Three: A Love That Could Not Be Known

Sex, Marriage, and Southern Law

“Come on, hurry!” fourteen-year-old Rosa Mae Clower yelled while grabbing her fifteen-year-old friend Frances Hutcheson’s wrist and pulling her through the crowd gathered in front of Atlanta’s downtown McCrory’s drugstore. On the afternoon of April 11, 1932, the popular Filipino yo-yo exhibitionists Fortunatio Annunciatio and Ambia “Amby” Subia dazzled their audience as their agile fingers performed a litany of tricks with the toy, a craze that was sweeping through the city during the early years of the Great Depression. But the growing economic storm did little to stifle the enthusiasm of the citizens of Atlanta, who handsomely tipped the yo-yo kings. The two girls, who had spent extra money that day to ride the streetcar from Fulton High School to the show, clamored to see Annunciatio and Subia and applauded the talented duo after each trick, clapping until their hands stung.¹

As the crowd thinned out, Clower and Hutcheson remained at McCrory’s, sipping Cokes, stealing glances at the two Filipinos, and catching twenty-five-year-old Subia’s eye. Subia and Annunciatio (who was twenty-seven years old) did not exchange words with their fans that day, but the two girls returned to the drugstore two days later to see more yo-yo tricks. At this point, Subia approached Clower and Hutcheson, inviting them to come see a later performance at the convention hall. The girls never made it to the second exhibition, but on the afternoon of April 13, Clower and Hutcheson climbed the stairs in the Tallulah Apartments building and knocked on Annunciatio and Subia’s door. What happened after the two entered the apartment that afternoon spurred a unique Georgia court case involving a Filipino American man fighting for his civil rights while encountering the racialized legal system of the Jim Crow South and Clower’s accusations that Annunciatio had raped her. Although sentenced to ten to fifteen years of hard labor at the Georgia State Penitentiary during his trial, Annunciatio appealed the decision to the supreme court of Georgia, arguing that he was denied a fair trial from the moment the police illegally entered and searched his home without a warrant until the assistant solicitor general provided damaging and racist closing remarks to the jury regarding Filipinos.²

Twenty years later, another Asian man, Han Say Naim, would attempt to tackle the racism and prejudice inherent in southern laws and mores that governed the relationship between white women and “colored” men. Naim was a Chinese-born sailor who came to New York City during World War II and eventually made his way to Virginia. While there, he became smitten with a local white woman named Ruby Lamberth. Despite the tabloid stories that warned young white women of the dangers of engaging with Asian men, Lamberth also fell in love with Naim, and the two began a whirlwind courtship. Shortly thereafter, in 1952, Naim and Lamberth eloped to North Carolina in order to avoid Virginia’s strict ban on interracial marriages. For a little over a year, the Naim marriage was stable. Han Say Naim led a typical seafaring life, leaving from nearby Norfolk to work on various ships for months at a time and sending money home to Ruby to pay the bills. But Ruby eventually grew tired of Han’s long absences as well as the endless paperwork and trips to and from Washington, D.C., in order to help him become an American citizen. While Ruby tried to make her growing unhappiness with her marriage and her loss of patience for her husband’s immigration troubles known in often cryptic letters, Han was caught off guard by his wife’s suit for her “freedom” from their relationship in 1953. The Portsmouth, Virginia, court honored Ruby’s request by annulling the marriage, ruling that the couple violated Virginia’s antimiscegenation law. However, Han Say Naim would not accept the court’s ruling. His access to naturalization as well as his marriage were on the line, and he was not ready to have a discriminatory Jim Crow regulation on the relationship between husband and wife strip his rights as an immigrant in the United States.

The courtroom experiences of Annunciatio and Naim and their status as Asian noncitizens drew them together in the broader history of civil rights, race, and sex in the South. Both men found themselves before southern courts for cases tied to their racial status and their relationships with white women, but their legal strategies were also similar. Rather than denounce the structure of Jim Crow as it affected sexuality and interracial unions, both men argued that their civil rights in the United States depended on their noncitizen status. Colonial subjects and foreign nationals, Annunciatio and Naim claimed, operated above southern segregation and were not subject to the same plight as African Americans and other minorities because they were outsiders disconnected from such political, social, and legal structures. In a region where African Americans fought for the recognition of their citizenship rights, Annunciatio and Naim attempted to use their noncitizen and immigration status to subvert the South’s code of legal discrimination. State antimiscegenation laws created new racial identities for Asian immigrants and American-born Asians between the Civil War and the early twentieth century, transforming them from members of once distinct ethnic groups into an Oriental other to be bound and prohibited from interracial contact as other “colored” individuals across America. However, both Annunciatio and Naim fought against their status according to miscegenation law by using the courts.

Annunciatio claimed that as a colonial subject of the United States, his basic rights under the Fourteenth Amendment to due process and equal protection were abridged during the unlawful and unconstitutional procedures of the Atlanta police and Fulton County Circuit Court. In Naim’s case, Naim and his attorney (immigration law specialist David Carliner) argued that as a Chinese national, Naim was not subject to Virginia’s antimiscegenation laws. Both Annunciatio and Naim appealed their cases to the highest courts possible, resulting in the 1933 Georgia Supreme Court State of Georgia v. Fortunatio Annunciatio case and the better-known Naim v. Naim case that Naim and Carliner brought before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1955. Annunciatio and Naim did not argue for their whiteness or assimilation but, rather, called on their political status as noncitizen subjects in their quests for justice. Under existing imperial relationships and immigration laws and treaties, there was the possibility that federally guaranteed rights for American subjects and immigrants could trump discriminatory southern laws. However, as the men and their attorneys would find out, their noncitizen status did not provide protection against a legacy of racism and paranoia directed toward these minority men who dared to disturb the sexual and racial boundaries of the South, whether black or Asian, citizen or immigrant.

Annunciatio’s and Naim’s legal battles prove that race, sex, and miscegenation affected noncitizens and immigrants in the southern states in a variety of ways. Accounts of discriminatory cases, rape accusations, and miscegenation law in the Jim Crow South tend to focus on relations between whites and blacks, particularly white women and black men. However, these cases reveal the political entanglements that sex and race created. Annunciatio clearly wanted to avoid prison, but he was also invested in using his colonial identity to secure his constitutional and human rights. Naim’s ability to remain in the United States depended on challenging the Virginia court’s ruling in order to obtain a nonimmigrant spousal visa. Both cases take well-known topics of cultural and legal barriers to racial equality, rape accusations, and antimiscegenation laws and complicate their legacies by adding immigrants’ rights and political status. What results is a portrait of attempts by noncitizens to fight against their racial classifications in the South by appealing to their political identities to circumvent discriminatory sexual norms and laws.³

The “Little Brown Brother” in the Jim Crow South

What began as an impromptu visit to Fortunatio Annunciatio and Amby Subia’s apartment quickly turned into a legal maelstrom as soon as Rosa Mae Clower initiated the criminal investigation into her charges of rape and the subsequent trial. Newspaper coverage of the case inflamed the passions of Georgians outside Atlanta, with one resident from Thomasville in southwest Georgia declaring that “those Atlanta yo-yo artists ought to be wrapped around some of their necks with their [yo-yo] strings.”⁴ Annunciatio’s appeal marked the first time in Georgia history that a Filipino challenged the state’s Jim Crow legal system (and its racist underpinnings). While the details of what exactly happened that April afternoon in the Tallulah Apartments remain unclear, Annunciatio insisted that the way the police, prosecutors, and the Fulton County judge handled the case violated his basic rights as an American subject. Classified as “nationals” under American colonial rule, the “little brown brothers” (as Governor General William Howard Taft described the Filipinos) were allowed to migrate to and from America and, despite not being recognized as U.S. citizens, were afforded full constitutional rights when residing in the United States.⁵ The “national” status did have limitations, however, as Filipinos could not vote in U.S. elections or run for political office. Considering that southern states at this time used voter registration lists to create jury pools, most juries were all white, and Asian Americans like Annunciatio, as well as African Americans, were thus deprived of a fair and equal trial. Rather than challenge the racial makeup of the jury system (an uphill and likely unsuccessful battle), Annunciatio and his lawyer carefully constructed an appeal based on broad violations of the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments. The lack of a proper search warrant and Assistant Solicitor General E. A. Stephens’s remarks to the court and jury that the United States should rid itself of Filipinos and the Philippines alike were only the most overt violations of Annunciato’s legal rights. By the time he appeared before the Fulton County court, Annunciatio, as both a migrant and an unwelcome racial minority, was well aware of the color line in the United States; that line was embedded in and emboldened by southern courts and legal systems. But when Filipino migrants faced discrimination, racism, and prejudice in the South, their colonial, cultural, and legal identities placed Jim Crow law within the context of imperialism.

Like other Asian Americans, Filipinos actively participated in lawsuits and legal battles for civil rights and protections throughout the twentieth century. In comparison with Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans, who were generally excluded by existing immigration laws, Filipino Americans possessed a unique political status as colonial subjects that they often attempted to use in their favor. Filipino Americans were often at the center of both successful and unsuccessful court battles for citizenship and against antimiscegenation laws both before and after World War II in the West Coast states.⁶ Annunciatio’s fight was part of this historical trend, but it reveals the special form a legal battle assumed when fought in a southern state. As Annunciatio discovered, his interstitial place in Georgia presented legal opportunities that African American men may have lacked, but his status as a suspicious minority and unwanted colonial subject could not compete with the protection of white womanhood in southern society.⁷

While a charge of rape was the reason Annunciatio found himself in an Atlanta courtroom, why he settled in the city in the first place was the result of broader immigration patterns. After arriving in the United States at some point in the 1920s and spending a few months working odd jobs in New England and Washington, D.C., Annunciatio moved south to Atlanta, where he met Amby Subia and became a permanent resident in the city.⁸ Annunciatio’s presence in the Peach State was part of a larger migration of unmarried Filipino men to America in the early years of the twentieth century. By the 1930, approximately 45,200 Filipinos lived in the United States, having crossed the Pacific for education or employment opportunities. The majority of Filipino men lived along the West Coast and worked in agriculture as migrant laborers, but others often followed the harvest seasons across the United States, ending up in the Midwest, the Northeast, and the South.⁹ The population of Filipino Americans in the South was small (totaling 911 by 1930 and only 29 in Georgia) and comparable to other Asian American groups in the region, but groups of 10 to 20 Filipinos often formed settlements in these areas. Southerners were intrigued by the presence of even small numbers of “the little brown brothers” amid a society that was largely divided along black and white lines.¹⁰

During the late 1920s, Filipino Americans created a small but noticeable enclave in Atlanta. As a growing city, Atlanta and its environs attracted a number of different immigrant and ethnic groups, including Chinese, Russian and Polish Jews, and Italians. Filipinos possibly used Atlanta as a temporary home between seasons or, as Annunciatio and Subia did, sought business opportunities in the area. In 1929, Atlanta Constitution student reporter Marcia Baker described the city’s “foreign colonies” as “intriguing” and counted five Filipino migrants in Atlanta as part of the region’s growing immigrant population. While port cities like Savannah and New Orleans had more diversity by the early twentieth century, Baker boasted of Atlanta’s burgeoning cosmopolitanism and applauded the immigrants’ abilities to “keep the best of their native land and adopt as their own the ideals of America.”¹¹

This praise for the blending of native and American culture and practices manifested in Atlantans’ enthusiastic embrace of the yo-yo, a toy with roots in the Philippines and made popular in the city by Annunciatio and Subia. Other Filipino migrants shared their love of this traditional pastime with Americans wherever they settled in the United States. After Filipino migrant Pedro Flores established a manufacturing plant in California in 1928, the yo-yo became more commercialized and swept the nation from coast to coast in the late 1920s and 1930s.¹² However, difficulties with making the yo-yo “do the things it ought to do” and chances for self-injury (as one father experienced while trying to entertain his son) created opportunities for enterprising Filipinos to conduct demonstrations and judge amateur competitions. By 1932, the “yo-yo craze” had arrived in Atlanta, leading to intrigue and fascination, as well as to confusion, regarding the exotic object. Rumors circulated in Atlanta that Filipinos used the yo-yo as a weapon or as “the slogan of insurrection,” that the yo-yoers were scam artists who actually used a hidden spring within the object to fool captivated audiences, and for the most misinformed, that “yo-yo” was a code word to procure “dope.” In March 1932 the Atlanta Constitution ran a series of articles to clear the air surrounding the introduction of the yo-yo, carefully explaining that the trick to the toy is “a matter of string and fling, not spring.” The newspaper assured readers that the yo-yo was “not a yodel, a form of greeting, or a sailor’s oath, a secret password, a cry of distress, or a drug. It’s a game.” The new fad, combined with the yo-yo’s association with Filipinos, resulted in a form of cultural Orientalism and exoticism that piqued the interest of Atlantans and contributed to the various rumors about the toy. During the spring of 1932, yo-yo demonstrations and contests sponsored by the Constitution filled parks and the sidewalks outside popular department stores with potential customers, youngsters eager to learn tricks like “walking the dog” and the “Kentucky Derby,” and simply curious individuals who had never laid eyes on either a yo-yo or a Filipino. And at the center of Atlanta’s yo-yo craze were Annunciatio and Subia, who were quickly elevated to the status of premier yo-yo exhibitionists by gracing the pages of the Constitution.¹³

While Annunciatio and Subia were enjoying fame and popularity in Atlanta, other Filipino Americans in and around Georgia faced different circumstances. At times, this meant greater acceptance or at least tolerance, as was the case with many Chinese American grocers and entrepreneurs in Georgia, Mississippi, and Texas.¹⁴ In other situations, Asian immigrants became part of the so-called colored menace as whites lumped them together with African Americans. The reputation as untethered sojourners that Filipino bachelors gained through their migratory work in California followed them to the South, further contributing to stereotypes of the shifty, dishonest, and predatory Oriental. Unfortunately, reports of a Filipino man who operated a successful “dope selling scheme” in Atlanta by posing as a doctor until his arrest in 1929 did little to ease white Atlanta’s suspicions of the newcomers. As migrants, colonial subjects, and racial minorities, Filipinos always posed a threat. Even in small numbers, Filipinos in other parts of the Southeast encountered less-than-welcoming receptions when they moved into the area. Two years after the break of the drug scandal, the Atlanta Constitution reported that 200 white residents in a farming community in southern Florida “ordered out” 30 migrant workers from a “Filipino colony” after one of the Filipino men engaged in “an episode” with a white woman from a nearby town. If the sexual transgression were not enough, rumors that 2,000 more Filipinos seeking work were on their way to Florida from California only fueled fears of unwanted labor competition. The Florida incident was reminiscent of more violent attacks by whites in central California when Filipinos crossed established racial and sexual boundaries with white women, and it solidified the place of Filipinos at the margins of society in the South. Atlantans held Annunciatio and Subia in high esteem for their talents, but the two were still Filipinos, strangers whose reputations were inevitably linked to the larger stereotypes of minority men in a southern state.¹⁵

Defying the accepted practice of holding Filipino Americans at arm’s length, the teenage Rosa Mae Clower and her friend Frances Hutcheson violated the codes of racial and sexual behavior by seeking the attention of Annunciatio and Subia in 1932. According to testimonies given by Clower and Hutcheson in the Fulton County court trial, the initial contact among the parties consisted of little more than innocent, consensual flirting and coy exchanges. After their encounters at the drugstore and during the yo-yo demonstrations, however, Clower and Hutcheson moved from flirtation to indecent behavior by white societal standards when they arrived at Annunciatio and Subia’s apartment on April 13. Subia paused his dinner preparations that afternoon to greet Clower and Hutcheson when they knocked on his door, asking if they could come in and visit. After entering the apartment at 225 Washington Street, they split up: Clower found Annunciatio alone in his room, and Hutcheson went with Subia to his quarters. Both Subia’s and Annunciatio’s rooms were connected by a shared door, which, according to both Hutcheson and Clower, Subia closed behind him when he and Hutcheson separated from Clower and Annunciatio. Before Subia left, however, he and Annunciatio exchanged a few words in “their native language,” which Clower did not understand. Simply being unattended in the home of two older, Filipino men was enough for a young, white southern woman to bring opprobrium from white southern society, but Clower was more bold in her decision to place herself in Annunciatio’s company behind a closed door.¹⁶

“Philippine yo-yo experts” traveling through Jacksonville, Florida, in 1931. There is no indication that any of these men were Annunciatio or Subia. Photo by Jack (John Gordon) Spottswood, courtesy of the State Archives of Florida.

Clower’s account of what happened behind that door confirmed exactly what southern whites feared most from minority men. Although Clower was fourteen and, under Georgia law, of age to consent, her statement about her encounter with Annunciatio cast the Filipino American’s advances as seduction with intent to rape. Clower’s detailed retelling on the witness stand of that afternoon satisfied the jurors, and it was this narrative that the court privileged in its ruling. Upon entering Annunciatio’s room, Clower found him relaxing and reading a paper on his bed. When he roused himself and saw Clower, he invited her to sit down, but as Clower pointed out to him, there were no chairs in the room. Annunciatio then told her to “sit down on the bed” while he grabbed a pencil and a pad of paper from his dresser. Annunciatio sat down next to Clower and asked her a series of questions, including what grade she was in and if she were taking Spanish in school. Clower replied that she did not know the language and asked Annunciatio to “write a few words in Spanish” for her, which he promptly did. Sharing a seat with an older man on his bed was no place for a young girl to be, but the Spanish lesson was innocent enough until Annunciatio reportedly threw Clower on the bed and kissed her. According to Clower, Annunciatio then “felt of [her] parts” and “put [his] hand up under [her] dress.” In desperation, she fought Annunciatio until he “put one leg on [her] and took out his private parts and put them against [her] private parts.” Despite the fighting and crying, Hutcheson never heard her friend’s struggle. When Annunciatio “finished” with the girl, he got up, and Clower noticed “there was nothing on her bloomers but blood” as she prepared to get Hutcheson and leave. Annunciatio and Clower exchanged no words following her assault except when he told her “not to tell Frances.”¹⁷ When Hutcheson opened the door between the two bedrooms, Clower was standing next to Annunciatio as he sat on the bed and scribbled on his notepad. With “tears in [her] eyes,” Clower left with Hutcheson, and they made their way outside, past a gas station where a friend of Clower’s family worked to the streetcar station. After getting on the car, the two girls rode silently back to their respective stops.¹⁸ As the court and jury later learned, Clower’s description of that afternoon differed from Annunciatio’s statement on his innocence in terms of forced sexual contact.

Bringing to life one of the central fears of white Georgia society, Clower’s account of her rape had roots in a longer history of tense racial relations. In the white South, few cross-racial flirtations were ever seen as truly innocent. White southerners were raised to believe that African American men desired nothing more than to ravage white women, supposedly the pinnacles of purity and symbols of the unobtainable for black men. Any interaction between a white woman and a black man could be interpreted as subversive and a violation of the color line, resulting in the ostracism of both parties and/or violent attacks on the African American man involved in the scandal. With this context, a white woman could wield an accusation of rape against a black man as her ultimate weapon—a way to bring “justice” to a black rapist whether or not he committed the crime (although different outcomes for such rape charges did occur throughout the South, depending on local class and race relations). White fears of interracial sexual relations made even the most innocuous of encounters on city streets or in social settings seem to be the first step in sexual crimes perpetrated by black men. Although not African Americans, Filipino Americans and other Asian Americans were racial minorities and therefore also seen as a constant threat to white female virtue. In the view of white southerners, Clower’s initial contact with Annunciatio broke the boundaries of acceptability and thus set the stage for her sexual assault at the hands of a nonwhite man.¹⁹

Clower’s interaction with Annunciatio, however, also highlights the fluidity of Asian Americans in the sexual and racial structure of the South. Had Annunciatio been a black man, it is very unlikely that Clower would have gone to his apartment with only her teenage girlfriend to keep her company. In terms of marriages and interracial sexual relations, the initial antimiscegenation laws of southern states like Georgia, North Carolina, Alabama, and Florida did not specifically mention Asians (or “Mongoloids” or “Malays”), but by the time Annunciatio found his way to the United States, Georgia’s law grouped Chinese, Japanese, and Mongolians under “colored.”²⁰ Inspired by Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924, Georgia representatives and officials moved to make their existing antimiscegenation law stronger with the end result of an amended law in 1927 focused on preventing “persons of color” from intermarrying with whites, but still relevant for Asian Americans.²¹ Filipinos, however, did not always identify as “colored,” citing their American “national” status or even Spanish heritage (as evident in their surnames) as evidence that the laws did not necessarily apply to them. Also, determining whether Filipinos were Malays or Mongoloids was a question that troubled county clerks and judges across the country, making Filipino Americans’ specific racial identification malleable. The fact that Asian Americans were not black but, rather, “brown” or “yellow” provided them with some maneuverability within the binary black-and-white structure as reflected in southern laws.²²

Filipino Americans’ potential for maneuverability within Georgia’s antimiscegenation law did not mean that free intermingling between “Malays” and whites was acceptable. Asian Americans were still racial minorities perceived according to their own set of accompanying sexual stereotypes. Similar to depictions of the “black beast” who craved nothing more than white female flesh, American newspapers, films, and other forms of media portrayed Asian Americans as purveyors of white women. In this narrative, Asian Americans desired young white women as much as blacks did, but their purposes were more for financial gain and control than a fulfillment of base sexual desires. Numerous articles in tabloids and gossip rags and respected newspapers alike from the early twentieth century luridly described the tragedies white women faced when they succumbed to the wily ways of the Oriental. Using opium and other drugs to seduce and ensnare women, Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino men subjected women to a lifetime of white slavery, forcing innocent young ladies into prostitution and drug addiction. Even when relations were consensual, stories of a woman who entered into a sexual relationship or marriage with an Asian American man usually ended in poverty, prostitution, adultery, or a realization that interracial marriage had driven her away from her disapproving friends and family and soiled her reputation.²³ Such stories on Asian American seduction of white and black women occasionally appeared in the Baltimore Afro-American, the leading black newspaper in the country, reflecting a cross-racial form of Orientalism as well as a means for African Americans to distance themselves from a new racial underclass.²⁴ By using white women for financial gain, Asian Americans represented a particularly dangerous threat to the economic, social, and political power structure in America as well as the South.

The American preoccupation with Asian/white stories of interracial tragedy shaped Atlanta’s views of Annunciatio long before the rape charges. American media hypersexualized Filipino American men, drawing them as wanderers and seductive predators who preyed on white women who fell for their debonair style. Filipino Americans did have a higher rate of intermarriage with white women in the United States (where not prohibited by antimiscegenation laws), and many white critics at the time argued that Filipino Americans, in contrast to African Americans, “‘who usually understood how to act,’” felt as though they had the right to intermarry whites because of their national status.²⁵ Seen as rootless, shifty, desirous of sexual control and power, and prone to using white women in prostitution rings, even the few Filipino Americans in Georgia were considered by whites to be a potential threat to Atlanta society and order. In 1931, Atlanta police found Jose Cruz, a Filipino American magician, and nineteen-year-old stenographer Gladys Frix dead in each other’s arms in a car parked outside the Asa G. Candler Jr. estate in the Druid Hills neighborhood. In addition to performing amateur magic tricks throughout the city and at parties, Cruz was a butler employed by Candler (son of the Coca-Cola magnate Asa Candler). Cruz had met Frix a few months earlier at a party where “the young Filipino entertained with this magic.” Frix’s family and friends rejected her developing relationship with Cruz: The couple crossed not only racial boundaries but also those of class, as Frix, the daughter of a middle-class railroad engineer, dared to stoop to the level of a working-class Filipino. Investigating the scene, police found a note from Cruz indicating that the deaths were a suicide pact and that the pair had decided to take their own lives because they “could not find a way to be together in peace.”²⁶ Piecing together evidence from the crime scene as well as testimony from witnesses, the coroner stated that Cruz shot Frix with a pearl-handled, nickel-plated revolver stolen from the Candler estate and then placed the gun to his head and fired. The coroner’s jury thus ruled that the incident was a murder-suicide prompted by the refusal of Frix’s parents to let their daughter speak to her lover. Her friends and family explained that she had been unhappy in her relationship with Cruz and, as the Atlanta Constitution reported, “feared [the] islander,” which often resulted in heated arguments between the two. Atlantans focused on the class and racial components of the Frix incident as well as the trope of the unhappy white woman caught in a web of deceit spun by her Asian paramour. For a city still reeling from the 1913 rape and murder of a thirteen-year-old white girl named Mary Phagan and the subsequent mob lynching of her accused murderer/rapist, an entrepreneur and northern Jew named Leo Frank, interracial and even interethnic relationships appeared to be the root causes of such tragedies that befell innocent and vulnerable white southern women such as Clower.²⁷

Bearing such preexisting stereotypes of Filipino Americans as threatening and seductive, the police entered Annunciatio and Subia’s apartment with suspicions of rape and sexual misconduct. Paul Seymour, a white owner of a small fruit stand situated on a corner by the Tallulah Apartments, warily eyed what he described as an endless parade of young white girls in and out of the Filipino Americans’ apartment nearly every day. Of course, Seymour may also have been concerned about the safety of the girls in relation to the older men, but as he explained, it was his duty as an American citizen to keep an eye on the Filipinos as “any white American would have done.” Increasingly concerned that “something was happening [up] there and something ought to be done about it,” Seymour provided a tip to the police that the Filipinos were seducing young women and taking advantage of them sexually, based solely on his observations of white girls visiting Filipino men.²⁸ On April 14 (the day after Clower initially went to see Annunciatio and Subia), detective George Pounds and an accompanying officer went to the Tallulah Apartments to investigate. Although Pounds did not have a search warrant, the building superintendent provided a key to Annunciatio and Subia’s apartment. When Pounds entered the apartment, he found Hutcheson and another friend, Evelyn Barnett, sitting in the kitchen while Annunciatio and Subia were in their rooms. Pounds rapidly questioned the girls, asking why they were there and what they were doing, while the other officer rifled through cupboards and drawers, inspecting documents and other personal effects that might provide a clue to the Filipino Americans’ lifestyle. Upon hearing the cries of the girls and the rummaging of the officers, Annunciatio and Subia emerged from their rooms, puzzled by the presence of the police. Pounds took both men into custody and also took Hutcheson and Barnett to the station for questioning.²⁹

The police learned that Annunciatio and Subia had relationships with the girls that were more complex than seduction or assault. Details on the personalities and backgrounds of Hutcheson, Barnett, and Clower are largely missing from the historical record, but a careful analysis of the court transcripts reveals more about the girls’ experience with sexuality and race in the South. Hutcheson explained that although Subia had “groped and fondled” her the day before when she was with Clower, she went back to the apartment with Barnett.³⁰ Subia’s actions, while perhaps crude, were not unwelcomed, making Hutcheson a curious case for the police. Hutcheson appeared to have been inappropriately (according to custom) touched by Subia, but she certainly did not resist any further advances. Also, Hutcheson confirmed that neither Subia nor Annunciatio touched the girls inappropriately or made them do anything against their will. Eventually, Hutcheson revealed to the police that Clower had accompanied her to the apartment on April 13 (the day of Clower’s alleged rape) and shared Clower’s contact information with Pounds.³¹

On April 18 (the Monday after Annunciatio and Subia were arrested), police officers came to Fulton High School to find Clower. At the school, police asked Clower for “the truth,” and she provided her account of what happened in the apartment. Initially, Clower insisted that neither Annunciatio nor Subia had harmed her in any way and that she was not “assaulted, struck, [or] beaten in that apartment.”³² She went so far as to claim that “nothing had happened” between her and Annunciatio, denying having any physical contact with him. For several minutes the police pushed Clower to reveal the truth of what happened, but the girl remained steadfast that Annunciatio had done nothing “bad” to her that day. Unsatisfied with the line of questioning, Solicitor General John Boykin had the police escort Clower to his office, where his officers continued to grill Clower for an accurate account of the afternoon of her rape. Eventually, Clower confessed “the truth” and gave a detailed description of her assault—the information needed to proceed with a grand jury to indict Annunciatio and Subia on charges of rape and sexual assault.³³

The exchange between Clower and the officers displayed the notions of white female purity and distrust of minority men found in legal proceedings in the South. In the Georgia criminal codes, in rape accusations a woman remained virtuous and innocent until proven otherwise, a protection that was often restricted to white women and created an insurmountable obstacle for African American men charged with sexual assault, rape, or the ambiguous crime of “eye rape” (committed by black men when their gaze lingered too long upon a white woman).³⁴ The officers refused to accept that Annunciatio did not force physical contact on Clower, a young, presumably virtuous woman. Despite Clower’s insistence at first in her examination that absolutely nothing had occurred that day, the solicitor general’s representatives would not accept this statement. How could they, according to southern customs and legal traditions and given the eyewitness testimony and racial concerns of men like Paul Seymour? In the eyes of the officers, Clower found herself in the Filipino Americans’ apartment because Annunciatio seduced her and then had his way with her against her will. Hutcheson maintained in her interview with the police that neither Annunciatio nor Subia had abused her and that she had entered their apartment willingly, but such an explanation of young white women frequenting Annunciatio and Subia’s home was unsatisfactory to the white male inquisitors. For her part, Clower, whose friends explained that she had voluntarily visited the apartment, may have initially denied any relationship or physical contact with Annunciatio for fear of tarnishing her reputation or of her parents hearing of her dalliance with an older Filipino American man. Confessing that Annunciatio forced himself upon her relieved her of any charge of societal misconduct. Before the trial, both Clower and the solicitor general’s office had a shared interest in having Clower admit to sexual assault. Consensual contact between Clower and Annunciatio defied racial boundaries, sullied the girl’s character, and prevented the officers from controlling the suspicious activities of the Filipino Americans who lived at the Tallulah Apartments.

Annunciatio’s decision to invite Clower into his bedroom resulted in grand jury proceedings. On April 22, 1932, the Fulton County grand jurors, believing evidence showed that he beat the girl and engaged in forcible carnal knowledge, returned the indictment to charge Annunciatio with the rape of Clower. Clower’s testimony before the grand jury, as well as the prosecution’s presentation of materials obtained from the apartment during Annunciatio’s arrest, convinced the jury that the Filipino had taken Clower’s innocence and endangered the “peace and dignity” of Georgia by committing the crime.³⁵ Annunciatio was taken into custody and, a few weeks later, placed on trial in the Fulton County Superior Court (which oversaw felony cases), where he pleaded not guilty and was represented by local attorney F. Joe Turner.³⁶ After hearing testimony from Hutcheson, Clower, Clower’s doctor and parents, and other witnesses who lived near the Tallulah Apartments, the jury convicted Annunciatio on May 11, 1932, recommending the mercy of the court and fixing his sentence at ten to fifteen years of hard labor at the Georgia State Penitentiary. (In a separate trial, Subia was found guilty of attempted sexual assault and sentenced to two to five years of prison time for his fondling of Hutcheson and his vicinity to Annunciatio and Clower that April afternoon).³⁷ Annunciatio maintained that he was innocent. With Turner’s assistance, Annunciatio filed a motion for retrial by Fulton County Superior Court judge Virlyn B. Moore Sr. (who later gained a reputation among Atlantans for his fairness in hearing cases involving African American defendants and African American lawyers).³⁸ Annunciatio argued that many of his basic rights had been violated and that he was denied a fair trial as guaranteed by the Constitution. In July 1932, Judge Moore denied Annunciatio’s request for a retrial, finding no legal wrongdoings in the superior court case. Annunciatio’s demand for a retrial eventually led to the Georgia Supreme Court in 1933, but his detailed explanations of civil rights violations and the proceedings of the superior court case reveal how a Filipino American man attempted to challenge southern law and customs at various stages of the legal process.³⁹

With Turner’s assistance, Annunciatio not only attacked the operations of the Atlanta legal system but also denounced Clower’s accusations and, as a result, her virtuous white womanhood. That he was a colonial subject within the southern metropole of the American empire adds another layer to this fight for justice. Annunciatio was a racial minority and a migrant without American citizenship, but his insistence on his basic right to a fair trial brought an imperial element into this story of racial and sexual scandal, exposing how southern courts responded to this new threat to order and white power. Although Filipinos were nationals, what that status meant in terms of U.S. laws was often unclear. Legal theorist Frederic R. Coudert attempted to decipher the exact legal rights of Filipino Americans in his 1903 article “Our New Peoples: Citizens, Subjects, Nationals, or Aliens.” He argued that because Filipino Americans were not aliens but did owe allegiance to the United States, they were guaranteed under the Fourteenth Amendment basic rights (though not political rights such as suffrage).⁴⁰ As Rick Baldoz argues, many Filipino Americans along the West Coast argued similar points when defending their legal rights in marriage and property cases, knowing that their “arrival . . . exposed the shifting and uncertain boundaries of the nation’s ascriptive hierarchy.”⁴¹ Annunciatio, with the assistance of his lawyer, sought to clarify the legal position of Filipinos in the United States by emphasizing the rights and privileges of nationals and by taking advantage of the uncertainties that abounded in American courts. In many ways, Annunciatio’s demands reveal challenges that all racial minorities, Asian Americans and African Americans alike, faced when going against legal norms; however, his experience in the appeals process also creates a more complex picture of how southern courts responded to individuals who did not fit within the racial structure or who lacked citizenship.

Some of Annunciatio’s objections spoke to the he-said/she-said nature of rape, particularly of those involving interracial sexual assaults in the South. Other witnesses called before the superior court during the trial told a story much different from Clower’s account. To begin, Hutcheson (sworn as a witness for Annunciatio) insisted that there was no evidence that Annunciatio assaulted or raped Clower. Although Hutcheson confirmed that the door between Annunciatio’s and Subia’s rooms was closed, she testified that she “didn’t hear any conversation in the other room and did not hear any noise of any kind” and that she “didn’t see anything wrong with the conditions in that room” when she checked on the pair.⁴² Instead, Hutcheson found Clower calmly seated beside Annunciatio on the bed, which Hutcheson explained “didn’t look . . . like it had been disturbed.”⁴³ Clower “made no complaint” when she came out of the room, and she rode the streetcar home as if nothing had happened. Hutcheson added another twist to the account by revealing that the day after the alleged rape, Clower telephoned Annunciatio and “impersonated” Hutcheson on the phone, telling Annunciatio that she was Hutcheson and asking him “how he liked Rosa Mae.” To her supposed dismay, Annunciatio told the incognita Clower that he “didn’t like Rosa Mae’s looks.” Clower then confessed to Hutcheson what she had done and refused to return to Annunciatio’s apartment “for this reason.” Clower’s reaction raised questions of whether the rape had occurred or if the accusation was a scorned Clower’s irrational reaction to Annunciatio’s reply.⁴⁴

Other individuals who testified also revealed holes and inconsistencies in Clower’s story. Fruit peddler Paul Seymour recounted that on the afternoon of April 13 he saw Annunciatio and a girl that resembled Clower “tussling in the window” on their feet for about fifteen minutes, whereas Clower previously explained that Annunciatio forced her to remain pinned on the bed.⁴⁵ Another witness, Harry Ingram, saw a couple “loving up on eachother [sic]” and then pulling down the shade about fifteen minutes later in the apartment, but that was all.⁴⁶ Because Clower waited until her mother discovered her bloodied bloomers in her bedroom to report for a medical examination, evidence of her alleged rape was not apparent. Officer George Pounds brought Clower to the office of Dr. W. A. Arnold, Clower’s family doctor, on April 18. Arnold “examined her to see if she had been entered [and] also to see if she had gonorrhea or any such condition,” but he found that although “the hymen had been ruptured” and that “she had been entered,” there was “no evidence of anything recent” and no clear way of determining if the ruptured hymen was caused by Annunciatio.⁴⁷ Clower’s sexual indiscretions with men besides Annunciatio may have resulted in her medical loss of virginity, an idea that would have tarnished her reputation as a good girl and aroused her father’s noted temper. Also, when cross-examined by Turner, Clower once again proclaimed that minutes before the trial began, she “told Mr. Stephens . . . about everything that happened to [her] up there in that apartment” and that “neither of these boys threatened [her] with physical violence.”⁴⁸ Although Clower maintained that both Annunciatio and Subia asked her not to tell of whatever occurred that day, she stated that “they didn’t threaten to harm me if I told in anyway.”⁴⁹ Questions regarding whether Annunciatio had made any physical contact with Clower, why Clower had not cried out if he had, and why she wavered on Annunciatio’s use of violence to have his way with her complicated the story and cast doubts on her claims.

While Annunciatio did have the opportunity to testify for himself, he argued in his motion for retrial that the court mishandled information and the questioning in ways that damaged his defense before the jury. Annunciatio’s account of the incident in his apartment differed dramatically from what Clower told the court. He admitted that Clower did come to his apartment that day, but he had attempted to deflect what he reported as her romantic advances. According to Annunciatio, Clower said she came to his apartment because “she loved [him]”; he told her that she was “too young to know about love,” to which she retorted, “You’re crazy.” When Annunciatio asked her again why she had come to his home, she replied with the perplexing “[I] know what is good and what is bad.”⁵⁰ Not knowing how to respond to such an odd comment from a young girl, Annunciatio did not ask her to leave but, rather, asked her to sit down on the bed while he showed her pictures from the Philippines and his travels around the United States. Annunciatio asked her if she would like to know more “about the Philippine problems and the United States,” and when she said yes, he told her about his “people” and how poor they were. Annunciatio’s brief lesson in international relations ended when Hutcheson came in for Clower, who did not want to leave and was only persuaded when Hutcheson reminded her that their streetcar tickets would soon expire. Annunciatio did not see Clower again, but he did confirm Hutcheson’s story that Clower called his apartment later that evening pretending to be Hutcheson.⁵¹ Although Annunciatio’s statement presented a different take on the evidence and appeared to corroborate Hutcheson’s account, Annunciatio argued that the original jury did not take his statement seriously because the prosecuting officers “unjustly discriminated against him . . . in that he had not been furnished with the name of a single witness . . . to testify against him,” leaving him without proper means to prepare for his defense. Most concerning for Annunciatio was the fact that one witness, fruit seller Paul Seymour, never appeared before the grand jury and was a convicted criminal (charged with larceny and burglary over the past two years). Had Annunciatio known about Seymour, he might have been able to conduct research for a character statement. The failure of the court to inform Annunciatio of the witnesses for the prosecution presented obstacles for his defense and made his own statement all but irrelevant by the time the jury heard it. As a result, these discriminatory measures denied Annunciatio access to a fair trial.⁵²

Annunciatio’s objections to court procedure were not new proceedings for the judge and prosecution, but his racial and migrant status shaped the unique characteristics of his appeal. By demanding a retrial, Annunciatio challenged Judge Moore’s handling of the case, whereby the court’s bungles allowed a young girl’s lovesick blues to undermine a man’s innocence. Such claims were certainly not unheard of and were hallmarks of many defense strategies in sexual assault cases. However, Annunciatio’s argument that the prosecution deliberately discriminated against him by withholding information about witnesses suggested that the problem was more widespread and not limited to this particular incident. Southern law officials did not practice proper procedure in Annunciatio’s case, which raised questions of how many other cases were characterized by such inadequacies and how many other defendants were denied equal treatment under the law. Annunciatio’s appeal exposed the tensions that arose when his demands as an American imperial subject collided with his image as a dangerous racial minority.

One of the most egregious violations of Annunciatio’s civil rights was the illegal search of his apartment and the seizure of materials found within. Despite the constitutional protections in the Fourth Amendment against illegal searches and seizures, many police and law officials saw little value in these protections, arguing that they applied more to federal investigations than to state or local procedures. Illegal searches and seizures more than likely occurred frequently, but few who endured them challenged such occurrences in court. However, Annunciatio pushed back against the standard practice of overlooking the need for a warrant in an arrest and argued that his right to a fair procedure was a federal right that could not be ignored by the states.⁵³ In the motion for retrial, Annunciatio and Turner placed this complaint at the top of a lengthy list of misconduct. When Pounds and his officers entered Annunciatio’s apartment on April 14, they did so without a warrant. Essentially, the officers “broke into and forced their way into the home” and proceeded to “unlawfully and illegally” arrest Annunciatio with little explanation for his placement under custody.⁵⁴ While Annunciatio’s arrest was problematic from a legal standpoint, even more galling was the officers’ illegal seizure of Annunciatio’s private papers, books, and effects “with references to addresses of girls and other parties.”⁵⁵ The prosecution did not provide Annunciatio with any information on the evidence seized, compelling him to “be a witness and furnish evidence against himself.”⁵⁶ Solicitor General Boykin’s office eventually agreed to turn over the evidence to Annunciatio after Turner filed a complaint, but according to the defense, the damage was already done in moving forward with the appeal.⁵⁷ The “unlawful and illegal arrest, search, and seizure” were also unreasonable in that officers did not follow proper procedure and only initiated the search based on the sketchy suspicions brought to the police by Harry Ingram, who supposedly saw Annunciatio and Clower “loving up on” each other that April afternoon. While Ingram and Paul Seymour expressed concern that Annunciatio and Subia were scheming to take advantage of young girls, the fact that both men were racial minorities also contributed to the witnesses’ compulsion to report any suspicious behavior that occurred in the Filipinos’ apartment. Once again, neither Seymour nor Ingram witnessed any illegal activities; they worked only from their suspicions of such based on the age of the girls and the race of the men. Before the police took Hutcheson and Evelyn Barnett down to the station and questioned them on their reasons for being with Annunciatio and Subia, the officers embarked on an illegal search and arrested both men on little more than racially motivated neighborhood gossip.

Annunciatio and Turner did not hesitate to argue that the illegal searches and seizures were glaring civil rights violations. Although Annunciatio was not an American citizen, he was a “subject of the United States” and was guaranteed basic political rights based on his status and his residency in America. Annunciatio correctly claimed that officers were “in contravention to and in violation of . . . the rights guaranteed to him under Articles 4 and 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States.”⁵⁸ More so, the police officers’ invasion of his home “deprived [Annunciatio] of his liberty and property without due process of law,” and his property had been illegally obtained by the police as a result of their invasion of his home.⁵⁹ Annunciatio clearly knew his rights as an American subject residing in the United States and was not afraid to claim them. While the racial classifications of Filipinos and other Asian Americans were often up for social or cultural grabs, minority status placed them in a precarious position before the law even when they claimed the most fundamental rights. In the South, where even American citizens were routinely prosecuted for crimes they did not commit and were blatantly denied even the pretense of a trial, Annunciatio was on shaky ground, and his cries for respect as a colonial subject fell on deaf ears. Although his status as a nonblack person and a racial and political oddity afforded him certain privileges and allowed him to go further than many black men in appealing a conviction of rape, there were limits to this legal maneuvering.

It did not take long for Annunciatio to be reminded that in the South he was a racial minority who faced obstacles in fighting for justice. In addition to the objection that they did not know that Paul Seymour would be a witness for the state, Annunciatio and Turner based their demand for a retrial on Seymour’s racially tinged remarks during the case. In his testimony when he insisted that he watched the girls go in and out of Annunciatio’s apartment “as any white American would do,” Seymour reminded the jury that Annunciatio was an outsider and a potential predator not only because of his supposedly suspicious behavior with young girls but also because of his race. In the motion for retrial, Annunciatio argued that even though Judge Moore had instructed Seymour “to leave that out” after Turner objected, the remark was damaging and prejudicial. It was impossible for Seymour to “leave out” his comment regarding Annunciatio’s race when the jury was already exposed to such racial profiling.⁶⁰ Race was undoubtedly a factor in most southern cases involving black defendants, with lawyers, prosecutors, judges, and juries relying on preconceived notions and legal conventions to come to verdicts. Atlantans could not neatly define Annunciatio as black, but as Seymour demonstrated, they knew that he was certainly not white. As in the cases of other minority and black men brought before the bar, Annunciatio’s race worked against him before he even set foot in the courtroom; Seymour’s racialized explanations for what he saw merely reinforced the jurors’ notion that nonwhites, regardless of the shade of their skin, deserved suspicion rather than the benefit of the doubt. Whereas historians have elaborated on the identity crises that Asian Americans many times faced in southern states when authorities tried to determine where they fell on the often malleable color line, at least in the Fulton County courts it was clear to all except Annunciatio that his political and nonblack status ultimately provided few favors in the outcome of the case. Nevertheless, Annunciatio pushed the boundaries of southern legal conventions in the Jim Crow era by demanding a retrial for reasons of racial injustice and discrimination under the law.⁶¹

Annunciatio’s political status as a colonial subject and Assistant Solicitor General E. A. Stephens’s openly negative remarks regarding the imperial relationship between the United States and the Philippines, however, demonstrate that this was no ordinary, racially defined case in the South. Annunciatio’s classification as a national also worked against him during the trial and revealed the complex relationship that southerners had with the “little brown brothers.” Along with the illegal search and seizure of Annunciatio’s property, Turner listed Stephens’s use of the trial to voice his opinions on the Philippines as the prime justification for declaring a mistrial. At one point during the superior court trial, Stephens turned to the jury and unleashed a string of vitriol: “The United States took over the Philippine Islands, and why? God only knows. We got a burden when we took over those islands. We have the Philippines with us and can’t get rid of them. There should be some way to get the Filipinoes [sic] back, but there is no way to do so.”⁶² Annunciatio himself “then and there called the Court’s attention to said alleged remarks . . . and asked and insisted upon the Court declaring a mistrial because there had been evidence introduced regarding the acquisition of said islands . . . whether they were an asset or a liability, or whether they had caused the U.S. any trouble, or how much.”⁶³ Rightfully so, Annunciatio demanded a mistrial because “said remark was made for the purpose of prejudice of the jury . . . and said argument was highly prejudicial against [the] defendant . . . because of his race.”⁶⁴ Annunciatio accused the court of improper conduct for not declaring a mistrial after Stephens’s irrelevant and damaging political rant concerning the Philippines and Filipinos.

Solicitor General E. A. Stephens (far left) during the murder trial of George Harsh in 1929 in Atlanta. Photo by Kenneth Rogers, courtesy of the Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center.

In response to Annunciatio’s objections, however, Stephens argued that his beliefs about the Philippines and their inhabitants were perfectly in line with the trial. He was not attempting to smear the defendant with prejudicial remarks, he explained, but rather, he “merely intended to argue the difference in customs and social status of the defendant and the alleged victim to show that if sexual relations were had the probability was that it was by force.”⁶⁵ Stephens’s questioning of the U.S. purpose and goals in controlling the Philippines was directly related to the case: Now that the Philippines were a colonial possession, Americans like those in Atlanta were forced to deal with the Filipinos who settled in the United States and the racial, legal, and sexual chaos they brought with them. As a young, white, southern American girl, Rosa Mae Clower defined sexual contact differently than Annunciatio. As such, if any sexual contact occurred between the defendant and Clower, it was because Annunciatio’s “customs” encouraged him to take what he wanted by force, bringing to fruition all the preconceived notions of Filipino men as sexual predators. Stephens did not go into great detail about a racial predilection for rape among Filipinos and argued that he was merely reminding the jury that the cultural atmosphere of the Philippines might support the use of intimidation and force in sexual relations. Stephens’s own experience with crimes of a sexual nature ran deep: He had assisted the prosecution during the Leo Frank case and had served on special committees to clean up the red-light districts of Atlanta’s black neighborhoods in order to promote and protect pure womanhood.⁶⁶ Stephens’s previous experiences with cases such as Annunciato’s, combined with his clear opinions on Filipinos and colonization, fueled his political outburst in court. To guard against any undue uses of Stephens’s statement, Judge Moore instructed the jury to disregard the assistant solicitor’s argument “as to the race of the defendant” and to “try said case as they would any other case irrespective of where the defendant came from or his race.”⁶⁷ Moore reminded the jury that Annunciatio was “entitled to a fair and impartial trial as any other defendant would be,” and Stephens agreed to “not say anything more about that” for the remainder of the case.⁶⁸

In the context of imperialism and racial relations in the South, Stephens’s remarks about colonialism are unsurprising. The remarks and Annunciatio’s objections to the solicitor general’s racial prejudice brought before the Atlanta court the complex relationship between race, sex, and imperialism. Stephens used Annunciatio’s political and racial status and played on stereotypes to discredit the Filipino’s character. Whereas Stephens was clear in his distaste for the burden that colonization placed on the United States, others in the Atlanta area were more ambivalent about the political connection between America and the Philippines. Returning from a trip to the Philippines, U.S. congressman from Georgia Charles R. Crisp did not hesitate to argue that “Filipinos were a long way away from being ready for self-government” and “that from the viewpoint of the Anglo Saxon, it would be a long time before they reached that point.”⁶⁹ Another writer for the Atlanta Constitution was wary of continued colonization because correcting the primitiveness of the Filipinos was “a problem that promises to cost more trouble and expense than the United States had any idea of when it made the Filipinos its wards.”⁷⁰ Many anti-imperialists were interested in granting independence not to ensure political freedom for the Filipinos but, rather, to prevent further migration of Filipinos to the United States.⁷¹ Socially and culturally, the people of Atlanta, as in other areas of the United States, expressed complicated and sometimes contradictory views on Filipinos. In the courts, however, these views crystallized in Annunciatio’s racial classification as nonwhite and un-American. Thus, the classification of Filipino Americans had a peculiar and debated role in the legal, racial, and sexual structure of the South. Annunciatio viewed his political status as an advantage, while Stephens argued that Annunciatio’s racial and migrant identities, as threats to white womanhood, overruled any legal benefits that his national status might provide.

Unfortunately for Annunciatio, on July 23, 1932, Judge Moore denied the motion for a retrial. (With Turner’s assistance, Amby Subia also attempted to argue for a new trial but was denied in August 1932.)⁷² Annunciatio’s attempts at overturning his conviction by highlighting the errors and civil rights violations during the case failed to convince Moore of the need for a retrial. As far as the superior court was concerned, any discriminatory or prejudicial remarks were handled appropriately, and the outcome of the case was in line with Georgia’s punishment for rape. Annunciatio had received a fair trial in the Fulton County Superior Court and therefore had little ground for demanding a revisit to the case.

Annunciatio’s setback in Fulton County, however, did not end his fight for justice. While imprisoned at the Georgia State Penitentiary, Annunciatio worked with his attorney on an appeal to take before the Georgia Supreme Court. In March 1933 Annunciatio and Turner went before the state supreme court with the same list of complaints: illegal search and seizure, inflammatory remarks based on race, and Moore’s failure to declare a mistrial and order a new hearing. As with Annunciatio’s motion for a new trial at the county level, the supreme court denied his appeal, confirming the lower court’s decision.⁷³

All the justices except Associate Justice Samuel C. Atkinson concurred. Interestingly enough, Atkinson’s dissenting opinion rested not on any of the racial or civil rights violations that Annunciatio had raised but, rather, on the definition of rape and the differences between seduction and intimidation that were part of the original trial. Drawing on previous Georgia cases involving similar circumstances, Atkinson argued that there was no evidence presented to support the claim that Annunciatio raped Clower. Not one witness who took the stand during the first trial clearly indicated that penetration (a necessary component to defining rape under Georgia law) had occurred; Clower had described only Annunciatio’s placing of his private parts against her private parts. Also, because of Clower’s questionable testimony about what occurred that day in the apartment, it was difficult to discern if Annunciatio actually used intimidation to gain carnal knowledge of Clower without her consent. “It follows, plainly and without argument,” Atkinson concluded, “that a rape cannot be made on the basis of a prosecution for seduction. The two offenses are so totally different, they cannot be confused, nor can one of them by any possibility . . . be substituted for the other.”⁷⁴ Annunciatio may have been guilty of seducing a young girl, but there was no solid proof that he had raped Rosa Mae Clower. For Atkinson, Annunciatio deserved a retrial due to legal technicalities, not because of rights violations or evidence of racism displayed in the courtroom.

Despite the loss, however, Annunciatio’s little-known legal battle challenged the southern courts to consider, if not fully recognize, the rights of Asian Americans and colonial subjects in relation to Jim Crow. The traditional boundaries of sexual relationships in the South were expanded beyond black/white in this case, and imperial relationships invaded the Fulton County courthouse and southern sexuality. Annunciatio’s supposed sexual nature as an Asian American as well as his political status as a noncitizen from an American colony were focal points of the trial. Although Annunciatio attempted to argue that, as an American national, he was entitled to the rights provided under the Constitution regardless of his race, his arguments proved futile. Although it failed in the courtroom, Annunciatio’s case was important for drawing attention to the limits of citizenship as a foundation for rights and the potential for Asian Americans to set themselves apart from the southern system of Jim Crow and racial discrimination.

The Trials of Being a “Chinaman’s Wife”: Marriage, Immigration, and Miscegenation

Chinese sailor Han Say Naim arrived in the United States in 1942 when he was a sailor on a British vessel docked in New York City and “jumped ship,” a tactic that many Chinese sailors used during the war in order to remain in America. But Naim claimed to have done so in order to “make more money on an American ship.”⁷⁵ While the details of his entry into the United States are not clear, for the next ten years, Naim traveled along the East Coast in search of work, eventually securing employment on the SS Lipari as a merchant seaman. Naim frequently went to sea, traveling to India, Korea, and other Asian nations and docking temporarily in New York City, Baltimore, and more often, Norfolk, Virginia. In Norfolk on an extended leave in February 1952, Naim met Ruby Lamberth (originally from Michigan).

In May, Naim and Lamberth decided to get married, but the decision was difficult to carry out in the state of Virginia. While most southern states had some form of antimiscegenation law in place by the mid-twentieth century that targeted black and white couples, some, like Virginia, broadened miscegenation to include marriages between a white resident and anyone who was not white, including Asian Americans and other racial minority groups. Although the Asian American population in Virginia was small compared with other minority groups during the early twentieth century, the threat of any form of interracial relationship and the potential undermining of racial and legal order was enough for Virginia to enact the 1924 Racial Integrity Act, one of the most restrictive and harsh of all antimiscegenation laws in the United States. While the supreme court of California ruled antimiscegenation statutes unconstitutional in 1948 with the Perez v. Sharp case (involving a Mexican American woman and an African American man), southern states still upheld the 1883 Pace v. Alabama decision that protected bans on interracial sexual relationships and the power of the states to regulate them. With the Racial Integrity Act, Virginia proved to be a stronghold for discriminatory measures against interracial marriage.⁷⁶

Faced with the reality of how difficult it would be to procure a marriage license in Virginia, Lamberth and Naim fled to North Carolina in June 1952. Fortunately for the couple, the question of Chinese/white marriages in North Carolina had already been decided in 1929, when the North Carolina attorney general approved a marriage license for L. W. Moon (a Chinese man) and his white fiancée to marry in Greensboro.⁷⁷ Despite North Carolina’s generally “loose” antimiscegenation laws in comparison with Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act, little is known of the experience the Naims had in North Carolina: Was it relatively easy to obtain a license? Were there difficulties in finding an official to marry the couple? Did Naim and Lamberth face unsympathetic court clerks who knew of Virginia’s laws? Unknowns aside, a few days later they were back in Virginia after having married in the small town of Elizabeth City, North Carolina.

By 1953, however, the marriage began to disintegrate. Ruby Naim filed for an absolute divorce, leveling charges of adultery against Han Say Naim and describing their relationship as a “love that could not be known” in Virginia.⁷⁸ Although Portsmouth Circuit Court Judge Floyd Kellam did not grant an absolute divorce, he did annul the marriage using the Racial Integrity Act, stating that the marriage was void under Virginia law. In granting the annulment, Judge Kellam followed precedent set during an earlier ruling in 1949 regarding another Chinese/white couple seeking annulment in Virginia, although in this instance it was “Chinaman” Jong Len Yigh of Richmond who asked that his marriage to Laura Anne Wolfe be voided under the Virginia act.⁷⁹ In response, Naim began the long appeals process to have the judgment overturned in order to allow him to remain in the United States on a spousal visa. The resulting 1955 Naim v. Naim case brought before the U.S. Supreme Court was an early attempt at challenging states’ abilities to pass legislation prohibiting interracial marriages.

But Naim was also a Chinese alien and a man eager for citizenship in a nation where for most of its history such a goal was not easy or even possible for Asian Americans to attain. It is easy to group Naim’s case with the contemporaneous 1954 Jackson v. State case in which the Supreme Court upheld an Alabama court’s conviction of a black woman, Linnie Jackson, for violating the state’s antimiscegenation law by entering a relationship with a white man. Both Jackson and Naim were failed yet important attempts at changing miscegenation law in the progression to the Supreme Court’s decision in the 1967 Loving v. Virginia case in which the laws barring interracial marriage were declared unconstitutional. However, the Naim case is also important for understanding the centrality of citizenship, immigration, and civil rights in southern legal history.⁸⁰

In addition to its role in the chain of antimiscegenation legal challenges of the 1950s and 1960s, Naim v. Naim is part of a larger historical battle for immigrant access to protections and rights in the South. Han Say Naim’s status as an immigrant suggests that this case speaks as much to immigration rights as to civil rights history.⁸¹ Having lost his chances of achieving residency through spousal relations after the Portsmouth court annulled his marriage to Ruby, Han faced an uncertain future in the United States, dependent on seaman’s visas that expired after anywhere from sixty days to six months. The court transcripts and records do not reveal any of Han’s emotional reasons for objecting to his wife’s demand for a divorce, but legally speaking, his fight was tied to his resident status rather than a desire to remain in a loving relationship that would characterize later antimiscegenation battles, including the Loving case. While Naim was no lovelorn or romantic tale of passion squelched by prejudice and racism, antimiscegenation laws prevented Han from receiving a full and fair trial in court, thereby unfairly jeopardizing his future. Han Say Naim’s situation represents another aspect of Naim v. Naim, one rooted in the often-uphill battles for legal justice that immigrants faced while living under discriminatory laws in the United States. As a racial minority and an immigrant residing in the Jim Crow South, Naim was in a situation that was particularly difficult and speaks to the impossible odds stacked against individuals without citizenship. Naim v. Naim represents how intricately connected immigrant and civil rights were to antimiscegenation law in the South.⁸²

Faced with this predicament, Naim, like other immigrants before him, turned to the law to ensure that he would be guaranteed a fair appeal and enlisted the help of civil rights and immigration lawyer David Carliner in his fight. Naim’s attempt to appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court was similar to Annunciatio’s in State v. Annunciatio in that both men relied on using their noncitizen status to argue for rights. Carliner and Naim, however, would emphasize Naim’s status as a Chinese national and specific rights that were guaranteed to him as stated in previous treaties and agreements between China and the United States, arguing that immigrants received special protections that overrode discriminatory state laws.

The fact that Han and Ruby’s marriage ended in a contentious trial would not have surprised many Americans at the time. When we think historically of the hostility toward interracial marriages, white and African American relationships have shaped the literature on the subject; however, the fear of Asian American men intermarrying with white women was a widespread concern across the United States during the early to mid-twentieth century as well.⁸³ Western but also southern states (even where the population of Asian Americans was relatively low) banned marriages between members of the “Mongol” or “Malay” races and whites. While the idea of miscegenation was repulsive for many whites and various state laws prohibiting interracial relationships reflected this opinion, lascivious stories of mixed-race nuptials gone sour nevertheless filled tabloids and popular periodicals. In the tabloid stories, women often sought annulment or divorce after realizing they had been seduced by Asian men into becoming prostitutes or deciding that they could no longer live as a “Chinaman’s” wife in the midst of societal scorn and pressure. The marriages often ended when a judge granted an annulment upon the conclusion of a messy court case set on proving that the Asian man in question was a disloyal or abusive husband.⁸⁴

Ruby’s suit for divorce did not specifically mention any abuse or maltreatment, but her statements during the hearing indicate that she had grown weary of Han. Despite very loving letters written to her husband in April 1953, Ruby accused Han of adultery in October when she filed the charges, indicating that his time away as part of a ship crew provided him with opportunities to engage in extramarital affairs. However, there was little proof that he had committed such acts. In fact, a letter from Ruby to her mother from August 1953 revealed that Ruby lived with a man named Stan while Han was away on his most recent trip; Ruby even signed the letter “Love, Stan and Ruby.” More telling is an emotional letter that Ruby wrote to Han in September in which she expressed her frustration with his legal and immigrant status. Ruby was supposed to meet him in New York City after stopping in Washington, D.C., to meet with his immigration attorney about paperwork for naturalization. Ruby never made it farther than Baltimore, however, explaining to Han her growing frustrations with the immigration process and that she “got exactly nowhere with results” on his forms and papers. Her impatience overcame whatever love she still held for her husband: “Han, this whole mess is just too much for me to try and contend with. I can’t take anymore and sincerely feel that it is best to get completely out of the whole situation.” She then informed him that the following morning she would be meeting with her own attorneys from the Bangle, Bangle, and Bangle law firm in Portsmouth and that she would “appreciate her freedom” from the marriage.⁸⁵

Ruby’s request for an absolute divorce on the grounds of adultery did not work out well for either plaintiff or defendant. While securing a divorce was her first goal, Ruby also asked for alimony payments of $200 a month from Han, the same amount that he sent home to her from his own pay. Although Ruby filed for divorce in October, the hearing was pushed back until February 1954, when Han was set to return from a trip to Korea. The trial itself was relatively uneventful. Ruby, her friends and family, and Han testified during the hearing, where the focus was on determining whether or not both parties were legal residents of Virginia. The court ruled that Ruby was a resident but that Han was not, considering he was an alien and was away on leave more than he was at home in Norfolk. After hearing testimonies and reviewing evidence, Judge Kellam found no proof of Han’s adultery and also denied Ruby alimony (noting that she was able to support herself as she had done while married to Han). Because Ruby lacked a clear and consistent reason for demanding an absolute divorce, Kellam chose to void the marriage under Virginia’s antimiscegenation law, noting that both parties were fully aware of the state’s bans on interracial marriage and had left the state to procure an unlawful relationship. Judge Kellam’s decision in granting an annulment left Ruby without the financial security she had hoped to get from her ex-husband, but she did have her freedom. Meanwhile, Han Say Naim’s future in America was unclear.⁸⁶

Before the divorce hearing, Virginia-based immigration and civil rights lawyer David Carliner worked with the Naims as the pair poured money, time, and other resources into helping Han become a legal citizen. After the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, Han began the process of naturalizing, acquiring the assistance of Carliner, a recent graduate of law school with an interest in issues of civil and immigrant rights working in Washington, D.C. Despite Carliner’s assistance and the somewhat more relaxed immigration and naturalization laws, the slow legal slog through paperwork and bureaucracy took its toll on both Ruby and Han. With his marriage annulled, Han turned to Carliner to guide him in how to proceed. While Carliner recognized an opportunity to carry out his long-held desire to challenge the constitutionality of antimiscegenation laws in the United States, Han required practical and legal advice on how to fight the annulment in hopes of maintaining his residency. If Han hoped to be able to stay in the United States and eventually become a citizen, his only recourse was to challenge Ruby’s case by directly tackling the issues of civil rights and antimiscegenation law.

Neither Han Say Naim nor Carliner was surprised by Judge Kellam’s annulment and filed an appeal with the Virginia Supreme Court. For Carliner, the annulment was the first step in challenging the Racial Integrity Act at the state level and, hopefully, later challenging antimiscegenation laws at the national level. Carliner knew that the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals would more than likely not overturn Kellam’s decision; this would be the first step in developing a case that would require more attention from the U.S. Supreme Court. In this situation, a failure in securing an appeal would be a victory in challenging the jurisdiction of the Virginia code and moving the case to the federal level. For Naim, however, the appeal was an opportunity to challenge the ruling as well as to insist on his right to equal protection that had been abridged by the state of Virginia and the Racial Integrity Act, demonstrating that civil rights applied to all who resided in the United States regardless of citizenship status.

In attempting to define the Virginia code as a violation of state jurisdictional power, Carliner identified Naim’s status as a Chinese citizen living in the United States as an added boost rather than a hindrance to his legal strategy for the case. Naim’s position as an immigrant presented Carliner with an opportunity to challenge the Virginia code on the grounds of immigration violations as well as civil rights. Most historical and legal studies of the Naim case and appeal focus on Carliner’s use (and later discarding) of the “full faith and credit” clause of the Constitution that protects one state from infringing on the power and decisions of another. Carliner argued in the appeal that by not recognizing a marriage granted by North Carolina, Virginia ultimately violated this clause. Few scholars mention that Carliner also used immigration and Naim’s alien status to argue that the code was in violation of a variety of federal treaties and constitutional laws. In addition to highlighting what would later become staples of the case, including the fact that the “Virginia law was so broad that not even ostensibly white persons can tell whether their marriages are illegal” and was particularly “offensive . . . and unconstitutional,” Carliner also focused on the statute’s “violation of the U.S. treaty with China.”⁸⁷ The Virginia code was inapplicable to the Naims in this instance because Han Say Naim was “a citizen of China without domicile in the state of Virginia,” and as such, the code “conflict[ed] with Article II of the Immigration Treaty of 1880 concluded between the United States and China.”⁸⁸ The 1880 treaty, or the Angell Treaty, granted Chinese immigrants “most favored nation” status and agreed to extend certain rights and privileges to Chinese laborers already living in the United States. The Angell Treaty and other formal agreements between the U.S. and China during the late nineteenth through early twentieth centuries “superseded” the Virginia code and guaranteed that Chinese nationals in the United States would receive equal protection and rights.⁸⁹ Within his notes and records, Carliner made no reference to the legacy of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which prohibited Chinese laborers from entering the United States. Although Chinese exclusion was formally repealed in 1943 following China’s alliance with the U.S. during World War II, Carliner did not acknowledge the fact that the Angell Treaty had not had a bearing on the treatment of Chinese in America for the previous seventy years. Such realities did not stop Carliner in developing a legal strategy that would fly in the face of decades of discrimination against Chinese immigrants. Because Naim was a Chinese citizen, the Virginia code did not apply to him, yet the Portsmouth court violated this principle and Naim’s basic rights and protections under the Fourteenth Amendment. Carliner evoked the “diversity of citizenship” clause in his appeal, arguing that because Naim was still a citizen of China, the Naim case fell within the jurisdiction of federal authorities rather than state courts. While crafting his legal strategy with the assistance of other American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) attorneys, including legal counsel head Herb Monte Levy, Carliner paid special attention to Naim’s legal status in the United States and used it as a key piece of evidence in seeking an appeal from the Virginia Supreme Court. Expecting the Virginia appeals court to argue for the validity and constitutionality of the Virginia Racial Integrity Act, Carliner used Naim’s Chinese citizenship to emphasize the international and foreign policy violations of the statute, making this case one for federal rather than state courts.

In response to Carliner’s appeal, Virginia attorney general J. Lindsey Almond Jr. used previous state cases involving Asian Americans to argue in favor of the Virginia code and the Portsmouth court’s decision. Carliner compared the Naim case to other Supreme Court decisions concerning immigrants and state laws, particularly those involving racial classifications. Carliner referenced the 1886 Yick Wo v. Hopkins case, where the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Yick Wo, a Chinese immigrant who fought against a California law barring Chinese laundries from operating unless the owners paid an additional tax, successfully arguing that his rights to equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment had been violated. While Carliner argued in the petition that the Supreme Court’s decision in the Yick Wo case guaranteed that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections and rights “apply with equal force to persons other than Negroes,” the Virginia attorneys general presented a different interpretation of the decision and how it applied to Naim.⁹⁰ Almond argued that Carliner never once “in a brief, six page appeal” challenged the racial classifications in the Racial Integrity Act, a fact that set this case apart from others in the past. Almond referenced the 1952 Sei Fujii v. California case involving a Japanese immigrant who attempted to challenge the California anti-alien land laws by arguing that they violated the charters and rights guaranteed by the United Nations. In this case, the Supreme Court ruled that while the United Nations treaty did not overrule local laws, the California land laws did, in fact, violate the Fourteenth Amendment, not because the law itself was racist or unconstitutional, but because the law created racial classifications that had “no substantial relation to the health, safety, and welfare of the state and therefore were arbitrary and capricious.”⁹¹ In other words, land laws and antimiscegenation laws themselves were not unconstitutional, but the creation of “arbitrary” racial categories under said laws was. One had to prove that the racial categories created by such laws were done so with the health and well-being of state citizens in mind to be constitutional, which the Racial Integrity Act of Virginia did because the legislature created it for the racial benefit and protection of Virginia citizens.⁹² Because Carliner did not actually challenge the racial categories laid out in the Racial Integrity Act but, rather, Naim’s subjection to the act as an immigrant, Almond maintained that there was no constitutional issue present in the Naim case and the annulment was well within the powers of the state of Virginia.

As Carliner accurately predicted, the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals rejected Naim’s claim in April 1955, standing by the lower court’s initial ruling in favor of the annulment. Justice Archibald Buchannan spoke on behalf of the Virginia court when he rebuked Carliner’s attempts to apply the recent Boiling v. Sharpe ruling (which overturned Plessy v. Ferguson and integrated transportation) to the issue of marriage, arguing that school and busing desegregation was one thing, but to attack a state’s right to regulate segregation of marriage would be “harmful to good citizenship.”⁹³ The Virginia Supreme Court ruled that the Racial Integrity Act and the state’s right to pass such legislation were merely extensions of the state’s attempts to protect its own citizens, a right that was not limited by the Fourteenth Amendment and, in fact, was upheld by the Tenth Amendment. Carliner explained in a letter to Levy shortly after the hearing that “there was little question that the Court will uphold the marriage prohibition statute” and “the reaction of the most vocal member of the bench was that rather than a denial of equal protection under the law, a Chinese had more advantages than a Caucasian,” for “a Caucasian . . . could marry only other Caucasians, but a Chinese could marry freely among other races—Negroes, Indians, et. cetera, and so had more choice.”⁹⁴ Despite his temptation to “tell the judge that he was being cute,” Carliner bit his tongue and instead went back to the drawing board with Naim to develop a more comprehensive argument to take before the federal Supreme Court.

In rethinking his legal strategy, Carliner eventually dropped the full faith and credit issue and instead chose to focus primarily on the relationship between the annulment and the guarantees of the Fourteenth Amendment. Carliner emphasized that the Virginia Racial Integrity Act violated “the equal protection and due process clauses” of the Fourteenth Amendment, including the rights and privileges guaranteed to noncitizens such as Naim. By combining due process and equal protection with the violation of existing treaties between the United States and China, Carliner argued that antimiscegenation codes harmed not only the rights of citizens but also, in this case, the rights of immigrants residing in the U.S.⁹⁵ Although Carliner and the ACLU “waived any claim that Virginia could not control marriages outside of its borders in order to try to make sure that the Court would reach the miscegenation issue,” by the time the appeal reached the Supreme Court, Carliner’s initial legal strategy focused heavily on the violation of Naim’s rights as a Chinese citizen residing in the United States.⁹⁶

Following the Virginia Supreme Court’s rejection of Naim’s appeal, Carliner, Naim, and the ACLU sought to draw wider support from other branches of government and legal entities for the case. Naim’s status as a Chinese citizen, in many cases, either hurt or helped Carliner’s appeal for outside assistance. In July 1955, Carliner and the ACLU attempted to “get the Department of Justice to join in the appeal, both because of the constitutional question and because of the immigration aspects of the statute.”⁹⁷ Unfortunately, the Department of Justice rejected the ACLU’s request because, according to Carliner, the case was “too hot.”⁹⁸ While it is difficult to determine precisely what was “too hot” about the Naim case for the Department of Justice, the positioning of the case within the larger, ongoing battle over the 1954 Brown v. Board decision may have played a role in the agency’s decision to withhold assistance. Also, the burgeoning Cold War climate, the “fall” of China to Communism in 1949, and the general suspicion of migrants, particularly those from Communist nations or with ties to supposedly subversive or leftist organizations, may have also contributed to the Department of Justice’s hesitancy in investigating the case.⁹⁹ In other instances, the immigration aspect of the case garnered attention from the media, specifically Time magazine, which in June 1955 had contacted Levy and the ACLU because the editors identified “some immigration aspects of the case in which we had been asked to intervene” and were interested in running a story on Naim, his marriage, and the ensuing legal battle.¹⁰⁰ Naim’s immigration status signified that this was not only a legal battle between races over antimiscegenation laws but a far more complicated struggle involving rights, racism, and immigration laws and policies.

Carliner and the ACLU also looked into other antimiscegenation cases outlining issues similar to the Naim appeal’s. Carliner was able to uncover a case from Mississippi where a white wife was “suing a Chinese husband for support for herself and three children, and for an absolute divorce on grounds of a previously existing undissolved [sic] marriage to a wife in China.” The trial court dismissed the case “upon the basis of a Mississippi statute declaring the marriage void [on account of miscegenation]” and “refused to grant support for the wife or children—in effect illegitimatizing the children.” Carliner, however, explained to Levy in a letter from June 1955 that this was a “very sympathetic case” and could possibly serve either as a framework for Naim’s argument if the Court did hear the case or as part of a larger appeal drawing together a number of antimiscegenation cases involving immigrants and white, American-born spouses.¹⁰¹ Carliner also carefully followed the development of a similar case in Georgia, hopeful that he might “have a batch of cases to take to the Supreme Court” by the end of the year.¹⁰²

Despite Carliner’s identification of Naim as a prime test case that could possibly trigger a series of trials that had potential for overturning antimiscegenation laws and upholding minority and migrant/white marriages in the South, others were not as convinced of the power of Naim v. Naim. Sol Rabkin, a prominent member of and legal advisor to the Jewish Anti-Defamation League, wrote to Carliner in August 1955 expressing his concern in having his organization support the Naim case at the federal level. Rabkin’s doubt arose from the case’s perceived inability to “excite public sympathy” for Naim.¹⁰³ Rabkin correctly described the Naim case as “a civil proceeding in which a white woman is escaping from a marriage to a Chinese man” and explained that “it would certainly seem much better to have this question come before the court in a case involving a criminal proceeding in which the state of Virginia has prosecuted two persons who love each other and are married and wish to remain married.”¹⁰⁴ Certainly, as Rabkin countered, it would seem as though Naim would not receive much sympathy from either the court or other whites. With the public already suspicious of Asian/white marriages from scandalous tabloid stories and the details of the case describing a situation where a woman was seeking a divorce rather than fighting against state law to remain married, Rabkin did have a valid point. While the end of World War II typically brought a degree of acceptance for Chinese Americans and other Asian groups in the United States and the South in terms of school integration, as discussed in Chapter 2, such reconciliation did not easily translate to interracial relations in all southern states.¹⁰⁵ A situation where a white woman sought state recognition of her interracial marriage in order to punish her fleeing Chinese husband (as in the case from Mississippi) would probably appear more favorable. Also, as the Loving case would eventually show, a couple that was, in fact, fighting to remain married would garner more sympathy.

Rabkin suggested that Carliner and the ACLU wait for what he believed would be a more ideal case, one where “one of our returning veterans, who married a Japanese or Korean bride, is prosecuted and threatened with a jail sentence.”¹⁰⁶ “Here, such a defendant would generate much public sympathy with resultant public disapproval of the anti-miscegenation statute”; this was a reference to the rising number of war brides who came with their husbands or fiancés to the United States following changes in immigration policy (primarily the War Brides Acts of 1945 and 1950) after World War II.¹⁰⁷ A large number of brides were from Japan, China, or Korea and had met and married their American servicemen husbands while they were stationed in the Pacific. This was a unique situation where state-level antimiscegenation laws did not reflect the changes in immigration policies at the federal level. Rabkin argued in favor of waiting for such a case to arise because it would create a better opportunity to challenge miscegenation policies than the Naim case.

But Carliner and the ACLU did not agree with Rabkin. They identified the Naim case as a prime opportunity to challenge miscegenation laws as violations of both domestic and foreign policy. Throughout the summer of 1955, Carliner continued to work with Levy to attempt to build support from a variety of civil rights and ethnic rights organizations, particularly those that represented the interests of Asian Americans and immigrants. Levy explained to Roger Baldwin of the ACLU that “since the Court recently denied review on a similar case,” he and Carliner were “thinking of bulwarking our case by getting various nationality groups to join with us.”¹⁰⁸ In particular, Levy suggested that Baldwin gather “the names and addresses of Indian, Korean, Chinese, Philippine, and Indonesian groups—non-Communist ones, of course—which you think might be interested in lending their names” to Naim’s cause.¹⁰⁹ Levy and Carliner focused on gaining support from other Asian and migrant groups that might identify with the Naim appeal and understand Naim’s hardships in naturalizing and living under antimiscegenation laws across the United States. A coalition of racial and ethnic minorities supportive of Naim “would indicate the breadth of interest in the interracial marriage issue if the Japanese American Citizens League, Chinese Citizens Association, the Association of Immigration and Nationality Lawyers, the American Jewish Congress . . . and so on were to be listed of counsel through their attorneys.”¹¹⁰ Carliner also noted that “the Afro-American here by the way has editorialized that the NAACP should file a petition to appear amicus” in the case.¹¹¹ By emphasizing both the immigration and interracial marriage issues, Carliner and the ACLU endeavored to highlight the multiple illegalities of the Virginia Racial Integrity Act and other antimiscegenation laws and codes, making the issue of miscegenation as much a multicultural and immigration concern as a fight against racial discrimination in the Jim Crow South. Naim’s legal status represented a new challenge to cases involving antimiscegenation laws as well as a new angle to the growing civil rights movement that addressed the wide implications of the term “civil rights” for everyone living in the United States.

Ultimately, Naim would have limited financial and legal support from the proposed ethnic and racial organizations. Although the Japanese American Citizens League, the Association on American Indian Affairs, and despite Sol Rabkin’s initial hesitation, the Anti-Defamation League became strong backers of the appeal and filed amicus briefs, other groups were not as willing to support the case. Some explanations were a combination of logistical and practical justifications. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People explained that its efforts could be better applied to ensuring the success and enforcement of Brown v. Board, while Jack Wasserman, who represented the Association of Immigration and Nationality Lawyers, was barely able to convince members of his organization to appear on the brief (and only without being liable for financial contributions).¹¹² Despite Carliner’s and the ACLU’s arguments that Naim’s situation represented more than a run-in with antimiscegenation law, many other ethnic and racial advocacy groups did not immediately connect the plight of the Chinese immigrant to the larger issues of citizenship and Fourteenth Amendment violations as hoped. For many, the antimiscegenation laws were overwhelmingly matters of black and white in the South, which complicated Naim’s position as a Chinese immigrant fighting against such codes.

Newspapers across the country, however, portrayed Naim as part of a growing civil rights battle aimed not only at antimiscegenation laws but also at broad civil rights violations. In the fall of 1955, the Lubbock Times reported that Naim, “a Chinese seaman, contended that [marriage restrictions] violate the equal protection and due process law clauses of the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment.”¹¹³ Here, Naim was the lone fighter against Virginia’s antimiscegenation law as well as the laws of twenty-eight other states that forbade interracial marriages. What the article correctly identified was Naim’s fight for the right to equal protection and due process under the law for all who married and lived under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Constitution; it was not just a fight against Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act or even antimiscegenation laws in general. Although many Americans may have viewed the Naim case as an oddity or disconnected from larger civil rights battles such as school segregation or issues pertaining specifically to African Americans, others argued that Naim’s fight was an important step for securing individual rights and liberties.

Similarly, the New York Times declared Naim’s fight a leading case in a growing civil rights movement following the Brown decision. In his article “Civil Rights Highlight Supreme Court Session: Justices Will Consider Many Issues Involving Individual Freedoms,” Luther A. Huston explained that in “the two recent court terms, the major issue has been racial segregation in public schools,” with “corollary questions arising from that decision,” one of those questions being interracial marriage. “The civil rights category is broad [and] under it the question has been raised for the first time of whether the equal protection and due process clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment inhibit the power of the state to dissolve a marriage upon the sole ground of the races of the married persons.” By classifying Naim’s legal struggle as a component of a larger movement, Huston situated Naim, a Chinese immigrant, in the midst of other forms of civil rights activism of the time. Rather than just an individual seeking to challenge antimiscegenation law or segregation in the Jim Crow South, Naim was a man who, despite not being a citizen of the United States, challenged the parameters of the definition of “civil rights” and applied this term to the basic protections guaranteed under the Fourteenth Amendment. Although Huston did not go into great depth in describing Naim’s past or his situation, his identification of the Naim fight as a part of the growing civil rights struggle in the United States connected Naim to other immigrant activists before him (such as Yick Wo) who expanded “civil rights” to include individuals who were not necessarily citizens.¹¹⁴

Eventually, by November 1955, the Supreme Court received Naim’s appeal; however, the immediate reactions of the judges were less than promising. After meeting in conference, the judges ultimately vacated the annulment but remanded the decision of the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals and asked for the case to be sent back to the circuit court in Portsmouth. The reasoning behind the judges’ action rested on a variety of points, ranging from the Court’s current involvement in other civil rights issues to the supposed clarity of the initial Portsmouth and Virginia Supreme Court ruling. Among the explanations that the judges provided for their decision to pass on the Naim case, the most well-known was their insistence that the then-current school desegregation issue surrounding the contentious Brown v. Board decision and Brown II follow-up required full attention. The Court refused to hear the case and summarized its decision with a simple phrase: “lack of substantial federal question.” For the majority of the judges, there was little in the Naim appeal that applied to federal principles or laws, and Virginia’s right in overseeing marriage was not subject to federal intervention.¹¹⁵

More specifically, the Court also addressed the issue of Naim’s “complicated status” as an immigrant, a factor in their decision to reject the case. While Carliner initially argued that Naim’s immigrant status provided enough ground for the Racial Integrity Act to become a federal concern, the Supreme Court justices thought otherwise. Naim’s status as a Chinese national who led a transitory life in the United States, rarely settling down to “establish domicile,” added another complicated layer to Carliner’s theory that the Virginia act did not apply to Naim or this particular marriage. The Court admitted that this presented a particular problem in determining the relation of Han Say Naim to the state of Virginia, potentially creating a loophole in the Racial Integrity Act; however, the Supreme Court justices ultimately decided that Ruby Naim, as the plaintiff, was a resident of Virginia, and therefore the code applied and the appeal was unfounded based on her residency. By using the “diversity of citizenship” issue as justification for their dismissal of the Naim appeal, the Court did not intervene in the complicated issue of antimiscegenation law, but it also limited Han Say Naim’s ability to pursue legal justice as a noncitizen. In addition to delaying the fight against laws prohibiting interracial marriage, the Court also exposed the difficulties that immigrants such as Naim faced while attempting to challenge discriminatory laws in the United States.¹¹⁶

The Supreme Court’s decision to reject the Naim case and return it to Virginia for further review resulted in a joyous outcry from Virginia residents. In January 1956, the Virginia Supreme Court officially rejected the higher Court’s suggestion for a new look at the case, once and for all leaving the issues at hand “devoid of a properly presented federal question.”¹¹⁷ As historians have noted and Virginia newspapers proclaimed, the Naim rejection represented a victory for the state of Virginia against any form of potential forced integration. When Supreme Court Justice Harold Durton noted that “in view of the difficulties engendered by the segregation cases, it would be wise judicial policy to duck this question for a time,” inhabitants of Virginia and other states reeling from the recent Brown v. Board and Brown II decisions celebrated the Virginia Supreme Court’s own refusal to review the case again as a victory for states’ rights. Although school segregation was the major political, social, and cultural topic of the mid-1950s, the challenges of integration as well as the fear and dread of the Brown decision affected other areas of life that were traditionally segregated, including marriage. The state of Virginia essentially “nullified” the Supreme Court’s call for the Naim appeal to be remanded, with newspapers “trumpeting the action as the first step in the realization of an ‘Ordinance of Imposition’ against the Brown decision and school desegregation.”¹¹⁸ The Washington Post and Times Herald’s Roger Farquar asked in a January 1956 article if Virginia’s “open defiance” of the Supreme Court’s suggestion to have the case reopened was “a straw in the wind revealing what the State’s highest court would do when public school desegregation cases come before it?” Farquar concluded that “only time could tell.”¹¹⁹ Virginia’s decision to uphold Ruby Naim’s annulment was a political form of support not only for antimiscegenation law but also for segregation in all realms of social and political life.

While traditional historical interpretations of reactions to the Brown decision describe white southerners’ resistance to school integration and relations between whites and African Americans, Virginia’s jubilant reaction to the failure of the Naim appeal also sheds light on another component of this same civil rights history. Not only were interracial marriages at the heart of one of the state’s first official rejections of the federal government’s attempt to fully integrate southern life, but the case also involved not a white/black couple but a Chinese/white marriage. Han Say Naim’s challenges to the Racial Integrity Act represented an attack on a system of segregation and racism across the South, and his actions speak to the intricate connections between migration, citizenship, and civil rights.¹²⁰ In February 1956, Carliner again asked the Supreme Court to attempt another hearing on the case but was once again denied on grounds of “inadequacy of information.”¹²¹

Following the Virginia Supreme Court’s rejection of the U.S. Supreme Court’s suggestion to send the case back to Portsmouth for review, Carliner remarked that the “fact that this was a Chinese-white marriage didn’t make any difference; they [the Virginia Supreme Court] saw black all over the place.”¹²² But perhaps Carliner’s statement is too simplistic. Naim’s appeal and Carliner’s representation of his client reveal that this case touched on issues of immigration, citizenship, and immigrant rights. In the end, the Court may have reduced Naim’s complicated position to a matter of black and white, but the appeals process reveals a more complex picture of the impact of southern antimiscegenation laws. Naim’s case was peculiar: He was not fighting against the annulment because he necessarily desired to stay with Ruby but, rather, because an annulment granted only on the grounds of race complicated the process of becoming an American citizen and remaining in the United States. Naim and Carliner set out to prove that although antimiscegenation laws prevented couples from entering into sanctioned relationships, these discriminatory measures also wielded power over immigrants, leaving individuals like Han Say Naim at the mercy of local and state courts. Denying Ruby’s request for an end to her marriage would have made her life difficult, but Virginia’s Racial Purity Act allowed her to easily remove herself form the marriage, using racial reasoning to place the burden of proof on Han for why the marriage should remain intact. In the end, his appeal revealed not only Virginia’s insistence on maintaining antimiscegenation laws but also the federal court’s general disinterest in his status as an immigrant in fighting against these laws. Immigrant protections provided no reprieve from southern racism and injustice in the courts.

Although many viewed the Naim case as a chance to either challenge the system of Jim Crow in place or uphold a centuries-old system of antimiscegenation law and discrimination, this example of stillborn justice speaks to more than just binary race relations and antimiscegenation. Many view the case as a failure. Legal scholars such as Gregory Dorr have attempted to identify the reasons for the higher Court’s refusal to hear the appeal and examine the cultural and social norms surrounding the Racial Integrity Act. Likewise, lawyers and policy scholars use the Court’s unwillingness to engage in the issue of miscegenation law so close to the dramatic Brown v. Board ruling in 1954 to shed light on the influences of public opinion on the judicial process. Civil rights and legal specialist Richard Delgado has gone so far as to nominate Naim v. Naim for inclusion in the “worst Supreme Court decisions” in history, citing the justices’ shortsightedness and cruelty in rejecting Naim’s appeal. Overall, the Naim decision (or lack thereof) is a painful reminder of our nation’s lengthy battle against inequality and discrimination in issues of marriage and civil rights. However, Naim’s appeal represents the globalization of miscegenation law following World War II and the intricate connections of sex to issues of citizenship and civil rights.

Little is known of what happened to Fortunatio Annunciatio and Han Say Naim after their failed attempts at overturning discriminatory statutes and legal practices. Annunciatio appears in the Georgia central registry of convicts as having served time at the Forsyth, Georgia, prison and as receiving a conditional pardon from Governor Eugene Tallmadge in June 1936.¹²³ We know slightly more about his partner Subia, who according to the same registry was listed as “Cuban” and was paroled in October 1935, the same month that he married a Georgia woman, Marie Henry.¹²⁴ Meanwhile, Naim’s death certificate indicates that he died alone in Brooklyn, New York, at age ninety-one in 1996, hundreds of miles from the reaches of the Virginia law that stripped him of his marriage. It is unknown if Naim obtained legal residency and later naturalized or if he fell into the large group of undocumented immigrants living in the United States. The unknown whereabouts of both Annunciatio and Naim prove that in many cases, silence speaks volumes.

Both men attempted to use their noncitizen status to defy southern law, but both failed. As a result, their names do not typically appear in larger histories of civil rights and sex and antimiscegenation. Their stories and battles do not easily mesh with histories of the interracial marriage and civil rights movements. What their experiences prove, however, is that there were opportunities for noncitizens to attempt to manipulate southern courts, presenting an overlooked strategy for achieving justice. Citizenship was not the only means to arguing for civil rights, and the two men attempted to subvert state law by appealing to federal power in regulating transnational and international relationships between the United States and other countries. Intimate relationships became part of a web of foreign policies, constitutional law, and discriminatory state regulations in the Annunciatio and Naim cases. Although their attempts did not weaken the southern system of sexual segregation, both Annunciatio and Naim demonstrated to the courts that immigrants and colonial subjects knew of their civil rights and were willing to fight for them in the Jim Crow South.