Tried With Fire

Water Tossing Boulders: How a Family of Chinese Immigrants Led the First Fight to Desegregate Schools in the Jim Crow South, Adrienne Berard, Beacon Press, 2016. Water Tossing Boulders is the true story of the Lum family's fight to have their children admitted to the whites-only public school in Rosedale, Mississippi. This unfolded in 1924-1927 during the years of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act , Jim Crow laws, and the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act . Jeu Gong and Katherine Lum were immigrants and part of the wave of Chinese laborers that came to this country to supply the loss of slave labor after the end of the Civil War. A large number of these laborers were denied entry or reentry with the Chinese Exclusion Act, the only law to-date that prohibited people from entering the US based on national origin. Laws were also stricter regarding the Chinese already here, but the Lums were able to settle in the deep South and open a small grocery store. The children, who were Americans by ...

When I started delving into the history of Asian American immigration, I uncovered stories and facts that I was never taught in school. One of those facts was the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act , a racist government policy that troubles me. It has left me skeptical about the rosy picture of the past that was painted for me through school texts and biographies. Thus I've been reading more history in search of the truth. Now I've learned something else. Water Tossing Boulders is the story of the Lum family, a Chinese Mississippi Delta family who challenged the state's school segregation laws when their daughters were forbidden to attend the whites-only public school. Their case went to the Supreme Court in 1927 , 25 years before Brown v. Board of Education , a landmark case worth reading about . Yet the Lum's story was omitted from history books. When asked the reason why, a descendent said, "Because we lost" to a unanimous 9-0 vote. What would it have been ...

Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it. George Santayana The following is the trailer for a PBS documentary on the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act . I don't remember learning about this in American history. Do you? I'd have a hard time forgetting because if I had lived back then, I would have been excluded. The Chinese were a source of cheap labor during the California gold rush and the building of the transcontinental railroad. But when economic times got tough, they were accused of taking work from "real" Americans. They were considered unassimilable and inferior by their very nature thus unfit to become citizens. In 1882, the federal government banned any Chinese from entering the country and denied citizenship, which led to an eventual ban on all Asian immigration until 1943. Even with repeal of the exclusion act, only 105 Chinese per year were allowed to immigrate until 1965. This is the first law to single out a specific ethnic group for ex...

This video shows the diversity of the Chinese immigrant experience. I love the juxtaposition of the Mississippi accent and Chinese ethnicity. We need to hear more stories like this to knock down Asian stereotyping.