examines the development of Black citizenship, beginning with a stark reminder that blacks had no access to national citizenship rights in the antebellum period, even though there were more than 435,000 free Blacks living in the United States at the time of the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott ruling. The Framers’ Constitution had accommodated the interests and demands of slaveholding states at the time of ratification and thus gave much greater power to states than the federal government in setting citizenship rights. The constitutional framework structuring black citizenship changed significantly after the Civil War, as new forms of regressive state citizenship emerged against the backdrop of Reconstruction and decades of Jim Crow, followed by rapid changes in the Civil Rights period that continues until today. Throughout this chapter, the authors train their focus on the role of the Constitution and courts in defining and constraining Black citizenship rights, as well as the role of parties and social movement actors in propelling legislative action toward rights expansion and contraction.

focuses on the particular case of the United States and the development of national citizenship and state citizenship over time. Following the lead of other works in American history and American Political Development, the authors lay out three major periods in federated citizenship that follow significant developments in the US Constitution and federal law: the Framers’ period, stretching from the Articles of Confederation and the founding Constitution through the Civil War; the Reconstruction period’s establishment and subsequent collapse of national control ensuring the provision of those citizenship rights under Jim Crow; and the Civil Rights period, starting with the Twenty-Fourth Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, and subsequent extensions and contractions in citizenship rights provided at the national and state levels along lines of race, gender, immigrant status, and sexual orientation.