United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind: Supreme Court rules a high-caste Hindu born at Amritsar is not a white person

Who: Bhagat Singh Thind, born on 3 October 1892 at Taragarh Talawa near Amritsar, Punjab, and the United States Government. The National Park Service describes him as a Sikh, a Ghadar Party member and a US Army veteran. Justice Sutherland wrote the opinion; the Solicitor General argued for the government and Will R. King for Thind.

What: Thind moved to Seattle in 1913, enlisted in the US Army in 1917 and was honorably discharged in 1918, the National Park Service says. A court approved his first application for citizenship and then reversed itself after the Bureau of Naturalization objected. In Oregon in 1920 a judge granted him citizenship again, partly citing his army service, and the government appealed. The Supreme Court heard the case on 11 and 12 January 1923 and decided it on 19 February 1923, unanimously according to the Park Service.

The question put to the Court was whether "a high-caste Hindu, of full Indian blood, born at Amritsar, Punjab, India" was a white person under the naturalisation law. It answered no. Building on Ozawa v. United States (1922), it held that "white persons" were words of common speech, to be read as the common man understood them. It said the Aryan theory as a racial basis seemed discredited by modern writers, called "Caucasian" a conventional term, and said the "blond Scandinavian" and the "brown Hindu" might share a remote ancestor but that the average man sees "unmistakable and profound differences". Because that answer settled the case, the Court did not reach the second question, on the Act of 5 February 1917. The opinion calls Thind a high-caste Hindu and does not use the word Sikh; the Park Service notes that press coverage likewise called all Indians "Hindus".

Where: The Supreme Court of the United States, in a case that began in the US District Court for the District of Oregon.

Why it mattered: The University of California, Davis archive says the citizenship of dozens of South Asian pioneers was revoked. The Alien Land Laws then applied to Punjabi farmers, and Sutter County's district attorney announced he would sue Punjabis who owned land, according to the Appeal-Democrat of 20 February 1923. American-born women who married men ineligible for citizenship, including Punjabis, lost their own US nationality under the Cable Act, and the Immigration Act of 1924 cut Indian entry further. Thind himself became a citizen for the third and final time in 1935 as a First World War veteran, the Park Service says. Apart from veterans such as Thind, Indians could not naturalise again until the Luce-Celler Act of 1946.