Achieving Citizenship through Joint State and Federal Constitutional Reform

• In Event: Conferring and Challenging State Legitimacy through Citizenship

Abstract

In the United States, both the state and federal constitutions regulate citizenship, such that social reformers can revise citizenship law at either or both levels. Since all state constitutions are much easier to amend than is the federal Constitution, almost all amendment occurs at the state level rather than the federal one. However, some citizenship rights, like the African American and female vote, passed through joint state and federal amendment. Why did some citizenship amendments pass at both levels?

This paper argues that in strategically pursuing state constitutional revisions, social reformers can lay the organizing groundwork for a federal constitutional amendment. Further, state revisions that grant a group citizenship may help legitimize that social group’s appeal for federal citizenship. This paper defends the claim with an original dataset of all 354 proposed state constitutions from 1776–2017 and paired case studies of suffrage reform, one of the main issues in American citizenship law.

The first case study shows how state constitutional reform between 1864 and 1870 enfranchised African Americans across the Upper North and Reconstruction South, helping coax members of Congress into passing the federal Constitution’s Fifteenth Amendment to enfranchise African Americans. The second case study shows that after suffragettes failed to secure the vote through the Reconstruction Amendments, they pursued a successful program of enfranchisement through state constitutional reform. These state reforms provided a model for the eventual Nineteenth Amendment enfranchising women. This evidence suggests that state-level citizenship reforms legitimize appeals for federal citizenship.

Author

• Robinson Woodward-Burns, Howard University