Abagond

A guest post by commenter Jefe:

Chinese Americans in Mississippi under Jim Crow (1877-1967) were classified as “colored”. In the 1920s, when it started to affect the education of their children, they fought back. By the 1950s they were almost “white”.

What being “colored” meant for them:

• Employment: In the Mississippi Delta nearly all Chinese men became self-employed grocers to black sharecroppers, a niche whites did not want.
• Marriage and family: Anti-miscegenation laws added “Mongolian” and “Malay” as races that could not marry whites. Meanwhile the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 made it nearly impossible to bring over wives or brides from China. Most Chinese men remained bachelors, though some married black. After 1910 “Paper Sons and Daughters” began to arrive from China, through a loophole in the Exclusion Act created by the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906.
• Education: In the 1920s their children were kicked out of white schools and forced to go to the immensely inferior coloured schools. Gong Lum of Rosedale, Mississippi took it to the Supreme Court. He lost: in Lum v Rice (1927) the Supreme Court ruled that any jurisdiction could classify a non-white group as “colored” as long as “equal” facilities were provided.

To fight this, Chinese Americans:

1. Set up their own schools. By the 1930s Mississippi had dozens of Chinese schools.
2. Contributed money to white institutions (churches, civic organizations, social clubs, politicians, etc.).
3. Became Christians through Chinese missions opened up by white churches.
4. Had white people witness them mimicking whites in their treatment of blacks.

It slowly took effect. Some churches closed their Chinese missions and let their congregations attend the white churches. Some districts could not afford schools for 3 separate races and eventually closed the Chinese schools. If one white school would not accept Chinese students, parents would send their kids to a school in another district. The acceptance to white institutions was not universal; it often depended on the whites in the local community.

One Chinese group was left behind – those who married black or were part black. Whites made it very clear that in order to let Chinese into any white institution, they must guarantee that they were full Chinese with no “Negro” blood.

By the early 1950s, the separate Chinese schools had closed and most Chinese children were attending white schools. Chinese had to work continuously to gain “white” status. Some contributed to the White Citizens Council to oppose segregation - while some also contributed to the NAACP to appease their black customers. They always had to walk a racial tightrope to please whites without offending blacks.

They would be “white” for some things, but not for others. They could attend the white schools, but could not be valedictorian or date any whites. They were not always permitted to move into white neighborhoods.

In 1954 Brown v Board overturned Lum v Rice. 

In 1967 Loving v Virginia overturned anti-miscegenation laws.

By the 1960s, mechanization had replaced hand labour in the cotton fields. The Delta lost much of its black population in the Great Migration. With their customer base disappearing, most Chinese were leaving the Delta by the 1970s – after spending decades trying to be accepted as “white”.

See also:

• External links:
  • Mississippi School Segregation of Chinese
    • Gong Lum v. Rice: summary, full text
  • Anti-Miscegenation laws in 1910 and 1950
    • Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924 (full text)
  • White Citizen Council (more)
• The White Club
• Jim Crow
• Emmett Till (who was lynched in the Mississippi delta in 1955)
• James W. Loewen: Lies My Teacher Told Me
• The Nadir of American race relations
• American school resegregation
• Settlement of Asians in the Deep South (1763 – 1882)
• Chinese Americans in the Deep South after 1882
• Chinese Exclusion Act
• Paper Son
• The Great Migration

 

Americans tend to think that only the South or only slave traders and slave owners benefited from slavery.

But it was not that simple. Slaves and land were the main forms of wealth in the US before 1860. Therefore slaves figured in insurance policies and bank loans. Therefore universities turned to slave owners and slave traders to raise money. Industry in the North and in Britain made money processing slave-grown tobacco, cotton and sugar from the South and the Caribbean. Railway companies used slave labour. The most profitable activity on Wall Street was – the slave trade.

For example:

AIG – bought American General Financial which owns US Life Insurance Company. US Life used to insure the lives of slaves.

Aetna – insured the lives of slaves in the 1850s.

Bank of America – grew in part out of the Bank of Metropolis, which accepted slaves as collateral.

Brooks Brothers – got its start making clothes for slaves!

Brown Brothers Harriman – a Wall Street bank that owned hundreds of slaves and lent millions to Southern planters, merchants and cotton traders.

Brown University – named for the Brown brothers who gave money to the university. Two were slave traders, another ran a factory that used slave-grown cotton. University Hall was built in part by slave labour.

CSX – rented slaves to build rail lines.

Fleet Boston – grew out of Providence Bank, founded by one of the Brown brothers (see Brown University above), a slave trader who owned slave ships. The bank made money from the slave trade. Providence, Rhode Island was the home port for many slave ships.

Harvard Law School – endowed with money from Isaac Royall, an Antiguan slave owner and sugar grower.

JP Morgan Chase – made a fortune from the slave trade. Predecessor banks (Citizens Bank, Canal Bank in Louisiana) accepted slaves as collateral, taking possession of 1,250 slaves from owners who defaulted on loans.

New York Life – insured slaves. Of its first 1,000 insurance polices, 339 were policies on slaves.

Norfolk Southern – the Mobile & Girard, now part of Norfolk Southern, rented slaves to work on the railroad. Central of Georgia, also now part of the company, owned slaves.

Princeton – raised money and recruited students from rich, slave-owning families in the South and the Caribbean. Princeton was not alone in hitting up slave owners and traders for money and students. So did:

• Harvard,
• Yale,
• Penn,
• Columbia,
• Rutgers,
• Brown,
• Dartmouth and the
• University of Delaware.

By the middle 1700s, most Princeton students were the sons of slave owners. Many of Columbia’s students were sons of slave traders.

Tiffany’s – founded with profits from a cotton mill in Connecticut that processed slave-grown cotton.

USA Today – its parent company, Gannett, had links to slavery.

Wells Fargo - Georgia Railroad & Banking Company and the Bank of Charleston owned or accepted slaves as collateral. They later became part of Wells Fargo by way of Wachovia. (In the 2000s Wells Fargo targeted blacks for predatory lending.)

Yale University – money from slave trading went to its first endowed scholarships, professorship and library.

Universities not only sought and accepted money from slave owners and traders, they helped to create scientific racism.

Sources: Craig Steven Wilder, “Ebony & Ivy” (2013), Atlanta Black Star (2013), Nell Irvin Painter, “Creating Black Americans” (2006), The Harvard Crimson (2006), New York Times (2001).

See also:

• American slavery
• J. Marion Sims
• Ta-Nehisi Coates: The Case for Reparations
• “My family never owned slaves”
• How White America got rich
• Nazi Germany, brought to you by…. - Chase is on that list too

Guest post by commenter Jefe:

Note: Some of the analysis in this post came from the book “The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White” (1971, 1988) by James W. Loewen.

Chinese labourers were imported into the American South after the Civil War to replace emancipated black slaves. The plan failed. Chinese importation halted after the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) and by the late 1880s, all had left the plantations.

Some Chinese left the South, mainly moving to the growing Chinatowns in the North.  The Chinese-American population plummeted by 60% in the 1880s and 1890s, but New York City’s Chinatown actually grew from 200 in 1880 to over 7,000 by 1900 and continued growing afterwards.

Of those who stayed in the South, some migrated to larger cities, such as New Orleans and found work there. Some ran businesses (e.g., laundries) across the South. And some became grocers to black sharecroppers, a new niche of the post-Reconstruction South.

Sharecroppers bought food and daily necessities from plantation commissaries. The prices were inflated to keep them in debt. By 1880 in Mississippi a few Chinese opened makeshift grocery stores with very basic items, charging less than the plantation commissary. The commissaries began to disappear.

By the early 1900s over 95% of Chinese men in the Mississippi Delta were grocers.

Several factors caused this:

• Blacks could not get credit or capital to open their own stores.
• Whites would not open stores in black neighborhoods.
• Most of the Chinese came from the same region of Guangdong province, speaking similar rural dialects and often sharing kinship ties. They could provide each other with training, credit, and access to distribution networks. Once one of them set up a store, another, perhaps a relative, could work in it, gain experience, save some money, and then open up his own store in a nearby town.
• Chinese did not share close kinship ties with their most of their customers. They did not feel obligated to extend credit or loans to their customers (unlike a potential black storeowner, who would have many sharecropper relatives in debt).
• Most did not have family and could live at their store.

By the early 1900s, a third of Chinese men in Mississippi had taken black wives, though most remained single. The Chinese Exclusion Act left Chinese males little prospect of bringing over wives from China, while anti-miscegenation laws put white and Mexican women out of reach (except for those who got themselves classified as “White”).

Mixed Chinese-black children were categorized as “Chinese” in the 1880 census; in the 1900 census, most had been reclassified as “colored”, a  few as “white” (especially if their mother was part white), but none as “Chinese”.

In 1906 the San Francisco Earthquake destroyed city records, making it hard to strictly enforce the Chinese Exclusion Act. “Paper sons” and daughters began arriving from China on forged documents.

By 1910, Chinese men in the Mississippi Delta had begun taking Chinese wives and formed families. These families would later challenge the Jim Crow laws popping up across the South.

By the 1960s, mechanization had replaced hand labour. Many towns lost over half their black population in the Great Migration. Their niche livelihood was drying up, and most grocery stores shut down in the 1970s. Few remain today.

See also:

• James W. Loewen: Lies My Teacher Told Me – James Loewen wrote several books about the history of race relations in the USA, some which focus on the Deep South.
• Jim Crow
• Some numbers on Black Americans
• Interracial relationships
• Settlement of Asians in the Deep South (1763 – 1882)
• Chinese Exclusion Act
• US v Wong Kim Ark
• Paper Son
• Asian Men, Black Women
• sharecropping
• The Great Migration
• Other references:
  • “The Chinese in Mississippi: An Ethnic People in a Biracial Society“
  • Chinese in Mississippi: An Ethnic People in a Biracial Society””
  • “The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White” (1988, 1971) by James W. Loewen (Amazon page)
  • Interview of 3rd generation Chinese-American grocer in his 60s in Arkansas (2010)

Taiwanese Americans are people in the US whose families come from Taiwan. As many as a fourth of all Chinese Americans are Taiwanese. Most of the Chinese who came to the US in the 1960s and 1970s came from Taiwan.

• Population: 230,000 to 919,000 in 2010.
• Languages: English, Mandarin, Taiwanese, Hakka.
• Location: Half live in California, many others live in New York and Texas.
• Nobel Prizes:
  • 1976: Samuel Ting, Physics;
  • 1986: Yuan Tseh Lee, Chemistry;
  • 1997: Steven Chu, Physics.
• Helped to found: Yahoo!, YouTube, Garmin, Nautica, Panda Express.
• Some famous Taiwanese Americans:
  • Lucy Liu, actress;
  • Jeremy Lin, NBA;
  • Lisa Ling, journalist (pictured above);
  • Connie Chung, journalist;
  • Jerry Yang, billionaire, co-founder of Yahoo!;
  • Steve Chen, designer of Cray supercomputers;
  • Wen Ho Lee, nuclear physicist, falsely accused of spying for communist China;
  • Ang Lee, film director, “Eat Drink Man Woman” (1994), “Sense and Sensibility” (1995), “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” (2000), “Brokeback Mountain” (2005), “Life of Pi” (2012). First Asian American to win an Oscar.
  • Alexander Wang, fashion designer;
  • Iris Chang, writer, “The Rape of Nanking” (1997).

History: In 1949, when mainland China fell to the communists, Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT fled to Taiwan as a government in exile. So did more than a million others, many of them middle and upper-class Chinese who lost everything to the communists.

The KMT was an ally of the US during the Second World War. The US protected Taiwan militarily from communist China and pumped money into it. An economic miracle followed: Taiwan went from farming to making Barbie dolls to building computers, all in less than 50 years.

That miracle was paid for in part by the billions that the US poured into the science and engineering departments of its own universities. Taiwan benefited because it sent its best and brightest, especially those good at mathematics and science, to the US for graduate studies. They made Taiwan into a technological powerhouse.

Brain drain: But the US benefited even more: three in four Taiwanese students stayed in the US, becoming an American ethnic group with one of the highest levels of education. Many became professors and engineers. They helped to make the US into a technological powerhouse.

America in the late 1960s: It was amazingly free (Taiwan was a dictatorship, the US was going countercultural), had terrible food (even the “Chinese” food was fake!), most people looked alike at first with pale skin and big noses, and their English was full of slang and idiomatic expressions.

America in the 1970s: Nixon visits China. Saigon falls. Fears that the US at some point will become unwilling or unable to protect Taiwan from communist China. The US is seen as a safe haven.

The bamboo ceiling: You have to be twice as good. Less educated Whites get promoted over you. Whites stereotype you as a worker bee uninterested in management. At best they see you as an honorary white, not a fully equal fellow American.

Taiwanese Americans mostly live in suburbia, not Chinatowns. The Chinese of Chinatown mostly come from Guangdong province: the food and language is different. Taiwanese Americans have their own shops and restaurants at suburban shopping centres.

 Source: Mainly “The Chinese in America” (2003) by Iris Chang.

See also:

• Wen Ho Lee
• Yahoo!
• YouTube
• Asian Americans
  • counter-frames
  • The model minority stereotype
  • “Asian Americans have a higher median family income”
• Notes on the American Empire
  • Barbie
• American ethnic groups: a brief history: 1492 to 2100
• The Third Enlargement of American Whiteness

 

The Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) was a US law that shut off all immigration from China to the US except for scholars, merchants, diplomats and professionals. It is where the American idea of “illegal aliens” comes from, the beginning of the country’s racist immigration policies.

At first just immigration from China was limited, then Japan and Korea were added (1907), then the Asiatic Barred Zone (1917) and then southern and eastern Europe (1924). On top of that, Chinese and Mexicans were being driven out by violence and deportation.

That is why the US was so lily-white in the 1950s. Some think of that as the “natural” state of the country, but it was the creation of a set of racist policies that began with the Chinese Exclusion Act, policies that were not overturned till 1965.

In 1881 Senator John F. Miller of California spoke in favour of the Act. He said the Chinese were:

machine-like … of obtuse nerve, but little affected by heat or cold, wiry, sinewy, with muscles of iron; they are automatic engines of flesh and blood; they are patient, stolid, unemotional … [and] herd together like beasts.

He wanted to save the US from the “gangrene of oriental civilization”, from a “degraded and inferior race”.

Senator George Frisbie Hoar of Massachusetts opposed the Act. He said it was “legalization of racial discrimination”, that it made a mockery of the Declaration of Independence:

We go boasting of our democracy, and our superiority, and our strength. The flag bears the stars of hope to all nations. A hundred thousand Chinese land in California and everything is changed … The self-evident truth becomes a self-evident lie.

The New York Times said of Hoar:

It is idle to reason with stupidity like this.

Passage of the law was followed by the Driving Out: anti-Chinese riots and massacres in the West. Many who could afford to leave the US, left. At one point the city government of San Francisco considered burning down Chinatown – as a public health measure.

The law was extended so that Chinese were denied entry when they tried to return after visiting China – even if they had family and property in the US. Even if they were a US citizen:

In 1895 Wong Kim Ark returned to the US after visiting his parents in China – and was denied entry even though he was an American-born citizen. It went to the Supreme Court in United States v Wong Kim Ark (1898).

The United States argued that to accept Chinese Americans as citizens because of a “mere accident of birth” would be:

a most degenerate departure from the patriotic ideals of our forefathers; and surely in that case American citizenship is not worth having.

The Supreme Court upheld the Fourteenth Amendment: anyone born in the US was a citizen regardless of race.

In California, the Chinese-born were 90% male. The Exclusion Act made it next to impossible to bring over wives or brides from China, while state law did not allow Chinese Americans to marry Whites till 1948.

See also:

• The term “illegal immigrant”
• The perpetual foreigner stereotype
• Bhagat Singh Thind
• coolies
• Settlement of Asians in the Deep South (1763 – 1882)

Coolies (fl. 1830-1917) were Asian labourers, especially those brought as indentured workers to the Americas and elsewhere after black slaves were freed. Most coolies in the British Empire came from India. Elsewhere they mainly came from China. They worked on plantations and in mines. In the US and Canada they are famous for building railroads.

The word “coolie” can also be a racial slur (or just neutral description) for a descendant of said workers, especially in the Caribbean and South Africa.

The numbers, in millions (m):

• From India: 30m to 40m (1830-1913), especially to:
  • 1m: Mauritius, Trinidad, Guyana, Natal (South Africa), Fiji (sugar),
  • 4m: Malaysia (tin and rubber),
  • 2-3m: Sri Lanka (tea),
  • 2m+: Burma.

• From China: 10m to 15m (1830-1914), mostly from Guangdong and Fujian provinces. Among the places, they went to:
  • 6m: Malaysia (tin, rubber),
  • Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines,
  • Hawaii, Cuba, Samoa, Queensland (Australia), Fiji (sugar),
  • Peru (guano, silver),
  • South Africa,
  • US, Canada (railroads).

Most Indians returned home. Not as many Chinese did. Many of those who stayed in the Americas married black.

For comparison:

• From Africa: 12.5m+ (1501-1867) as slaves, especially to:
  • Brazil,
  • Caribbean,
  • US

• From Europe: 50m to 60m (1840-1914), two-thirds as permanent immigrants, especially to:
  • US,
  • Brazil, Argentina,
  • Siberia

Cheap food from the Americas was undercutting farmers in Europe, driving them off the land.

All told that is over 100 million people in motion, 40% of them coolies.

How coolies were different than slaves (at least on paper):

• fixed-term contract, generally five years or so (sometimes unfairly extended by employers);
• not hereditary;
• received wages;
• almost all were young men;
• many signed up willingly;
• many sent money back home;
• many returned home.

In Cuba and Peru it was slavery in all but name from the 1840s to the 1870s. Of the Chinese sent:

• 80% were sent against their will (1875)
• 15% to 40% died during the Pacific Passage (1850s),
• Over 67% died before the end of their contract (Peru, 1849-1874).

In the US, meanwhile, most came voluntarily. Those who worked on the Transcontinental Railroad were whipped, given the most dangerous work and were underpaid compared to whites, but still made good money for the times and were in better health than white workers.

On the other hand, in the 1850s Chinese women were openly sold on the docks of San Francisco. The police saw and did nothing. Chinese gangs attacked those who tried to save them from sex work. Hospitals turned the women away.

After 1853 in California, Chinese were not allowed to give testimony in court for or against a white man, which allowed whites to get away with crimes against them. In the South, however, Chinese workers were able to take employers to court and even win.

Chinese middlemen (labour contractors) in California turned Chinese labour into a cheap, reliable commodity.

US employers used coolies to keep wages low and keep white and black workers in line. That backfired in the long run: Chinese workers were not as docile as stereotyped while white workers, who had the vote, were able to shut off Chinese immigration by 1882.

See also:

• American slavery
• Settlement of Asians in the Deep South (1763 – 1882)
• Kingdom of Hawaii
• British Empire
• The map of white people
• Linda Tuhiwai Smith on history
• Asian Americans

Here on this blog I am extending Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month another week. I still have some posts in the pipeline.