Bhagat Singh Thind

Bhagat Singh Thind was a Punjabi Sikh who came to the United States as a student, served in its army in the First World War, and in 1923 lost a Supreme Court case that held Indians were not "white" and so could not become citizens. He later became a writer and lecturer, and is remembered as a pioneer of the Sikh community on the Pacific coast.

The National Park Service says he was born on 3 October 1892 at Taragarh Talawa, in the Amritsar district of Punjab, and in 1913 went to Seattle to attend graduate school. He studied religion and literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and worked summers in the lumber mills at Astoria, Oregon. At Astoria he joined the Ghadar Party, which organised Indian immigrants in North America and advocated overthrowing British rule; its first meeting was held there, in the Finnish Socialist Hall. The Park Service says he stayed in the United States when some members returned to India in 1914 and their armed rebellion failed.

Key moments

• 1917 to 1918: the Park Service says he enlisted in 1917, when the United States entered the war, trained at Camp Lewis in Washington, and was honourably discharged in 1918. It calls him the first turbaned soldier in the American military, and a photograph caption in the UC Davis archive calls him the first Sikh to serve in the US Army.
• 1918 to 1920: a court approved his petition for citizenship but, when the Bureau of Naturalization objected, overturned its own order days later. In November 1920 a judge in Oregon granted him citizenship, accepting his argument that he should be treated as a white man.
• 19 February 1923: in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind the Supreme Court held that "a high-caste Hindu, of full Indian blood, born at Amritsar, Punjab, India" was not a white person. The Park Service says the ruling was unanimous. The opinion calls him a high-caste Hindu and does not use the word Sikh, and the Park Service notes that the press likewise called all Indians "Hindus". The UC Davis archive says the decision led to the revocation of the citizenship of dozens of South Asian pioneers.
• 1935: the Park Service says he became a citizen for the third and final time, after Congress granted legal status to First World War veterans. The UC Davis archive says the Luce-Celler Act of 1946 later allowed South Asians in general to naturalise.
• 15 September 1967: he died in Los Angeles.

The Park Service says he became a writer and lecturer on philosophy and the Sikh religion. Wikipedia lists among his books Radiant Road to Reality, Science of Union with God and The Pearl of Greatest Price. In 1930 Dalip Singh Saund dedicated his book My Mother India "to my beloved friend Dr. Bhagat Singh Thind".