Rond Abdel-Fattah
speaker
33 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Rond Abdel-Fattah’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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So I'm guessing they had lots of contacts and networks who were aware of who was coming in and what was happening on those steamships.
The group was known colloquially as the Chinese Six Companies.
It was a group of representatives from all the different regions of China who were immigrants to the U.S., living in the U.S., who had made it in the United States. They had some money, they had some resources. And when the Chinese Exclusion Act went into effect, they mobilized, and they said, we are going to fight back.
And so the Chinese six companies hired a lawyer for Wong Kim Ark, a well-known lawyer named Thomas Riordan, and he files a habeas petition on Wong Kim Ark's behalf.
So the government doesn't give up, but the government immediately says, we're appealing this. And in fact, Wong Kim Ark is only allowed off that steamship because he posted a $250 bail. And those records are lost to history, but I'm guessing that the Chinese six companies produced that $250. He was kept for four and a half months, and he was only released on January 3rd, 1896.
And Holmes Conrad was tall, patrician. He looked like exactly the kind of person that could be trusted to convey the law clearly and accurately to the justices. His reputation at the time was that he was an excellent lawyer, an excellent representative of the US government. But if you dig a little deeper into the background of Holmes Conrad, you see some really interesting personal details.
So for at least a little period of time, a short period of time, Holmes Conrad too was not a citizen of the United States. He wouldn't have been able to vote or hold office. It's interesting to think that, at least for a brief period of time, he shared this issue with Wong Kim Ark about whether he would be considered a citizen of the United States.
In a way, he wore a dual hat. He was hired by the Chinese six companies, paid by them to represent Wang, but the railroad, which he also worked for, clearly supported him.
The second lawyer was a man named J. Hubley Ashton, who had worked for President Lincoln. And both men deeply believed in Lincoln and the Reconstruction era's mission of not just ending slavery, but establishing racial equality.
He surely knew that if he lost, he would be forced to leave the United States, the country in which he'd been born and spent most of his life.
They're in the Capitol building because there was no Supreme Court building at this time.
And they were in front of these nine black robed men with Chief Justice Fuller in the middle, who was very short, so he was sitting on an elevated chair.
Many members of the court were on record as being hostile to Chinese immigrants. The argument took place over two different days, Friday, March 5th, 1897, and Monday, March 8th, 1897.
He would have argued, as he did in this brief, that the 14th Amendment, which guarantees citizenship to all born in the United States— has a caveat, or he would have said an exception, which is only those who are born in the United States and who are subject to its jurisdiction are automatically birthright citizens of the United States.
And so Holmes Conrad would have grasped on to that language and said, well, Wong Kim Ark, sure he was born in the United States, we can't refute that. But we do not think he was subject to the jurisdiction of the United States because his parents were loyal to the emperor of China and so was their son by sort of automatic transmission.
And so that means the son cannot automatically acquire citizenship based on birth.
Also said to the Supreme Court that the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution is itself unconstitutional. And his reason for that was he said the South was coerced into ratifying the 14th Amendment in 1868, and therefore it was never validly a part of the Constitution. And we can see in that argument, of course, that he's trying to litigate the Civil War. He's trying to say,
The Reconstruction Amendment should not be law. We should turn back the clock.
And in fact, the lawyers for Wong Kim Ark call him on that. And they say in their brief, This nation spilled so much blood to fight for the end of slavery and to establish the 13th and 14th and 15th Amendments and change our nation and change our Constitution. And you should not accept the argument that these amendments are invalid.
So the length of time between the oral argument and the ruling was over a year. So the case was argued March 5th and March 8th, 1897, and the final Supreme Court decision wasn't announced until March 28th, 1898. And that was an extraordinary long period of time. It would be extraordinary today. It was even more so then.
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