A Brief Timeline of Racism Against Asians in America
Author: Nina Strochlic
Strochlic, Nina. “America's Long History of Scapegoating Its Asian Citizens.” History, National Geographic, 3 May 2021, www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/asian-american-racism-covid?loggedin=true.
Chinese laborers answering America’s call for cheap labor came to California during the Gold Rush. They faced harsh treatment, high taxes on foreigners, and racially motivated violence. Here, seven miners, some white, some Chinese, stand next to a sluice box for trapping gold in Aubine Ravine, California, around 1852. By the 1850s, Chinese immigrants comprised one-fifth of the population living around the gold mines of southern California.
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America’s first transcontinental railroad opened for business with a celebration in Promontory, Utah, on May 10, 1869.
Around 15,000 Chinese workers had spent the prior decade laying track under backbreaking conditions.
Two years earlier, 2,000 of them went on strike, asking for an end to beatings, a raise from $35 to $45 a month, and 10-hour shifts.
It was the largest labor strike in the country at the time.
The railroad bosses cut off food to the camp, and brought in armed guards to force the strikers back to work.
COURTESY OF THE LAWRENCE & HOUSEWORTH ALBUMS, THE SOCIETY OF CALIFORNIA PIONEERS
In 1882 Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, a law excluding Chinese people from entering the United States and barring citizenship for naturalized Chinese.
Though it was originally meant to last 10 years, the ban was extended until 1902 and eventually encompassed Japanese, Indians, Filipinos, Koreans, and other Asian immigrants.
A caricature from a magazine at the time shows a Chinese man seated next to a sign that reads “Notice — communist, nihilist, socialist, Fenian & hoodlum welcome but no admittance to Chinamen.”
The law was not officially repealed until 1943.
A caricature from a magazine at the time shows a Chinese man seated next to a sign that reads “Notice — communist, nihilist, socialist, Fenian & hoodlum welcome but no admittance to Chinamen.”
LIBRARY OF CONGRE
In 1885, the Supreme Court heard Tape v. Hurley, a case arguing for equal access to public school for all races.
Joseph and Mary Tape won the case against San Francisco’s school board to enroll their daughter, Mamie, in public school.
But soon after, the state authorized school districts to put children of “Mongolian” descent into separate “Oriental Schools,” ensuring resegregation.
In 2017, the San Francisco Board of Education struck down the last law on the books that restricted children of Chinese, Japanese, or Korean ancestry to “Oriental Schools.”
RYKOFF COLLECTION/CORBIS/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES
The 1892 Geary Act amended the Chinese Exclusion Act, forcing all Chinese living in America to obtain and carry a government-issued residency identity card proving their legal status.
Those discovered without identification could be arrested and deported, or sentenced to hard labor.
Despite protests, the law was upheld by the Supreme Court.
“Do you know what the Geary bill means to the laboring Chinese in this country?”
Qing Ow Yang, the Chinese vice consul in San Francisco, wrote to the U.S. government.
“It means, sir, that they are placed on the level with your dogs.”
This certificate shows the residence for Lung Tang, a 36-year-old laundryman from San Jose, California.
IRS, FIRST DISTRICT CALIFORNIA/CALIFORNIA HISTORICAL SOCIETY
Wong Kim Ark was born to Chinese parents in 1873, in San Francisco.
When he tried to return to the U.S. from a trip to China as a teenager, he was denied entry.
His lawsuit, in 1898, determined that individuals born in the United States were still considered citizens—even if their parents were not—and could not be stripped of citizenship because of their parents’ country of origin.
ALAMY
When bubonic plague broke out in Hawaii in 1899, it affected the entire population.
But the disease’s early victims were Chinese, and the local board of health forced just the Chinese to quarantine and prevented them from sailing to the continental United States.
In January, officials attempted to sanitize Honolulu’s Chinatown by burning buildings where plague victims had died, but the flames went rogue, consuming a fifth of Honolulu’s buildings and 5,000 homes.
The survivors ended up in refugee camps under armed guard.
PHOTOGRAPH BY BROTHER BERTRAM, BROTHER BERTRAM PHOTOGRAPH COLLECTION, CHAMINADE UNIVERSITY OF HONOLULU VIA ULUKAU: THE HAWAIIAN ELECTRONIC LIBRARY
In 1913, California barred “aliens ineligible for citizenship” from owning or leasing land.
The law inspired copycats in 15 states.
That same year, Japan sent civil servants Juichi Soyeda and Tadao Kamiya to study the law and its effect on Japanese in America.
The Alien Land Law remained on the California’s books until 1956.
COURTESY OF LIBRARY OF CONGRESS PRINTS AND PHOTOGRAPHS DIVISION
What is whiteness and who can benefit from it?
In 1922 and 1923, two cases sought to find out.
Takao Ozawa, a Japanese man, appealed for naturalized U.S. citizenship based on his light skin tone and good character.
The Supreme Court rejected him, claiming that by anthropological definitions, Ozawa was actually Mongolian.
A few months later, Bhagat Singh Thind (pictured with his wife and children) argued in front of the Supreme Court that the definition of Caucasian included groups from India descended from Aryans.
The court rejected his argument, saying he did not “fit the common understanding” of whiteness.
The ruling defied precedent set by Ozawa’s case, and redefined the meaning of “Caucasian” to also exclude those from India.
COURTESY OF DAVID THIND AND THE SOUTH ASIAN AMERICAN DIGITAL ARCHIVE (SAADA)
In January 1930, a mob of 500 white farmers attacked Filipino farm workers in Watsonville, California.
For five days, roaming mobs terrorized the Filipino community, dragging men from their houses and even throwing them off bridges.
The Watsonville Riots touched off violence in Californian cities, where immigrants from the Philippines, then an American colony, were described by newspapers as the state’s “next problem.”
A few years later, Filipino farmworkers in Salinas (shown here), about 30 minutes from Watsonville, went on strike against ethnic discriminatio
PHOTOGRAPH BY DORTHEA LANGE, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, U.S. FARM SECURITY ADMINISTRATION/OFFICE OF WAR INFORMATION BLACK & WHITE PHOTOGRAPHS
President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 in 1942, forcing the imprisonment of Japanese Americans and Japanese immigrants in military camps after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
On March 18, the War Relocation Authority was created to “take all people of Japanese descent into custody, surround them with troops, prevent them from buying land, and return them to their former homes at the close of the war.”
Ten government-run prison camps in five states held more than 120,000 Japanese during WWII.
Here, a dust storm settles around the barrack homes at the Manzanar Relocation Center in California in 1942.
PHOTOGRAPH BY DORTHEA LANGE, NATIONAL ARCHIVES
In the 1940s, Japanese Americans convicted of disobeying internment orders sued the government for discrimination.
But three Supreme Court rulings upheld the legality of internment.
Years later, a congressional committee described the policy as a “grave injustice” that stemmed from “race prejudice,” and in 1983 three men—Fred Korematsu (left) from San Francisco, Minoru Yasui (center) from Portland, and Gordon Hirabayashi (right) from Seattle—sued to re-open cases against the U.S. government for internment.
All past rulings against them were overturned.
PHOTOGRAPH BY BETTMANN ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES
In 1943, the Magnuson Act repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act.
After nearly 60 years, Chinese immigrants were again allowed into America.
This photo, taken 20 years earlier, shows an immigration interview on Angel Island, in San Francisco Bay, which served as a gateway for most Asians arriving to the United States.
COURTESY OF NATIONAL ARCHIVES CATALOG
In August 1965, the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, predominantly comprised of Filipinos, began to boycott the exploitation of farm workers picking grapes in California.
A week later, the National Farmworkers Association, which was mostly Latino, joined the cause.
The two groups merged to form the United Farm Workers Committee and pulled off a five-year strike that ended with grape growers signing their first union contracts.
PHOTOGRAPH BY HARVEY RICHARDS, HARVEY RICHARDS MEDIA ARCHIVE
The Third World Liberation Front, founded in 1968, was a coalition of San Francisco State University minority student groups, including Asian unions.
They organized a four-month strike—one of the longest student strikes in U.S. history—to diversify campuses, which led to the creation of the country’s first Ethnic Studies Department and an effort to hire more faculty of color.
The protests spread to other campuses, like UC Berkeley, pictured her
COURTESY OF CHICANO STUDIES PROGRAM RECORDS, ETHNIC STUDIES LIBRARY, UC BERKELEY
Lily Chin holds a photograph of her son Vincent, 27, who was beaten to death in Detroit on June 23, 1982.
His killers, two white men, allegedly killed Vincent, a Chinese American, as retaliation for jobs lost to the Japanese auto manufacturing industry.
His murder inspired an organized movement for racial justice and equality for Asian Americans.
PHOTOGRAPH BY RICHARD SHEINWALD, AP
Riots in Los Angeles in 1992 were a major hit for business owners and residents of the bustling neighborhood of Koreatown.
The weeklong rioting destroyed nearly $1 billion in property, about half of which was Korean-owned businesses.
Many Koreans watching their life’s work go up in flames felt abandoned by law enforcement and ignored by the media.
PHOTOGRAPH BY HYUNGWON KANG
Rana Singh Sodhi kneels near his service station in Mesa, Ariz., in 2016, next to a memorial for his brother, Balbir Singh Sodhi, who was murdered in the wake of the Sept.
11 terrorist attacks by a man who said he wanted to kill Muslims.
Beards and turbans made American Sikhs and other South Asians targets for years after the attacks.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ROSS D. FRANKLIN, AP
The Severe Acute Repiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak began in China in 2003 and made its way to the U.S. and Canada.
Discrimination against Asian communities quickly followed, with Chinatown businesses suffering and Asian civilians harassed on the streets.
In this 2003 photo, Philadelphia Mayor John Street eats with his staff in Chinatown in an attempt to help the city overcome fear of SARS.
PHOTOGRAPH BY SABINA LOUISE PIERCE, AP
During a June 2020 rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, his first since the coronavirus pandemic hit the U.S., Trump described the virus as “the Kung Flu.”
The Trump Administration has repeatedly called COVID-19 “Chinese flu” and the “China Virus,” even though the World Health Organization warns against associating countries or ethnicities with diseases.
PHOTOGRAPH BY GO NAKAMURA, BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES
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