When Birthright Citizenship was last "Reconsidered": REGAN v. KING and Asian Americans Part IV

The Native Sons appeal in the Regan case catalyzed the intervention in the case of a notable pair of new players, the Japanese American Citizens League and the NAACP. At that point, the JACL, the largest prewar Nisei organization, was financially strapped and embattled—from the outside by mass removal, and inside the Japanese community by its reluctant decision to offer the federal government its assistance. Although the JACL did speak out against attempts to restrict permanent citizenship rights of japaense Americans, they did not consider taking part in the Regan case until the organization held a Special Emergency National Conference in Salt Lake City in November 17-24, 1942. A.L. Wirin of the Southern California ACLU (a notable civil rights lawyer who had left his previous law firm in order to defend Japanese Americans in court cases) gave an update on the various test cases challenging Executive Order 9066. Wirin spoke briefly about Regan, and suggested that in case of an appeal the JACL might want to intervene. Soon after, the JACL approved the preparation of an amicus (friend of the court) brief in opposition to the Native Sons by National President Saburo Kido and past president Walter Tsukamoto. However, both Kido and Tsukamoto were confined in government camps, far from law libraries and proper office facilities. Thus, doubtless at Wirin’s suggestion, they reached out to Hugh MacBeth, a maverick African American attorney from Los Angeles who had served as director of the California Race Relations Commission, and had been an outstanding defender of Japanese Americans (For more on MacBeth, see http://www.blackpast.org/?q=perspectives/defending-nikkei-hugh-macbeth-and-japanese-american-internment) MacBeth not only agreed to work with the JACL, but in turn recruited the NAACP’s Southern California branch president, Thomas L. Griffith.  (African American lawyer Loren Miller, who frequently worked with the NAACP, signed another amicus, from the National Lawyers Guild)

The JACL’s amicus, which listed Kido, Tsukamoto, MacBeth, Griffith and Wirin as counsel, was filed on February 17, 1943, two days before oral argument. Perhaps the most striking and original section of the brief was located in its latter half. First, the brief pointed out that the Native Sons’ case was in fact directed at many other groups, including American Indians and Americans of Chinese, Korean, Filipino and East Indian ancestry, whose citizenship the Native Sons had declared to be “repellant.” The brief then moved on to explore what it termed the “Interests of Negroes and this case.” In this section—which may well have been drafted by Hugh MacBeth—the brief ridiculed the disingenuous suggestion of the Native Sons that the citizenship of African Americans was not in question. Pointing to larger connections between opponents of equality for Japanese Americans and blacks, the authors reminded the judges that Native Sons leaders had claimed in recent testimony to Congress that the granting of citizenship to Blacks after the civil war had been a “grave mistake.” They added that if the Native Sons lawsuit was successful, the next step of such “Hitlerism” would be the introduction of a constitutional amendment to deprive Negroes of citizenship” The brief then went on to make an extended comparison between statements of official Nazi ideology and the arguments of the Native Sons.