This is the memory palace. I'm Nick D'Ameyau.

Before it was all said and done, before the arguments first in a San Francisco courtroom in 1895,

in which the case was heard of Wang Kim Ark, a man in his late teens employed as a cook in that city,

who was born in that city, to parents who had come to America from China like so many others had during the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad.

When his parents moved back home some years later, there was a recession in the United States and people had started blaming people like them for taking jobs,

channing the culture, the usual. In the federal government passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882,

stopping all immigration from that country and it became too much for his parents.

But Wang Kim Ark stayed in America in his native country.

But when he went to China to visit his family in 1895, even though he had done so at least once before and returned without incident,

even though on this trip the 1895 trip, he carried extensive documents,

notarized in San Francisco prior to his departure that proved he was a native born American.

He was refused readmittance. He didn't know why. He didn't know that the government was looking for someone just like him,

an American born child of Chinese immigrants, so that they could detain him and hopefully affirm once and for all that people like him were not citizens.

And so he was taken to court. Before the appeal was heard in the United States Supreme Court in March of 1897,

and before it ruled that a child born in the United States of parents of Chinese descend who at the time of his birth are subjects of the Emperor of China,

but have a permanent domicile and residence in the United States,

and are there carrying on business and are not employed in any diplomatic or official capacity under the Emperor of China.

That child and by extension any child born in America would be a citizen, would be an American.

Before the plaintiff learned of his victory and was allowed back into the United States to live out his life as a citizen,

before he begins to disappear from the historical record, leaving just enough clues to suggest this,

that he found that his case, that the ruling that created birthright citizenship in America,

didn't change the fundamentals of America. There was still discrimination,

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