Native Americans were granted U.S. citizenship
On this day · 2 June 1924
On June 2, 1924, a single stroke of the presidential pen made some 125,000 Native Americans citizens of a country built on their land.
On June 2, 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed the Indian Citizenship Act, also called the Snyder Act, declaring all Native Americans born within U.S. borders to be citizens. At the time, roughly 125,000 Indigenous people, about 40 percent of the Native population, were still not recognized as citizens of the nation surrounding them.
The law arrived partly in gratitude: thousands of Native Americans had served in World War I, and many had already gained citizenship piecemeal through allotment, military service, or marriage. The 1924 act swept those exceptions into a single birthright rule, and notably let recipients keep their tribal citizenship rather than forcing a choice.
Citizenship, it turned out, did not guarantee the vote.
Because elections were governed by the states, several continued to bar Native voters for decades. Full suffrage would not arrive everywhere until 1948 and later, a reminder that a citizenship certificate and an actual ballot were, for many, two very different documents.
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