“I’ve never heard a political opinion from a Chinaman,” African American civil rights activist and Mississippi Delta entrepreneur Amzie Moore recounted in a 1967 interview. Although Congress passed and enacted major pieces of legislation, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Moore understood that there was still a long way to go on the road to equality and was more than a bit flustered over what he identified as Asian Americans’ lack of participation in the civil rights movement. A native of the Mississippi Delta born to sharecropping parents on a plantation near the small town of Grenada and later a store owner in Cleveland, Mississippi, Moore became a leader in the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, an organization that encouraged self-help and entrepreneurship among African Americans in Mississippi. While the 1955 murder of Emmett Till spurred Moore to action in the search for Till’s body (where Moore and others learned that there were hundreds of unknown Emmett Tills whom whites had murdered and dumped in the swamps, bayous, and murky, slow-winding rivers of the Delta for decades and probably centuries), Moore was most comfortable in the economic arena of civil rights. Moore believed deeply in the value of small business and property ownership in uplifting black southerners and placing them on the path to equality. This was often difficult to accomplish in the Delta, the “most southern place on earth,” as journalists described the flat, cotton-bespeckled landscape of the area. Since the immediate post–Civil War years, however, Chinese migrating to the region from the West Coast in search of business opportunities or to join other family members who lingered after brief stints as plantation workers during the early days of Reconstruction had a strong foothold in the small business scene in the Delta. Both African Americans and Chinese Americans shared this southern space and attempted to find their place in a racialized society as entrepreneurs and, more generally, as ethnic and racial minorities.
As Moore’s perception of the “Chinaman” illuminates, African Americans and Chinese Americans often lived in the same area but did not always share the same experiences within that space. Antagonisms, such as a black boycott of a Chinese grocery store in Grenada, Mississippi, erupted when African Americans perceived that Chinese Americans became too accepting of white racism and benefited from shunning and refusing to intermingle with African Americans. However, the distance between African Americans and Chinese Americans was often greater than antagonisms; they simply did not intersect. The experiences of these two marginalized and often ostracized groups living in a white, racist society were different and created a silence reflected in Moore’s experience that he had never heard a political idea or witnessed civil rights activism from the Chinese Americans in Mississippi. If African Americans rarely acknowledged the presence or the voices of Chinese Americans (and vice versa) in Mississippi, whites often did the same. This biracial framework creates the notion that Chinese Americans were an anomaly in Mississippi and that their presence had little impact on the battles for racial justice and equality that shaped the southern civil rights movement of the twentieth century.
But about half an hour up the road from Grenada in the Delta town of Rosedale lived Jeu Gong Lum, a “Chinaman” grocery owner who would have been puzzled by Moore’s characterization of him and his fellow countrymen. True, Gong Lum did not join in the protests or picket lines of the African American Civil Rights Movement, and maybe he didn’t discuss politics over coffee at the local diner; but he had political opinions, particularly when it came to the well-being of his American-born daughters, Martha and Berda. In 1925 (decades before Brown v. Board of Education, McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, and Sweatt v. Painter), Gong Lum fought against the local school district’s decision to deny Martha admittance to the white school, and he appealed his case to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1927. Although Gong Lum would not win his case, here was a “Chinaman” who challenged segregation through the legal system and accidentally became involved in the racial politics of the South. Instead of participating in protests and sit-ins, he pursued a steady fight against Jim Crow in the local, state, and federal courts, and perhaps unbeknownst to Moore, there were other Asian Americans like Gong Lum across the South who fought just as steadfastly for their rights by using the law.
Moore’s description of the Mississippi Chinese Americans as politically mute was a gross mischaracterization that continues to shape the narrative of civil rights history in the South. Chinese Americans did have political opinions on their place in a largely biracial society, as did other Asian Americans living in Dixie during the long twentieth century. Similar to African Americans, Chinese Americans, Filipino Americans, Japanese Americans, and later, Vietnamese Americans and Indian Americans faced legal and social discrimination under Jim Crow and its aftereffects. Like African Americans, they often used the courts and advocacy organizations to fight for justice; to disrupt school segregation, antimiscegenation laws, and business discrimination; and to combat racial violence. Unlike African Americans, however, Asian immigrants were subjected to unique discriminatory legislation (including the prohibition of landownership) that rested on their immigrant status as well as international politics and relations between the United States and Asian nations. As a result, Asian Americans utilized a variety of legal strategies in the courts by claiming status as American citizens, exercising special privileges as foreign nationals and (in the case of Filipinos) colonial subjects, emphasizing their liminal racial position via the black/white color line, and later, moving from judicial to legislative lobbying. Despite Moore not hearing it, Chinese Americans did have a political voice, even if it did not intermingle with those of black activists. This book uncovers the political voices of Asian American activists from the 1880s to the late twentieth century and places them within the context of southern and civil rights history.
Why are Asian Americans largely absent from this rich history? As I discovered during frequent research trips and through conversations with friends, family, and other scholars, there is a pervasive belief that because Asian Americans were not present in large numbers in the South for most of American history, their influence on policy must have been minuscule. My mentioning of this project either thoroughly fascinated students in my immigration history course (“Chinese? In the South? That’s so random!”) or elicited genuine confusion. “Asians” and “the South” are two subjects that do not often go hand in hand, despite Asian Americans representing a rapidly growing demographic in Houston, Atlanta, and other southern cities and their long, if not prolific, presence in this region. A group of Filipino sailors who leapt from a Spanish galleon docked in New Orleans in the late 1700s formed a small fishing village, St. Malo, near current-day St. Bernard Parish, which existed well into the twentieth century and was perhaps the first Asian settlement in the South. Similarly, New Orleans’s cosmopolitan atmosphere boasted of its own Chinatown and Japanese quarters during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, while Chinese Americans began to make their homes in Macon, Savannah, and Augusta, Georgia, during the early twentieth century. Elsewhere, southerners often encountered the one or two Asian families or entrepreneurs in town, such as Chinese Americans in Mississippi and Arkansas. Asian Americans were (and are) part of the fabric of the South, yet have been overlooked in the southern historical narrative.1
The absence of Asian Americans in southern and civil rights history is due not to a physical absence in the region but to the idea that because Asian Americans were, as Leslie Bow explains, “racial anomalies,” they existed on the margins of southern society.2 This separation of Asian Americans from the larger narratives of American history is not limited to historical studies of the South. While Asian Americans are front and center in the historiography of West Coast student movements and the Asian American Movement of the late 1960s, their roles in other social and political events nationwide, if we rely on the majority of the existing literature, are minuscule. The political and activist presence of Asian Americans is confined to the historical, geographical, and conceptual boundaries of “Asian America,” primarily West Coast based and dating from the late 1960s forward. The lack of engagement among scholars of Asian American and civil rights history more broadly contributes to an incomplete picture of both narratives. More recently, studies of multiracial, interethnic, and panethnic civil rights movements of the West Coast are bringing Asian Americans into the fold of histories that were previously sketched in black and white. However, when we look at the South, the historically low numbers of Asian Americans in the region lead us to believe that they lacked an activist presence or, really, any presence at all.3
White southerners, however, identified even the smallest community of Asian Americans as a threat to racial order and stability. Although small pockets of Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans were initially tolerated in Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas during the early twentieth century, white southerners viewed Filipinos in the 1930s and Vietnamese and Indians during the 1970s and 1980s with more suspicion. Asian Americans did not fit easily into “colored” or “black” and “white” categories, and even their small numbers posed a challenge to Jim Crow hallmarks such as school segregation and antimiscegenation laws. However, Asian immigrants’ noncitizen status (under the 1906 Naturalization Act, Asians were unable to naturalize in America) as well as their social and cultural otherness as “Orientals” led to questions of property rights and legal status. White southerners and southern legislatures viewed these challenges and questions as threats and fired back with a slew of discriminatory court rulings, acts, and even constitutional amendments to limit the potential of Asian Americans to maneuver their position in southern society. The presence of Asian Americans revealed the xenophobia that was rampant in southern racism. From segregation to denial of property and other basic rights to outright violence and intimidation, whites welcomed Asians with codified racism, forcing them to assimilate to the Jim Crow social, cultural, and legal system or to challenge it.
Contrary to Moore’s statements and the absence of Asian American activism in works of southern history, Chinese Americans, Filipino Americans, Japanese Americans, Vietnamese Americans, and Indian Americans made political statements by using the courts as well as their noncitizen status and identity to push back against racial inequality. Over the years, Asian American identity in the racially binary South has become a growing subfield of Asian American studies and Asian American history. The experience of Asian Americans with civil rights activism in the South is often overshadowed in the existing literature by a distinct division of the region between “black” and “white.”4 Scholarship on the Mississippi Chinese and their struggles with acceptance and assimilation dominate our understanding of the Asian American experience in the South, but more recently scholars have pushed historians to grapple with the larger conceptual problems and issues of what Leslie Bow has described as the “interstitial” identity of Asian Americans residing in the South.5 Instead of merely existing between two racial identities (black and white), Asian Americans inhabited a unique space in southern society that was not easily defined and presented opportunities as well as setbacks in maneuvering this racial landscape without necessarily having to strive for or proclaim “whiteness” to thrive and function. Far too often, scholars and the few historians who have focused on Asian Americans in the South characterized them as seeking to become white socially, culturally, and politically to distance themselves as far as possible from the “black” or “colored” categories.6 Bow challenged historians to move beyond this “yellow to white” framework and instead focus on the unique space and identity that Asian Americans inhabited in Dixie. I build on Bow’s foundational work and argue that Asian Americans used their interstitial identity and alien status in court to actively challenge segregation and discrimination. The presence of the interstitial Asian American in the legal realm of the South and its consequences on race relations guide this study.
Because I focus largely on Asian Americans’ legal strategies, A Different Shade of Justice also brings nuance to the study of southern history and civil rights through applications of critical race theory and Asian American studies. In a black-and-white society, there is no better example of what critical race theorists Michael Omi and Howard Winant identify as the unstable social category of race than the experiences of Asian Americans with southern laws.7 In many ways, this is as much a story of the variables and gray areas of Jim Crow law and racialized southern courts as it is of Asian American civil rights. Since Asian Americans were neither colored nor white, they were often defined as either colored or “not colored” (a category different from “white”), depending on what state, county, or even city they inhabited. Legal scholar Angelo Ancheta’s study of the experiences of Asian Americans with the law as racial minorities and immigrants and the resulting questions of citizenship and its definition in the United States informs this study. Many studies of Asian American legal activity are centered on the West Coast or at the very least west of the Mississippi River, where larger Asian American populations existed before the mid- to late twentieth century. As such, Asian American legal battles in this region moved in cycles, largely corresponding to larger events such as mob violence targeting Chinese during the late nineteenth century (which resulted in Chinese suits for property damages in local and state courts) and, later, during and after World War II, cases against Japanese American incarceration and forced removal (Korematsu v. United States in 1944 and Hirabayashi v. United States in 1943) and anti-alien land laws (Sei Fujii v. State of California in 1952 and Oyama v. State of California in 1948). Other cases that went before the Supreme Court and originating from the West, including the 1886 Yick Wo v. Hopkins case (where the Supreme Court ruled that seemingly race-neutral laws can still violate Fourteenth Amendment rights) and the 1898 United States v. Wong Kim Ark case, which affirmed birthright citizenship, centered on violations of Fourteenth Amendment rights. In contrast, the cases presented in this book originated from the South and dealt with specific day-to-day encounters with Jim Crow segregation and other forms of anti-Asian violence in an area where often few Asian Americans lived. The Asian American plaintiffs from the South used the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantees of life, liberty, and property in conjunction with their status as noncitizens (as many were recent immigrants when they went into the courts) to work around a binary black-and-white, segregated legal system. However, legal strategies among Asian Americans varied throughout the South as well, representing an often personal approach to defining and fighting for civil rights. While Asian Americans faced discrimination on the West Coast as a result of their racial and immigrant status, the fluidity of their racial identity in the South as well as questions surrounding their rights as noncitizens created a more legally convoluted approach to civil rights in the southern U.S. I build on existing works of civil rights and southern history by exposing the complexities that Asian Americans brought to the southern legal system through their racially complex and shifting identities.8
A Different Shade of Justice restores Asian Americans to a multicultural and diverse legal system in the South. Native Americans and Mexican Americans who called the South their home for either centuries or decades also participated in rights movements that intertwined with the African American Civil Rights Movement, but they faced their own unique forms of discrimination and racism that shaped their strategies for justice and equality. Southern Native American tribes skillfully used federal Indian affairs commissioners to push for reforms in education, poverty, and unemployment in tribal communities, while Mexican immigrants often looked to the Mexican government to intervene on their behalf in fighting Jim Crow racial constructions during the twentieth century.9 I argue that Asian Americans shared a space as “marginalized” individuals with Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and other groups that fell outside the black/white framework, but their varied ethnic representations and complex legal relationship to naturalization and immigration laws unfold in a complex history of rights, racism, and discrimination in the South. In this sense, A Different Shade of Justice joins other scholarly studies of Mexican Americans and Native Americans that challenge the black-and-white story of race in the South during the twentieth century, but I argue for the importance of Asian immigrants for shaping southern laws and presenting crucial legal battles before the bar, often preceding corresponding African American challenges to Jim Crow.
In addition to their racially anomalous status, Asian Americans also walked a fine line between tacit acceptance in southern communities and perpetual otherness. So long as Asian Americans played by the rules of Jim Crow and accepted southern life as dictated by local laws and customs, they were tolerated. Once they pushed too hard for equality, however, their troubles increased and their otherness was highlighted. Lisa Lowe’s concept of Asian Americans as perpetual “foreigners within” regardless of citizenship status rings true in the experiences of Asian Americans in the South.10 From the late nineteenth century through the late twentieth century, whites viewed Asian immigrants as a form of labor in either positive or negative terms. From plantation laborers who filled a need following the emancipation of slaves to Japanese who were expected to rebuild and transform southern land to Chinese American merchants, Vietnamese American fishermen, and Indian American hoteliers, Asian laborers were an integral part of the regional economy but were not often seen as full members of society. Because the identities of Asian Americans were tied to their labor, their acceptance and even racial status varied depending on whether or not the South needed them. Japanese Americans were “model citizens” when assisting southern farmers with new technology; Chinese Americans, “celestial brothers” when assisting with plantation labor; Filipino Americans, a unique and harmless oddity so long as they worked in the fields or in the entertainment industry; Vietnamese Americans and Indian Americans, acceptable if they did not compete with whites, but instantly transformed into a “yellow peril” once whites perceived them as an economic or social threat.
Understanding the history of Asian Americans in the South requires an examination of their relationship to whites, employment, and property during the late nineteenth century within the broader context of Reconstruction. Land and labor had always shaped southern economic, social, and political life. Following the Civil War, many southern planters came to see Chinese migrants as a valuable tool in the struggle to restore prewar economic prosperity. Reactions to the Chinese from white southerners would set the stage for later receptions of Asian immigrants and lead to questions of the place of Asian Americans in southern society and their respective rights (or lack thereof) as noncitizens.
During the antebellum years, slavery shaped agricultural production and economics in the South. Those who did not own slaves depended on the system for trade and for the accompanying feelings of white supremacy that came from knowing that an entire racial underclass supported and protected the few social and political rights nonslaveowners possessed. After the Civil War destroyed property and land and precipitated the end of slavery, both white and black southerners struggled to understand the transformative changes in the world around them. For Republicans in Congress, the end of the war and the death of slavery represented an opportunity to reconstruct the South in the image of free labor, rights for the newly freed slaves, and industry. The sweeping visions of social, political, and economic change that Radical Republicans and their followers supported created the tumultuous Reconstruction era in the South. From the end of the war through the withdrawal of federal troops from the South in 1877, northern businessmen, politicians, educators, and military officials traveled south to oversee and create the transformation of southern society they desired for collective or individual gains. Programs such as the Freedmen’s Bureau assisted newly free slaves with gaining their footing in society, while legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments redefined citizenship and the rights therein.11
Many white southerners, however, held their own visions for Reconstruction. The rights of newly freed slaves came under fire from white Democrats who feared disorder, racial mixing, and political subversion from African Americans. Hysteria over the potential implosion of the traditional, race-based societal order resulted in discriminatory acts at the local and state levels known as Black Codes. These measures forbade African Americans from a number of activities, including owning firearms and intermarrying with whites, and severely curtailed the citizenship rights of freed blacks. Paramilitary terrorist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) represented these sentiments and fueled a social and political movement to redeem the South from outsiders who did not understand and did not care to understand the importance of racial hierarchy for harmony and efficiency. Reconstruction, both formally and informally, came to represent a second civil war for southerners seeking to regain control of their homes and their lives.12
Yet southerners did not reject all aspects of Reconstruction. In fact, many embraced the same goals of economic restructuring and progression that northerners held for the region. Planters desired to return their cotton, sugar, and tobacco fields to the glory days before the Civil War, while industrial-minded merchants and businessmen turned to new innovations in factories, steel plants, textile mills, and railroads to either regain or establish their economic prowess. Southerners turned to ventures in agriculture, industry, and capital in order to rebuild Dixie.13
But the question of whose labor would rebuild the South preoccupied the minds of planters and entrepreneurs. Both whites and blacks struggled to adjust to the concept of free labor, and the transition was far from smooth. For planters, sharecropping became a new labor system for the cotton and tobacco industries and represented the most efficient relationship between a planter and his tenant farmers. The system was not perfect, as debts could accumulate quickly on harvested crops, but it helped in adapting to new times. Another option was convict lease labor, a system that took advantage of the growing number of young black men arrested for violating the Black Codes. In northern Florida, eastern Alabama, and southwestern Georgia, sheriffs leased convicts to turpentine and sugarcane planters as needed. This was by no means free labor, as the convicts had no rights and the working conditions were typically no better than slavery, but it was again an attempt to fill the need for cheap labor following the war while resisting treating blacks as free workers.14
Early on, though, some planters and industrialists turned to an alternate source of labor: the Chinese. During the 1840s and 1850s, Chinese men arrived in the United States in large numbers, fleeing political unrest in their homeland and for employment in mining or railroad construction in the American West, arranged through friend or family contacts or labor contractors. Despite the reputation of the Chinese for being diligent, “docile,” and unassuming workers, white backlash against them rose throughout the 1860s as labor unions and the Democratic Party of California decried the Chinese, their “heathen” ways, and their desire to steal American jobs and depreciate wages. A growing global disapproval of the “coolie” trade also soured Americans’ opinions on Chinese laborers by the Civil War. Long before southern planters became interested in the Chinese, a coolie trade in Chinese and other Asian labor existed worldwide. Coolies (a term that stemmed from a Mandarin word for “bitterly hard use of strength” or labor) were workers originating from southern China or India recruited for manual labor in various regions around the world, including mining in Peru and other South American nations, but particularly for working on the sugarcane fields in Cuba and the wider Caribbean. The coolie labor system was a form of indentured servitude: Workers signed contracts either through labor brokers or directly through their employers and agreed to work a specific number of years in order to cover transportation expenses. By the early nineteenth century, coolies were shipped around the world and engaged in a variety of labor activities, but in many cases the working conditions resembled slavery more than free labor. Sickness, violence, and death characterized the lives of the many men who became coolies. In other cases, labor contractors obtained coolies through kidnapping or other illegal and/or unethical means. By the 1840s, amid the growing international abolitionist movement, the British and others around the world recognized that coolie labor was rarely free labor. The British shut down ports that oversaw the trading of coolies by the 1840s and 1850s, but coolie labor continued under the auspices of other nations, including Portugal and Spain.15
At the height of anti–coolie trade activism, Americans came to associate the Chinese living in their country with enslavement. Although these laborers were free and not coolies, Americans worried about the threat to free labor that any slave or indentured servant would hold. Concerns over the entry of coolies into America to work in mines grew until Congress passed the Anti-Coolie Act in 1862 and banned any ships carrying coolies from entering the United States, while dealing harsh penalties to Americans who aided the importation of coolies. Chinese workers who came to the United States were voluntary laborers, but the U.S. government grew concerned over the possibility that Chinese coolies would further undermine wages. With formal coolie arrangements outlawed in the United States, “coolie” became an unofficial term for any Chinese laborer who came to America to work.16
Despite the growing distaste for Chinese in America, by the end of the Civil War, the “celestials” appeared to be an acceptable labor option. But the turn to Chinese labor was more than an attempt to find a simple substitute for slaves or black labor. Planters identified the Chinese as apolitical and less likely than African Americans to challenge their employers. After the Civil War, planters and other whites argued that African Americans were lazy, insolent, and too demanding after they received their citizenship and rights. When southern planters and industrialists first considered importing Chinese labor for their own version of Reconstruction, they opened the South to Asian immigrants and set a precedent for how Chinese and other Asian ethnic groups would be viewed from then on. The Chinese were an odd addition to southern society: They were a commodity (labor), but a commodity with rights as immigrants and Chinese. Under the newly established Fourteenth Amendment, even noncitizens had access to due process and equal protection, establishing a basis for rights that transcended American citizenship. Employers who sought Chinese labor were forced to consider the place of Chinese in the southern economy, the political rights of the Chinese, and the reshaping of the southern racial landscape. These ambitious planters envisioned that when traveling through the cotton or cane fields, one would see Chinese cheaply and efficiently performing the duties that once belonged to blacks. Chinese labor was to be the cornerstone of a New South.17
In order to achieve their lofty goals and visions, a group of planters from Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Louisiana met in Memphis in July 1869 to discuss the possibilities and potential benefits and liabilities of importing Chinese laborers. Those in attendance from Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas expressed their deep desires to import Chinese but were also concerned about how this desire intersected with the Anti-Coolie Act.18 Those who were knowledgeable of Chinese labor assured planters that using Chinese already in the United States and living on the West Coast was perfectly legal and more advisable than searching for Chinese overseas. A special transportation committee reported that Chinese could easily be “brought from the Pacific to Memphis in lots of fifty and over for $60 each” in transportation costs.19 With the cost and mode of transportation more fully explained, others asked about the exact nature of the Chinese and their suitability for labor in the South. Fortunately for the curious planters, there were many West Coast representatives and labor contractors on hand at the convention to assuage any fears that the Chinese might be potential problems. Kim Orr, a Chinese immigrant who spent time as a missionary among Chinese sugar workers in British Guiana and later came to New Orleans as a labor contractor with a boat of Chinese laborers, assured those in attendance that the “habits and peculiarities” of the Chinese made them “well adapted to the southern plantations, the products of China being in many ways similar to the Southern States.”20 “The mighty reservoir of labor,” as one attendee described Chinese migration, “is ready to flow into your rich lands.”21 True, Chinese are “heathens,” but if a planter “wants cotton, sugar, or tobacco—[he] will get them from the Chinese.”22
When the discussions of the merits of Chinese labor were through, those in attendance turned to the logistics of importing Chinese to the South. Paying for the passage of Chinese directly from China was expensive. In order to curtail the costs, organizers suggested forming a joint stock company and pooling resources to bring Chinese from the West Coast to designated entry points, including New Orleans, Houston, and St. Louis. Then employers could either send for the workers that they had previously contracted or work with labor agents (some of whom, such as Orr, were Chinese themselves) to hire new laborers. The average contract for a Chinese laborer was between three and five years, and wages often varied. Following the advice to respect the workers and treat them better than African Americans, planters often included extra bonuses such as holidays, opportunities for additional pay, or commodities such as opium in the deals. The planters and employers who sought Chinese labor worked hard to strike a balance between using their new workers as efficiently as possible and respecting their status as free laborers.23
Although many of the Chinese who came to the South worked in the sugarcane fields of Louisiana, others scattered across the region where needed. Cotton planters in the Mississippi Delta sought Chinese labor, as did entrepreneurs who entered the high-stakes and lucrative railroad construction industry. Railroads became both a necessity for the expanding markets of the South and an enticing business venture. In order to construct the regional railroads, capitalists turned to the cheap and skilled Chinese, many of whom had recently finished jobs on the Transcontinental Railroad (completed in 1869) and other lines in the West. In 1870, approximately 300 Chinese arrived in New Orleans from the West Coast to begin work on the Houston and Texas Central Railroad, while 700 Chinese arrived in Birmingham and Gadsden, Alabama, from New Orleans and St. Louis to labor on the Alabama Chattanooga Rail Road. The Daily Alta California received reports of Chinese arriving in New Orleans and described the fascination and awe for “these strange people” and their “Mongolian habits of shaving.”24 Those of the “colored races” were particularly interested to get a glimpse of their “replacements.”25 Initially, Chinese laborers were welcomed by employers and inspired intrigue in other southerners who caught glimpses of them in the fields, on the rails, or waiting for employment in port cities. Initially, the decision to import Chinese labor to remake the land was promising.
Not all planters rushed to join the new trend in labor. Cotton planters in Arkansas were not immediately convinced of the virtues of Chinese workers, and state officials were even less impressed. Arkansas was devastated in the aftermath of the Civil War and had little state money for rebuilding. Arkansas cotton planters desperately wanted to get back on their feet and only begrudgingly attempted to hire their former slaves as free labor. Racial tensions during Reconstruction as well as corrupt state-level politics did little to restore faith in Arkansas’s potential for rebuilding after the war. To make matters worse for white planters, by the time of the Chinese Labor Convention in 1869, Powell Clayton, a former Union brigadier general who was born in Pennsylvania but moved to Arkansas after the war, gained control of the governorship in 1868. Clayton’s policies of higher taxes, promotion of rights for freed blacks, and devotion to keeping former Confederates out of the state capitol created rifts between him and his constituents.26
Arguments over the importation of Chinese labor to reconstruct Arkansas were complex and did not fall neatly along party lines. Following the Memphis convention, smaller planters went back to Arkansas to engage in their own discussions of Chinese labor and how it related to their state. Governor Clayton paid rapt attention to these discussions and carefully recorded them (along with newspaper reprints) in his memoirs, which provide an in-depth overview of the topic of immigration, Chinese labor, and agriculture in post–Civil War Arkansas. Although both Republicans and Democrats in Arkansas favored immigration for labor, they were “widely divergent as to the character of the immigrants sought and the rights and immunities of the newcomers as compared to the old citizen.”27 “Immigrants” in this sense were those coming from the American North and East as well as Europeans. Clayton argued in an 1869 address to the state legislature that “it is of vital importance for the growth and development of our state that every encouragement be given to the introduction of settlers from abroad . . . in order to restore, all over the state . . . law and order” and rebuild Arkansas’s economy.28 Clayton also praised Arkansas for its “soil unsurpassed for productiveness, a delightful climate and immense amount of cheap land” and called for the establishment of a state immigration bureau overseen by the State Office of Land and Migrations, created by the legislature a few months thereafter. Arkansas could only balance out the “influx of desperadoes and outlaws” coming in from nearby states like Texas and Louisiana by encouraging migrants to make stable homes and reconstruct the state. There was hope that “welcoming immigrants will make [Arkansas] recipients of these elements of wealth—prosperity which by the old order of things were effectually barred.”29
Many members of the Democratic Party, however, were not enthusiastic over the use of immigrants to rebuild the land and denounced Clayton’s approach to immigration. What they were looking for was not a reconstruction like that of Clayton’s but, rather, a return to the old agricultural system. As early as 1866, the Democratic Arkansas Gazette explained that in the aftermath of the war, “our people are particularly attached to the plantation system which has prevailed heretofore among us. . . . The introduction of foreign elements as laborers will tend to destroy this ancient system.”30 Also, “it is to be desired that the ownership of soil of our state remain for the greater part in our ancient population and their descendants as the proprietors of the soil give the tone to the people of the community.”31 The land of Arkansas was to be that of Arkansans, and laborers should be natives of the state, not outsiders or those who would not settle permanently and invest in the land. For opponents of immigration to Arkansas, land and labor were sacred and essential gifts to the deserving “ancient” populations of the state. Only natives would “give the [correct] tone to the character of the people of a community.”32
There were also fears that immigrants would bring too much political baggage to Arkansas, adding to an already unstable and volatile atmosphere. Democrats in Arkansas were clear that “we want them [immigrants] to bring with them labor and capital, and not a stock of political morality to force down the throats of supposed barbarians. We desire the greatest amount of industrious energy with the least amount of politics.”33 Possibly referring to the Radical Reconstruction politics that migrants from the North might bring to the state and/or the more radical socialist elements found among some European immigrants, many Democrats feared the instability that new waves of immigrants would present to the people of Arkansas.
When it came to Chinese immigration, the topic became more complex still. Democrats were particularly incensed by Clayton’s desire to promote African American settlement in Arkansas as a way to propel the state forward in progressive racial politics and relations. In retaliation, Democratic planters who attended the Arkansas conferences on Chinese labor in 1869 decided that if Republicans wanted immigrants, they would get them in the form of cheap Chinese labor to rebuild the old plantations. In 1870, planters and businessmen formed the Arkansas Valley Immigration Company to import Chinese workers from California and China directly (when applicable) to work on cotton fields in Lincoln, Jefferson, and current-day Pulaski Counties in the Mississippi Delta. Shortly thereafter, approximately 100 Chinese arrived in Arkansas and went to work. Clayton, observing the workings of the immigration company from his office, worried that this was little more than a scheme to “punish the negro for having abandoned the control of his master, and to regulate the conditions of his employment and the scale of wages to be paid to him.”34
The arrival of the Chinese prompted questions of labor and immigrant rights in the new Arkansas. Since Chinese were not black but were free laborers with protections guaranteed under the Fourteenth Amendment and the Burlingame Treaty of 1868 that granted “first nation” status and basic civil rights to Chinese living in America, how were they to be received and treated on the job? While Democrats supported them for their labor, others in Arkansas worried that, given these freedoms, the Chinese may become too political and that the Republican government would eventually grant them the right to vote in state and local elections. The Republican-controlled Pine-Bluff Express, however, was clear in that “a Chinaman . . . has the right to live, he has a right to earn his livelihood wherever he can best find work and wages. Knowing that of all the countries on earth America offers the greatest advantages to working men, he has a right to come hither and take his chances with the rest. Being here he has the right to be treated with the same justice and generosity as we show to other men. And that is the sum of the Chinese question.”35
Chinese laborers forced Clayton and others to test the bounds of rights in Arkansas following the Civil War. The presence of Chinese migrants in Arkansas brought debates over the relationship between free labor and immigration to the forefront. The politics of the state made this labor system more than just a substitution for slavery. Arkansans had heated discussions over the threat of Chinese labor before the Chinese question would induce debates in Congress on whether or not Chinese were threats to American labor more generally. The in-between status of the Chinese as nonblack laborers and racial others, but also immigrants with rights, would set the stage for later treatment of Asian Americans across the South. In Louisiana, as historian Moon-Ho Jung explains, the importation of Chinese labor complicated new national ideas of free labor, race, and citizenship, but as the experiences in Arkansas demonstrate, the Chinese also brought up more pointed questions about immigrants, Asian Americans, and their roles and rights in the South. Although the number of Chinese laborers in Arkansas was small, their very presence challenged Arkansans to consider whether or not the laborers had rights as noncitizens.
By the mid-1870s, Arkansas employers learned as others in the South also did that the Chinese were not the answers to their Reconstruction prayers. In many ways, this understanding was a product of the labor and civil rights that Chinese workers often demanded. As early as 1870, 140 Chinese laborers at the Maullauden Plantation in Louisiana grew weary of watching their black counterparts supposedly take frequent breaks and went on strike in retaliation to demand better wages. The plantation overseers were dismayed by the “crowd of infuriated Chinese laborers” and their lack of deference to their employers or even Cum Wing, the Chinese labor contractor who brought them to Louisiana and checked in on them from time to time to see that their needs were met. A year later, Chinese on plantations in Iberville Parish, Louisiana, protested fines deducted from their pay for failing to meet arbitrary quotas by running away. The planters enlisted the help of local law officials and even the state troops to maintain order, but to little avail: The Chinese scattered and refused to return to work. During the late 1870s, Chinese laborers frequently went on strike to protest low wages and left their jobs, transforming themselves from contract laborers to migrant workers who moved across the South in search of better pay and working conditions. Cotton planters in Arkansas also realized that perhaps their plan for using Chinese labor as a substitute for African American slave labor was ill conceived. Chinese on the cotton plantations eventually became dissatisfied with their working conditions and pay, and despite planters’ attempts to assuage them by offering an extra half-pound of opium on top of their weekly wages, the laborers left the fields and broke their contracts. “The efforts to utilize Chinese labor proved a disastrous failure,” Clayton observed. “Planters soon learned that after all the negroes, as laborers in the cotton fields, were better in all respects then [sic] the men of any other race, and in a little while the Chinamen sagaciously learned the purposes for which they were introduced.”36
Chinese workers demonstrated that they were free laborers with rights. In Arkansas, where the Republican government was adamant on protecting immigrants, the hands of the planters were tied. Following the failure of Chinese labor, working-class Arkansans were able to take refuge in the increasing number of white European immigrants coming into the state, “thrifty Germans . . . and the hardy sons of toil, who come to work and make a living and build up the fortune of the state.”37 In other words, white working- and middle-class Arkansans celebrated Anglo-Saxons who were there to work the land and reconstruct Arkansas rather than Chinese sojourners who were meant to prop up the old planter classes.
The experiment with Chinese labor across the South was short lived, lasting only a little under a decade. As early as 1873, when an economic depression beset the United States, planters in Louisiana were already releasing their Chinese laborers from their contracts. With a shrinking market and reduced tariffs on imported sugarcane from Hawaii and Cuba, the Louisiana planters could no longer afford to keep the Chinese. The venture had proven too costly and not nearly as efficient as they had hoped. Rather than a magic cure for the “insolent Negro,” the Chinese turned out to be anything but “docile Celestials.” Planters returned to recruiting poor blacks and whites for sharecropping, while dreams of reviving the old plantation system or re-creating the antebellum economic South on the backs of Chinese laborers evaporated.
Just as southern whites were losing patience with the Chinese, Americans nationwide became more suspicious of the immigrants by the late 1870s. Violent clashes between working-class whites and blacks and Chinese laborers in California, Washington, and throughout the Rockies were physical manifestations of the “Chinese problem” that plagued labor union leaders and West Coast politicians. The Knights of Labor, the Democratic Party of California, and various nativist groups, including the Native Sons of the Gold West, decried not only the unfair competition from Chinese but also the criminality, diseases, and disloyalty that the Chinese supposedly brought to the United States. The Chinese were not racially fit for citizenship under the Naturalization Act of 1790, which prohibited Asians from naturalizing; their culture and “heathen mannerisms” made them unassimilable. Others, including northern Republicans, worried that the Chinese were undermining free labor through their willingness to work for low wages. Both Republican and Democratic politicians assumed that all Chinese were coolies (despite coolie labor being banned in 1862 and the absence of any evidence that Chinese in the United States arrived as part of the coolie trade) and therefore a threat to freedom. Although some, such as Frederick Douglass, who argued that the Chinese were merely practicing their human right to migration by living in the United States, did speak out against anti-Chinese sentiments, calls for exclusion grew louder and more numerous.38
Southerners also joined in the fight for Chinese exclusion. In 1879, a bill limiting Chinese immigrants to the United States to fifteen per ship passed Congress but was later vetoed by President Benjamin Harrison, who did not want the bill to sour diplomatic and trade relations with China. Nonplussed, West Coast Democratic politicians, labor leaders, and their supporters crafted another piece of legislation, this time with support from southern politicians, who identified with the West Coast and its racial problems with the Chinese. Democratic representative (and later senator) John Sharp Williams from Mississippi frequently expressed his understanding of the problems of the West Coast with the Chinese. “Although your problem out on the Pacific Coast is not as serious as that with which we are struggling in the South,” Williams explained in a House speech, “it may in time become so.” “There will be a time, if the influx of Chinamen goes on upon the Pacific slope, when the demagogue will, in order to bolster up party purposes, demand that the Mongolian be equipped with the suffrage ‘in order that he may defend himself.’”39 White southerners, who battled their own “race problem” with African Americans, understood the problems Californians faced with the Chinese. “My friends on the Pacific slope, we [southerners] alone can understand you,” Williams assured fellow representatives from the West, “and . . . I think we can not cultivate the acquaintance and knowledge of one another any better than by uniting frankly and fearlessly whenever these questions are presented to do the right thing, trusting our white brethren elsewhere also to do the right thing.”40 After having experienced firsthand the uselessness and threats of the Chinese while facing its own racial problems with African Americans, the South had a connection with the West Coast, and southerners like Williams saw the Californian calls for exclusion as an extension of states’ rights to demand change from the federal government.
In 1882, the anti-Chinese backers achieved their goals when Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which denied entrance to all Chinese manual laborers and required Chinese already in the United States to apply for passports and carry papers with them at all times to prove their legal entry. The Exclusion Act marked an important turning point in American history by engendering a massive immigration bureaucracy, an increase in illegal immigration, further racialization of immigration law, and the struggle of legal Chinese residents and those who were born in the United States to protect themselves and their property from racism and discriminatory measures. The act was also significant for the South in that it cemented planters’ and employers’ beliefs that the Chinese were incapable of contributing their labor to reshaping and rebuilding the land. If they were not fit for labor, then they were not fit to be in the South or have rights. By extension, most whites would come to see all Asian Americans in the same light, as failed commodities with a perplexing political status living on the margins of society. Asian Americans’ apparent lack of commitment to labor made them an interstitial people, not black enough for black jobs but not white enough for white work or landownership.
After the failed labor experiment with the importation of Chinese labor to the South following the Civil War, many of the Chinese who came returned to the West Coast or scattered elsewhere across the country, but others chose to stay in Texas, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Tennessee. Those who lingered went on to establish Chinese communities in rural and urban areas of the states and eventually encountered Jim Crow throughout the early twentieth century. The attempts to use Chinese laborers in the fields and on the rails were quickly forgotten as whites turned their attention toward the growing racial and political tensions of the Jim Crow era.41
The troubled legacy of early Chinese laborers in the South would shape white southerners’ perceptions of Asian Americans for decades to come. As laborers, they were intractable. As a people, they were perpetually other: dangerous, shady, unwholesome, and incapable of proving their worth or becoming American citizens. They were not white but they were not black, and employers were not comfortable treating federally protected immigrants the same as African Americans. If the Chinese were not suitable for labor in a white-dominated society, then what was their purpose in the South? The Chinese did not “fit” with the labor or racial schema, making them outsiders and creating a pattern of abuse for future Asian migrant groups. The racialization of labor in the South following the Civil War affected Asian Americans as much as African Americans. Japanese, Filipinos, Vietnamese, and Indians would later face similar circumstances, resulting in a variety of legal cases and forms of activism centered on access to civil rights for Asian Americans and noncitizens. Did Asian immigrants have rights as noncitizens, when African Americans themselves often struggled for access to their basic civil rights as citizens? This question would characterize the legal activism of Asian Americans for decades to come.
Because the populations of Asian Americans were so varied and far-flung throughout the South for most of the twentieth century, defining the civil rights activism of Asian Americans as a “movement” belies its fragmented and individualistic nature. There were no large-scale national organizations, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Congress of Racial Equality, or the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, or even large-scale labor unions to represent Asian Americans living in the South. Not only were they racial minorities, but Asian Americans were also minorities in the overall population when compared with African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans. When Gong Lum fought against school segregation in Mississippi and Lum Jung Luke battled anti-alien land laws in Arkansas, although they were both Chinese Americans, they were not fighting for Chinese American rights or even Asian American rights but, rather, their own civil rights as individuals. Gong Lum wanted his daughter to be able to attend white schools, and Lum Jung Luke simply wanted to own property. Class and gender also played large roles in Gong Lum’s and Lum Jung Luke’s decisions to battle discrimination: They were economically successful men who had the means to hire the best lawyers to defend their rights and their reputations. Gong Lum and Lum Jung Luke were not representative of all Asian Americans living in the South, but they do provide an idea of who was willing and able to tackle discrimination and take on southern law. In the process of using the courts, however, the two men indirectly challenged Jim Crow for all Asian Americans, as would other individual Chinese Americans and Filipino Americans struggling against miscegenation laws from the 1930s to the 1950s and, later, Vietnamese Americans and Indian Americans who battled de facto segregation and discrimination in the 1980s and 1990s.
Asian Americans in the South generally did not band together across regions and ethnic lines but, rather, engaged in microlegal battles at the state level that at times went up to federal courts—apart from Indian hoteliers who would break this pattern later in the twentieth century by reaching across regional and racial boundaries. This is not dissimilar to the smaller battles for property rights and civil disputes found in courts between whites and blacks from Reconstruction up through the major landmark Supreme Court cases of the post–World War II era. They fought for their own specific rights as Chinese Americans or refugees or colonial subjects or immigrants—not because they were “Asian.” Southern and U.S. law may have grouped all “yellow” people under the category of “Oriental” or “Asian,” but in the South (as elsewhere) their identities varied, as did their approaches to fighting discrimination. This was not a panethnic movement as would be seen along the West Coast before, during, and after World War II but, rather, a series of individual battles against discrimination in the South that, when taken together, weave a tapestry of legal activism that paralleled, and in some cases anticipated, the landmark African American civil rights cases of the twentieth century.
As Asian Americans attempted to distance themselves from “blacks” or “coloreds” (knowing the repercussions of being identified as either in the South), racial and ethnic tensions between Asian Americans and African Americans flared periodically. As a result, though the two groups were fighting against similar forms of discrimination, their movements would never merge to create an interracial or multicultural movement as they often did along the West Coast. The issues of citizenship and immigrant status often defined Asian American battles for civil rights and separated them from African American legal battles. Jim Crow’s powerful effect on assimilation for Asian immigrants had a stronger hold on a black-and-white based society than along the multiethnic West Coast, which would produce an interracial, interethnic, and panethnic movement later after World War II. As a result, historians have generally overlooked the individuated civil rights struggles of Asian Americans in the South. Their battles challenge the legal and historical narrative of civil rights in the South as dominated by African Americans and, later, by large-scale national and regional African American civil rights organizations.
Defining the South culturally, politically, and even geographically has proven to be a difficult task for historians, as “the South” is often a moving target. Depending on the topic, time period, and methodology, the South can mean different things to different scholars. Many historians geographically define the South as consisting of the former slaveholding states prior to the Civil War as well as those that later seceded from the Union to form the Confederacy. Culturally, the South can also include the Bible Belt (stretching from Virginia to Texas) and is interchangeable with terms such as “Old South” or “Deep South.” The official U.S. Census definition of the South is similar to those above except for the inclusion of West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Washington, D.C. Other scholars, such as Khyati Y. Joshi and Jigna Desai, provide a more fluid definition of the South as a “historical, cultural, and geopolitical space that is both understood to be a region of the United States and a space connected to and part of other transnational spaces such as the Atlantic World . . . a coherent region and place as it is associated with a distinct and authentic Southern culture and history” stemming form shared pasts of “slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, and White supremacy.”42 Joshi and Desai also call attention to the “discrepancies in Dixie,” or the variations in cultural, political, social, and racial aspects of life that break down the “solid South,” yet leave intact “an understanding of the South as a geopolitical place.” “Oriental,” “yellow,” and even “colored” as identifiers for Asian Americans in the South varied from state to state and even town to town, making the definition of the South as a geopolitical region with broad variations essential for my work. More specifically, while small groupings of Asian Americans could be found in all of the traditionally defined southern states, I focus on the regions where they had a profound impact on local and state law regardless of the size of their population. This book does not include discussions of every southern state but, rather, looks closely at Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas as battle sites for Asian American civil rights and the insight they provide on how Asian Americans maneuvered Jim Crow law and society.
In order to uncover Asian legal activism in the South and the forms it assumed as well as trace how it changed over time, this book is organized thematically and largely chronologically (although some chapters move beyond more limited time frames in order to fully explore a specific form of discrimination and the resulting response from Asian Americans and southerners). In many ways, this book uses cycles of Asian migration to examine legal battles and activism throughout the twentieth century as different ethnic groups encountered different aspects of southern racism and discrimination. I also use 1965 as a pivotal turning point for this history, as the Immigration Act of 1965 as well as other social, political, economic, and cultural factors that developed out of the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and changes in American economy and business had a significant impact on Asian American activism in the South. Not only did new Asian immigrants (primarily Vietnamese refugees and Indian hoteliers) first arrive in the South in larger numbers after 1965, but the southern prejudices that they encountered were a peculiar, post–civil rights era blend of racism, economic anxieties, and nativism that created new and challenging forms of discrimination as well as new forms of activism.
Chapter 1 builds on the brief history of Chinese Americans in Arkansas provided in this introduction by moving into the twentieth century and analyzing new forms of property discrimination in the South. Following the failed experimentation with Chinese plantation labor, Japanese American settlers began to look to the South during the early 1900s for agricultural opportunities (particularly in Florida, Louisiana, and Texas) that were denied or difficult to obtain on the West Coast. Initially, whites welcomed Japanese Americans for their ability to revive faltering agricultural industries that did not recover following the Civil War. By the years leading up to World War I, small yet successful colonies of a few hundred Japanese Americans growing citrus fruits and rice blossomed in Florida, Louisiana, and Texas. However, although small in number, the very presence of Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans in the South triggered a fear among southerners of a “yellow invasion.” In response, the distaste of whites for Asian settlers gave way to laws and state constitutional amendments prohibiting aliens ineligible for citizenship (Asians) from owning property in their states. The vague wording of the laws and lack of enforcement made mounting a battle against these legal forms of discrimination difficult, but one Chinese American property owner in Arkansas would finally do so in 1927. This chapter forms a foundation for examining the unique experiences of Asian Americans in the majority-black-and-white framework of the Jim Crow South.
Chapter 2 explores the experiences of Asian Americans with school segregation in the South. Focusing primarily on Chinese Americans and Filipino Americans, I compare and contrast the experiences of both groups in different southern states to expose the complicated relationships between Asian Americans and racial segregation in education. More than other aspects of southern society, segregated schools forced Asian Americans to face the binary nature of southern identity. While southern society typically grouped Asian Americans under “colored” and prevented them from attending white schools, Asian Americans often fought this racial classification by stressing their “nonblack” status in their communities, local courts, and federal courts. This strategy often further distanced them from African Americans and highlighted the uneasy relationships between the two groups, but it also showed the dedication of Asian Americans to staking a claim in the South and fighting for their children’s right to an education. The experiences of Chinese Americans in Augusta, Georgia, with city plans to segregate their children from whites in the early twentieth century, the challenges to easy racial classification presented by a group of Filipino students and a Chinese boy to a Kentucky school board in the early 1900s, and Gong Lum’s unsuccessful fight against school segregation in Mississippi form the core of this chapter. Taken together, these examples serve as an understudied component of civil rights history before the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case of 1954 and underline the complex racial and legal statuses of Asian Americans in the South.
While studies of antimiscegenation laws and interracial sex in the South tend to focus on white/black relationships, Asian Americans were also subjected to Jim Crow discrimination in prohibitions on interracial sex and marriage. Antimiscegenation laws pertaining to Asian and white relationships varied from state to state. Some were explicit in barring “Mongoloids,” “Malays,” or “Orientals/Asiatics” from intermarrying with whites, while others did not specifically mention Asians. Regardless, Asian men often experienced similar suspicions and prejudice from white southerners as African American men did regarding their sexual behaviors. However, the in-between racial and political status of Asian Americans challenged the social, sexual, and legal order of the South. Chapter 3 focuses on two court cases that highlight the complexities of Asian-initiated battles against sexual and racial laws and norms in southern states: the 1932 State of Georgia v. Fortunatio Annunciatio case and the 1955 Han Say Naim v. Ruby Elaine Naim Supreme Court appeal that originated in Virginia. In State v. Annunciatio, Fortunatio Annunciatio (a Filipino man) was accused and convicted of raping a fifteen-year-old white Atlanta girl. He later attempted to appeal his verdict to the supreme court of Georgia by arguing that his basic Fourteenth Amendment rights had been violated by unconstitutional and illegal procedures during the investigation and trial. Han Say Naim was a Chinese sailor who defied Virginia antimiscegenation law by traveling to North Carolina to marry his white fiancée, Ruby. Unfortunately for Naim, Ruby later filed for divorce in a local Virginia court, and the judge annulled the marriage, arguing that the union was void because it was not recognized under Virginia law. In order to keep his marriage and access to a spousal visa intact, Naim appealed his case to the U.S. Supreme Court, initially using his immigrant status to argue that certain rights granted to him through treaties between China and America were violated by the lower court’s decision. Both men attempted to use their noncitizen status in courts but repeatedly encountered obstacles to arguing for their rights when faced with southern sexual beliefs and laws in relation to race.
The 1960s and 1970s were a transformative time for Asian Americans across the country, and such changes did not escape the South. Although Asian Americans were assumed to be more successful and integrated than other minorities, the Immigration Act of 1965 and, later, the Vietnam War brought a new wave of immigrants to the United States. While the 1965 act removed decades-old race- and nationality-based quotas that severely restricted the number of Asian Americans allowed to migrate to the U.S., the wreckage of the Vietnam War and new American polices geared toward resettling refugees brought thousands of Vietnamese to America. Although many Vietnamese refugees settled on the West Coast and in the Great Lakes region, thousands more came to the Gulf of Mexico area through sponsors or established family connections seeking work in the shrimping or oil industries of Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. From the late 1960s through the 1970s, the Galveston Bay area of Texas received hundreds of Vietnamese who were eager to build small, family-owned fishing businesses. But as the Vietnamese soon discovered, they were not welcomed by southern whites who feared economic competition and mistrusted racial outsiders. The Vietnamese faced prejudice, boycotts, and threats but also more hostile and violent encounters with paramilitary white supremacist organizations. When the Galveston Ku Klux Klan burnt Vietnamese ships one night in 1981, the Vietnamese fought back in the Houston District Court, filing a civil rights suit against the Klan with the assistance of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Chapter 4 analyzes the experiences of Vietnamese in the South as a case study in the continued civil and human rights struggles faced by Asian immigrants and minorities in the “post–civil rights” South. With Reconstruction-era elements including violence, the Klan, and southern communities beset with sudden social changes, the Vietnamese proved that the civil rights movement was far from finished by the late 1970s.
Finally, through oral histories and private papers and publications, Chapter 5 uncovers the more recent history of Indian American hoteliers and their battles with discrimination in the hospitality industry. During the 1980s and 1990s, the South experienced yet another demographic shift as an increasing number of Indian immigrants and their families relocated to southern states for business opportunities. As in other regions across the country, Indian American–owned hotels and motels (or “Patel Motels”) became a growing phenomenon as migrants took advantage of affordable operating costs and tourism across the American South. While many Indian Americans maintained successful businesses and became a driving force in the southern hospitality industry, such success did not come without a price. As they did with Vietnamese Americans and Japanese Americans in previous decades, many whites resented another possible “Asian invasion” of “un-American” outsiders set on making profits by driving Americans out of business. Specifically, Indian Americans often faced entrepreneurial discrimination from southern bankers and insurance agents who would refuse loans and coverage. As a result, Indian American hotel owners from Tennessee formed the Mid-South Indemnity Association (later the Indo-American Hospitality Association) in 1985 and later merged with hoteliers from Atlanta in 1989 to create the Asian American Hotel Owners Association (AAHOA), an advocacy group that gained national prominence. The fact that AAHOA had its roots in the South was no coincidence: Indian Americans were part of a larger history of discrimination against Asian Americans in this region, and their responses were part of a larger civil rights movement. By using the records of AAHOA as well as oral histories from some of the founding members of the organization, I argue in this chapter that the experiences of Indians with business discrimination are an indication of the complex “postracial” history of the South and its treatment of immigrants and Asian Americans. Unlike previous Asian Americans who used the courts, however, Indian Americans avoided legal action as much as possible. Rather than attempting to work an in-between or interstitial identity to their advantage, Indian American hoteliers relied on the notion of Asian Americans as the “model minority” and “good” immigrants in search of the American entrepreneurial dream to band together and make their case against racism and prejudice. Indian American identity and nonlegal activism during the 1980s and 1990s presents a new look at the evolution of interstitial identities for Asian Americans in the South over time.
From Gong Lum to Indian American hoteliers, A Different Shade of Justice uncovers Asian American activism in the South and a more nuanced understanding of civil rights and social justice in this region of the United States. This book is not an exhaustive account of the history of Asian Americans or Asian American activism in the South. Other groups, including Korean American store owners, Japanese American auto-plant workers in Tennessee, or the more recent Asian American settlers in and around Atlanta and parts of Virginia, for example, are not discussed at length here. A Different Shade of Justice should serve as a starting point for further exploration of the intersections of Asian American identity and politics and justice in the South. The ways in which Asian Americans used their interstitial identities as well as their resident status to fight for equality with whites challenged southern law and brought immigrant and human rights into the fold of civil rights, creating a legal tradition that is distinct from that of African Americans in the civil rights movement. The xenophobia inherent in southern racism, the importance of citizenship, and the impact of international and immigrant politics on discrimination come to the surface in an analysis of the place of Asian Americans in the South during the twentieth century. Asian Americans did have political opinions, and in the pages that follow, their opinions and their voices challenge Moore’s characterizations as well as the standard histories of civil rights, Asian America, and the South.