This excerpt from the court's decision explained which immigrants were eligible for naturalization
as U.S. citizens. Select the passages that provide evidence of what the court believed a U.S. citizen
must be.
Click or tap on words, phrases, or items in the passage below to complete the question as instructed.
Opinion of the Court, United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 1923
... The words of familiar speech, which were used by the original framers of the law, were intended to
include only the type of man whom they knew as white. The immigration of that day was almost
exclusively from the British Isles and Northwestern Europe, whence they and their forbears had come.
When they extended the privilege of American citizenship to "any alien; being a free white person," it
was these immigrants-bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh-and their kind whom they must
have had affirmatively in mind. The succeeding years brought immigrants from Eastern, Southern and
Middle Europe, among them the Slavs and the dark-eyed, swarthy people of Alpine and
Mediterranean stock, and these were received as unquestionably akin to those already here and
readily amalgamated with them....
What we now hold is that the words "free white persons" are words of common speech, to be
interpreted in accordance with the understanding of the common man, synonymous with the word
"Caucasian" only as that word is popularly understood.... It is a matter of familiar observation and
knowledge that the physical group characteristics of the Hindus render them readily distinguishable
from the various groups of persons in this country commonly recognized as white. The children of
English, French, German, Italian, Scandinavian, and other European parentage, quickly merge into the
mass of our population and lose the distinctive hallmarks of their European origin. On the other hand,
it cannot be doubted that the children born in this country of Hindu parents would retain indefinitely
the clear evidence of their ancestry.
