After World War II and through the 1960s, Asian Americans began a transformative process, from being the “yellow peril” to becoming the model minority, and Asian Americans in the South experienced, to some degree, the same transformation. The war and its mottos of fighting for freedom and democracy at home and abroad affected the way Americans viewed their own hypocrisy toward minorities in the United States. African Americans were the largest minority group to use the aims of the war to demand attention to their plight with Jim Crow, prompting the growth of a nationwide civil rights movement, but Americans also came to view the century-old forms of legal discrimination against Asian immigrants and Asian Americans in a new light. Not only did Congress repeal the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943 (making it legal for some Chinese to naturalize and allowing a small number of Chinese immigrants to enter the United States), but Filipino Americans and Indian Americans received similar treatment during and after World War II. In 1952, the McCarran-Walter Act (or the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952), although designed to protect American security during the early Cold War by prohibiting and deporting subversive aliens, also made it possible for Asian immigrants of all ethnicities to become American citizens (while the number of Asians admitted to the United States did not drastically increase). Americans also viewed the ability of Japanese Americans to overcome the massive civil rights violations of wartime imprisonment and achieve economic and educational success as a model for all minorities to follow. Asian Americans came through the fires of World War II and proved that they were loyal Americans and deserving of equal treatment and respect, and while more subtle and sometimes not so subtle forms of racism and discrimination continued, the idea of the model minority shaped American perceptions of Asian Americans in comparison with other groups for decades to come. Southerners also to some degree welcomed Asian Americans into their society after World War II. Following general patterns across the United States at the time, southern schools, more specifically those in Mississippi, began to allow Asian Americans to attend white schools during the war. Similarly, the economic success of Asian Americans, at one point considered a threat to white labor and business, was now a sign of respectability, demonstrating that Asian Americans were not like African Americans (although limits to economic success and acceptability will be discussed later in Chapter 5).1
This new model minority identity helped Asian Americans to integrate into some areas of white southern life, but it also created tensions with African Americans. In the larger realm of African American civil rights activism during the 1950s and 1960s, Asian Americans living in southern states were relatively quiet and removed from such activity. While some Asian American students attending southern colleges and universities became involved in campus civil rights protests by the end of the 1960s, the presence of Asian Americans in the African American Civil Rights Movement was minuscule in the South. Although the Chinese in Cleveland and surrounding areas helped black families by letting them borrow more on credit at their stores and addressed them as “Mr. and Mrs.,” the Chinese received preferential treatment by local banks for loans over African Americans, “acted like Caucasians,” and refused to hire blacks in their groceries and laundries.2 Despite lingering forms of social discrimination and ostracism, particularly for some Asian American children who attended white schools, Asian Americans gained a reputation for being “white” in the South following World War II and through the civil rights movement, for better or for worse.
The very fabric of Asian America also changed during and after the 1960s with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Following cries for more liberal immigration policies, the need for family reunification in America, and more visas to fill labor needs, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Hart-Celler Act in October 1965, shedding what many considered to be out-of-date and racist immigration laws. The act lifted the decades-old exclusion on Asian immigrants, created new visa categories for family members and workers, and established a standard ceiling of 290,000 visas per year. Although the act was not entirely liberalizing (provisions in the bill made it appear that the demand for labor outweighed the ideological abandonment of racist and exclusionary practices in immigration policy), it did succeed in bringing more Asian immigrants from a variety of nations to the United States despite Johnson’s belief that the act would not result in significant changes to previously existing migration patterns. Immigrants from India, Southeast Asia, and China flocked to America for business and educational opportunities. In 1965, Asian immigrants made up only 5 percent of the immigrant population in the United States; by 1985, that number increased to 19 percent.3 Some, like Indian Americans, came to the southern United States to take advantage of business opportunities as whites fled during the late 1960s through the 1980s, and Atlanta’s Asian American population grew rapidly through the 1960s and 1990s as technology and computer specialists were needed. The lifting of the old restrictionist national policies as well as the creation of special work-related visas under the Immigration Act of 1965 ensured that southern states, too, would gradually become more ethnically diverse.4
But more ethnic diversity did not equal acceptance of all Asian American newcomers to the South. A sharp divide between “older” Asian American groups such as Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans and “new” migrants including Vietnamese refugees and Indian immigrants developed in southern states as elsewhere in the United States; however, this distinction repeated patterns of racism that characterized the arrival of Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans in the South decades before. While Vietnamese Americans and Indian Americans were perhaps not faced with the challenges of becoming part of a Jim Crow–based, binary system, by the 1970s, a struggling economy, America’s loss in the Vietnam War, and a general feeling of malaise created new difficulties for Asian Americans to be accepted in the South. Racial and immigrant statuses combined to make Vietnamese Americans and Indian Americans outsiders and, in many cases, enemies for whites. Taken together, the experiences of Vietnamese Americans and Indian Americans as well as their judicial and legislative activism against discrimination and racism serve as examples of changing strategies for justice in a rapidly changing South as refugee and entrepreneurial rights took center stage.