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Across the Divides: Beyond School, Nation, and the 1965 Immigration Act in the History of Asian American Education

Part of: 60th Anniversary Forum

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 November 2020

Stephanie Hinnershitz
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Extract

The importance of education for Asian Americans looking to fight race-based discrimination, create a sense of community, and reclaim and establish an identity is well documented. In 1884, Mary and Joseph Tape, Chinese immigrants living in San Francisco, sued the San Francisco Board of Education and the principal of the Spring Valley Primary School—Jennie Hurley--after Hurley denied their daughter, Mamie, admission because she was “Chinese” (though born in the United States). The Superior Court ruled in favor of the Tapes, but in 1885, the School Board appealed the decision to the Supreme Court of California where justices upheld the lower court's decision. Though Mamie would not be able to attend Spring Valley after the School Board successfully pushed for state-wide school segregation legislation, many “white-only” institutions began to admit Chinese American children after the Tape case.

Keywords

Asian American studentspost-1965 immigrationAsian American educationtransnational education
Type
60th Anniversary HEQ Forum
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 60 , Issue 4 , November 2020 , pp. 623 - 631
Copyright
Copyright © 2020 History of Education Society

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References

1 For more on these examples, see Ngai, Mae M., The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America (Princeton, NJ: University of Princeton Press, 2012)Google Scholar; Berard, Adrienne, Water Tossing Boulders: How a Family of Chinese Immigrants Led the First Fight to Desegregate Schools in the Jim Crow South (Boston: Beacon Press, 2016)Google Scholar; and Hinnershitz, Stephanie, A Different Shade of Justice: Asian American Civil Rights in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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