Dow v. United States

Common card · No. 263140

Dow v. United States, 226 F. 145 (4th Cir., 1915), is a United States Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit, case in which a Lebanese Maronite immigrant, George Dow, appealed two lower court decisions denying his application for naturalization as a United States citizen. Following the lower court decisions in Ex Parte Dow (1914) and In re Dow (1914), Dow v. United States resulted in the Circuit Court's affirmation of the petitioner's right to naturalize based, in the words of Circuit Judge Charles Albert Woods, on "the generally received opinion . . . that the inhabitants of a portion of Asia, including Syria and Lebanon, [are] to be classed as white persons". George Dow's gauntlet through the American legal system, and the language with which his petition for citizenship was dealt, illustrate the degree to which legal bodies struggled to classify new groups of immigrants in a racial schema which would ultimately determine these immigrants' right to become American citizens.

Read on Wikipedia · Image U.S. Government with modifications made by Offnfopt, Public domain