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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 14th 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 20th century, whose life’s work helped give modern meaning to the 14th 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 14th 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 14th Amendment.

Her concurrence reminds readers that the question of citizenship has never been principally........

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