old, Owen married an Englishman. As a result, she automatically lost her citizenship under the Expatriation Act of 1907, a xenophobic law that punished women who married foreigners by stripping them of their U.S. citizenship. (The law did not apply to men.)
In 1922—not coincidentally, two years after women gained the right to vote under the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution—Congress partially rescinded the law, allowing women who married white men to get their citizenship back. (Marrying foreigners of Asian, Arab, and African ethnicity, however, continued to cost women their citizenship.) Under the new law, Owen was finally made a citizen again in 1925, three years before her election.
Not good enough, said Lawson. He argued that Owen had not been a citizen for a full seven years, as the Constitution required, and filed a formal challenge in the U.S. House of Representatives.
The House took Lawson’s challenge seriously, holding a two-day hearing on Owen’s eligibility to serve. Lawson argued that an “American woman marrying a foreigner acquires so many bad habits” that she should be barred from taking office. When it was Owen’s turn to speak, she angrily called out the sexism and xenophobia that lay at the core of Lawson’s argument. “No man ever lost his citizenship through marriage,” she argued to the all-male panel charged with deciding her eligibility, and “no American man has ever been called before a committee of this sort to explain his marriage” or his “loyalty” to his country.
Owen was not the first to see her citizenship and eligibility to serve in high office challenged. Sixty years before, the first African American elected to Congress faced the same claim. In February 1870, Hiram Revels was forced to endure days of raging debate over his U.S. citizenship. “Revels is not a citizen of the United States,” claimed Kentucky Sen. Garrett Davis, because no Black man could ever claim that status. The 14th Amendment guaranteed citizenship to “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States,” overriding the Supreme Court’s holding in Dred Scott that no Black person would ever be a citizen of the United States. But Davis and his colleagues declared that amendment a “farce” that was “no more part of the Constitution than anything which you … might write upon a piece of paper and fling upon the floor.”
Hiram Revels eventually overcame the challenge to his citizenship and eligibility, finally taking his seat in the Senate on February 25, 1870. Although Revels won his citizenship battle, opponents to Black citizenship won the war. By 1900, Blacks were widely disenfranchised throughout the South and deprived of most of the rights of full membership in white society. Even today, 150 years after Revels took his seat, only nine other African Americans have served in the U.S. Senate.
A 2016 poll revealed that over half of all Americans questioned whether their president for the past eight years was an American.
One of those nine is Sen. Kamala Harris—a Black woman who President Donald Trump and his supporters suggest may not be a citizen eligible to hold any federal office. (Indeed, under their view she may be deportable as an undocumented immigrant.) Trump has indirectly challenged the citizenship of many of her colleagues as well, tweeting last year that four congresswomen of color should “go back … [to the] places from which they came,” even though they are all U.S. citizens and three of the four were born in the United States. Most famously, Trump rose to political power in part by challenging Barack Obama’s citizenship. His racist pandering found an eager audience. A 2016 poll revealed that over half of all Americans questioned whether their president for the past eight years was an American.
Like Revels, Ruth Bryan Owen also won her citizenship battle and her seat in Congress. She used her political power to help change the law so that all American women retained their citizenship, regardless of the citizenship or race of their spouse. With that victory, she must have thought the nation’s battles over women and minorities’ citizenship—and right to hold federal office—were finally over. But as the controversy over Sen. Harris reveals, many Americans still refuse to accept that women and people of color are equal citizens entitled to hold positions of power.
