Excerpt from U.S. Supreme Court trial of 1922

Opinion written by U.S. Supreme Court justice George Sutherland on November 13, 1922

An upstanding twenty-year Japanese immigrant resident of the United States fails in his application to become a U.S. citizen

"The intention was to confer the privilege of citizenship upon that class of persons whom the fathers knew as white, and to deny it to all who could not be so classified."

Takao Ozawa was born in Japan, moved to the territory of Hawaii, and later lived in California. Altogether he had lived in the United States continuously for twenty years when he applied in 1914 for naturalization, the process of becoming a U.S. citizen. At the time, he had graduated from high school in Berkeley, California, and had been a student at the University of California for three years. He...