From the Gulf to the Courts

The wreckage of the Vietnam War and new American polices geared toward resettling refugees brought thousands of Vietnamese to the United States. Although many Vietnamese settled on the West Coast and in the Great Lakes region, thousands more came to the Gulf of Mexico through sponsors or established family connections seeking work in the shrimping or oil industries of Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. But, as the Vietnamese soon discovered, they were not welcomed by the largely white population who feared competition and distrusted racial outsiders. The Vietnamese fought back in the Houston District Court, filing a civil rights suit against the Klan with the assistance of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Conclusion

In November 2008, Floridians who went to the polls to cast their ballots for the next president of the United States also had the chance to reverse eighty years of institutionalized discrimination against Asian Americans in their state. Asian American rights groups in Florida and nationwide distributed pamphlets, sent emails, and spoke to media outlets to build support for a ballot initiative that proposed removing the “aliens ineligible for citizenship” clause from the state constitution. There was hope that Florida could go the way of states like Kansas and New Mexico and formally remove the lingering anti-Asian language. Although the U.S. Supreme Court rendered legislative measures to prevent aliens ineligible for citizenship from owning land unconstitutional in 1952, the connection between the continued presence of this outdated language in the constitution and the legacy of anti-Asian sentiment was clear—this would be a symbolic victory that would signal a purge of de jure if not de facto prejudice and racism aimed at Asian Americans. Because Florida’s anti-alien legislation was enshrined in the constitution, 60 percent of voters would have to approve the initiative in order to remove the discriminatory language from the first amendment and insert neutral language specifying property rights for all. Surely, in the twenty-first century, Floridians would recognize the outdated and discriminatory portion of their constitution and vote to move the law of their land beyond the limits of the past....

Post-1965 Changes in Asian America

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 ...

A Love That Could Not Be Known

While studies of anti-miscegenation laws and interracial sex in the South tend to focus on white and black relationships, Asian Americans were also subjected to Jim Crow discrimination when it came to prohibitions on interracial sex and marriages. The in-between racial and political status of Asians challenged the black-and-white sexual and legal order of the South. This chapter focuses on two court cases from Georgia and Virginia that highlight the complexities of Asian-initiated battles against sexual and racial laws and norms in southern states: the 1932 Annunciatio v. State of Georgia case and the 1955 Naim v. Naim Supreme Court appeal that began in Virginia.

Black or White?

This chapter explores the experiences of Asian Americans with school segregation in the South. While southern society typically grouped Asian Americans under “colored” and prevented them from attending white schools, Asians often fought this racial classification by stressing their “non-black” status in their communities, local courts, and federal courts. The experiences of the Chinese community of Macon, Georgia with fighting plans to segregate their children from whites in the 1880s, the challenges to easy racial classification presented by a group of Filipino students to a Kentucky school board in 1904, and Gong Lum’s unsuccessful 1927 fight against school segregation in Mississippi form the core of this chapter.

Getting Down to Business in Dixie

During the 1980s and the 1990s, the South experienced another demographic change as an increasing number of Indian immigrants and their families relocated to southern states for business opportunities. Indian-owned hotels and motels became a growing phenomenon as migrants took advantage of affordable operating costs across the South. While many Indians maintained successful businesses, this success did not come without a price. Many southerners resented another possible “Asian invasion” of “un-American” outsiders set on making profits by driving Americans out of business. As a result, Indian hoteliers created an advocacy group—the Asian American Hotel Owners Association in 1989. This chapter argues that the experiences of Indians with business discrimination are an indication of the complex “post-racial” history of the South.

The Oriental Menace Comes to the South

This chapter follows Chinese and Japanese who migrated from the West Coast to the South following the Civil War through the early twentieth century. Both Chinese and Japanese laborers and farmers sought economic opportunities and reprieve in Arkansas, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas from growing anti-Asian hysteria. However, when they arrived in the South, the reality failed to live up to their expectations. Although small in number, the very presence of Chinese and Japanese in the South triggered a fear among southerners of a yellow invasion of their territory. In response, southerners’ distaste for Asian settlers later gave way to legislators passing laws and amending constitutions to prohibit aliens ineligible for citizenship (Asians) from owning property in their states.

Introduction

“I’ve never heard a political opinion from a Chinaman,” African American civil rights activist and Mississippi Delta entrepreneur Amzie Moore recounted in a 1967 interview. Although Congress passed and enacted major pieces of legislation, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Moore understood that there was still a long way to go on the road to equality and was more than a bit flustered over what he identified as Asian Americans’ lack of participation in the civil rights movement. A native of the Mississippi Delta born to sharecropping parents on a plantation near the small town of Grenada and later a store owner in Cleveland, Mississippi, Moore became a leader in the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, an organization that encouraged self-help and entrepreneurship among African Americans in Mississippi. While the 1955 murder of Emmett Till spurred Moore to action in the search for Till’s body (where Moore and others learned that there were hundreds of unknown Emmett Tills whom whites had murdered and dumped in the swamps, bayous, and murky, slow-winding rivers of the Delta for decades and probably centuries), Moore was most comfortable in the economic arena of civil rights. Moore believed deeply in the value of small business and property ownership in uplifting black southerners and placing them on the path to equality. This was often difficult to accomplish in the Delta, the “most southern place on earth,” as journalists described the flat, cotton-bespeckled landscape of the area. Since the immediate post–Civil War years, however, Chinese migrating to the region from the West Coast in search of business opportunities or to join other family members who lingered after brief stints as plantation workers during the early days of Reconstruction had a strong foothold in the small business scene in the Delta. ...