Justices Clarence Thomas and Ketanji Brown Jackson both claim history as their guide in Trump v. Barbara. Both insist that the original meaning of the 14^th Amendment resolves the dispute over birthright citizenship. Both look back to Reconstruction, to the debates surrounding the citizenship clause, and to the constitutional wreckage left behind by Dred Scott. And yet they emerge with constitutional visions that could scarcely be further apart.

Far more than birthright citizenship, the historical disagreement between each justice about what this country’s constitutional past demands of its present is about who gets to narrate the American constitutional story. Appeals to history often carry the comforting suggestion that the past has only one story to tell. Trump v. Barbara reminds us that the opposite is true.

There is another reason this exchange feels historically significant. Thomas and Jackson are both descendants of enslaved Americans. So am I. For decades, Thomas was the lone Black justice on the Supreme Court, occupying the seat once held by Thurgood Marshall, the greatest lawyer of the 20^th century, whose life’s work helped give modern meaning to the 14^th Amendment. Yet for many Black Americans, Thomas’ constitutional vision has often felt untethered from the tradition Marshall represented and from the lived experience of the very people whose struggle produced Reconstruction’s constitutional revolution. His opinions often treat race as incidental to constitutional interpretation, even though race shaped so much of the constitutional history he claims to interpret. For years, one Black justice largely defined how the nation’s highest court spoke about race, equality, Reconstruction, and the 14^th Amendment.

Now there is another voice. Jackson’s opinions offer something strikingly different. Where Thomas mines history for limits, Jackson returns to history to recover purpose. She refuses to treat the citizenship clause as an abstract debate about sovereignty or jurisdiction divorced from the people whose humanity demanded its adoption. Instead, she places Black Americans, Black intellectuals, and Black constitutional struggle where they have always belonged: at the center of the 14^th Amendment.

Her concurrence reminds readers that the question of citizenship has never been principally about immigration. Long before it concerned children born to immigrants, it concerned whether Black people born on American soil could ever belong to the nation of their birth. As Jackson states in a footnote, the promise of equal citizenship was forged in that struggle, and it has been threatened repeatedly by the Supreme Court itself, from Dred Scott to Plessy to McCleskey to Callais and beyond. Her opinion, now part of the permanent archive of the court, will never be forgotten.

What makes Jackson’s concurrence extraordinary is not simply that it reaches the right result. It is that it insists on telling the 14^th Amendment’s story honestly. For too long, constitutional history has been written as though Reconstruction emerged from debates among judges, senators, and legal scholars. Black Americans appear in that account, if at all, as the beneficiaries of constitutional change. For his part, Thomas writes as though history resides principally in legal texts, 19^th-century dictionaries, and carefully parsed debates over sovereignty. Jackson engages those same sources but refuses to accept that framing.

Her concurrence also refuses to sanitize Reconstruction into an abstract legal debate. It is, at moments, elegiac in its remembrance of the people whose suffering and resistance gave birth to the citizenship clause. Frederick Douglass is not a decorative quotation. Charles Sumner is not simply another historical source. Nor are the formerly enslaved Americans who forced the nation to confront the grotesque contradiction between slavery and constitutional liberty. Jackson centers them because they are the reason the citizenship clause exists. Without their struggle, there is no 14^th Amendment to interpret.

What’s more, Jackson’s historical conversation does not end in the 19^th century. She draws from a lineage of Black thinkers who have spent decades restoring Reconstruction to its rightful place at the center of constitutional law. She cites the work of Isabel Wilkerson, whose dazzling writing illuminates the enduring structures of the nation’s caste system, which survived slavery’s formal abolition. She relies on Sherrilyn Ifill, whose scholarship, leadership of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and now stewardship of Howard University’s 14^th Amendment Center for Law and Democracy has helped restore the 14^th Amendment’s original promise by returning the people it was written to protect to the center of its constitutional meaning. These citations reflect a deliberate choice about whose voices deserve constitutional authority. In doing so, Jackson reminds the reader that the 14^th Amendment was born from emancipation, political struggle, and the demands of generations of freed people insisting that the Constitution finally recognize what had always been true about their humanity and their deserved citizenship.

More than that, Jackson’s concurrence exposes the poverty of a constitutional history embraced by Thomas and the court’s majority, one that insists on treating race as incidental to the 14^th Amendment. There is nothing race-neutral about an amendment written to overturn Dred Scott, constitutionalize the citizenship of formerly enslaved people, and repudiate a legal order built on white supremacy. The 14^th Amendment stands as a constitutional monument to Black resistance. Every person who today claims the protection of the citizenship clause, including the child of an undocumented immigrant born on American soil, does so because Black Americans forced this country to confront its greatest constitutional betrayal and demanded that it become something better. Any account of the 14^th Amendment that attempts to scrub away that history is untruthful.

Thomas’ dissent is, in many respects, more emotionally complex than either his admirers or his critics, like me, were at first blush ready to admit. Read alongside Jackson’s concurrence, it reveals something almost tragic. This is not the work of a justice indifferent to slavery or unmoved by the constitutional catastrophe of Dred Scott. Quite the opposite. Thomas writes with unmistakable moral clarity about what this nation did to Black Americans. His account of Reconstruction is infused with outrage at a constitutional order that denied Black people membership in the political community of the very nation their labor had helped build. Beneath the citations and arguments, I see not simply a jurist parsing 18^th– and 19^th-century sources, but the descendant of enslaved people confronting one of the darkest chapters in American constitutional history with sincerity and conviction.

Which is precisely why it is so difficult to read what comes next. What Thomas ultimately rejects is the idea that the genius of the Reconstruction Amendments lies in their transformation of the particular suffering of Black Americans into constitutional principles that belong to everyone. The 14^th Amendment repudiated that old constitutional order once and for all, and now, as interpreted, declared that belonging would no longer depend on blood, lineage, or inherited status.

I have spent years filled with both compassion and rage for Thomas’ jurisprudence. Again and again, he writes with extraordinary force about the suffering Black Americans endured and the constitutional failures that made that suffering possible. And yet, in opinion after opinion, I have watched him distance Black Americans from the broader constitutional promises their struggle helped create. The very history he so powerfully invokes to explain the 14^th Amendment’s origins often becomes, in his jurisprudence, a reason to limit rather than enlarge its reach. I have long felt as though Thomas and I travel the same historical road until we arrive at Reconstruction itself. We stand before the same constitutional moment. We agree about the horror of what came before. We agree about the evil that demanded a constitutional response. And then our paths diverge.

In one of the most soberingly beautiful opinions I have ever read, Jackson reminds me that I am not alone. That the 14^th Amendment’s universal promise need not come at the expense of Black history because it is Black history. It is the fulfillment of what my ancestors struggled to secure.

From the shores of West Africa to Gadsden’s Wharf, where so many first set foot on American soil in chains, they forced this nation to confront its greatest constitutional betrayal. They compelled America to rewrite its founding charter. They transformed the unimaginable horrors that began with their theft from their homeland into constitutional principles expansive enough to protect people they would never know and generations they would never live to see.

Reading Jackson’s opinion felt, for the first time in a very long time, like turning a final page of one of the ugliest chapters in our constitutional story and catching sight of the first page of the next. The first chapter still consumes me with grief, anger, and inherited trauma. But Jackson’s concurrence opens a window into the sequel, one in which my ancestors’ suffering is remembered no longer only for what it endured, but for the constitutional promise it made possible.

There is also something undeniably beautiful about the fact that a Constitution that once denied our ancestors citizenship now bears witness to two of their descendants debating the meaning of the amendment their struggle made possible. I cannot think of a more remarkable testament to how far this country has traveled. But the beauty of that progress should never blind us to the work that remains. Reconstruction’s promise is still being written.