How Chinese Americans Used the Courts to Fight Discrimination

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Chinese Americans answered a wave of discriminatory laws by going to court — filing more than 10,000 lawsuits. Twenty reached the U.S. Supreme Court. Their cases set precedents for landmark civil rights law: they secured birthright citizenship, forced San Francisco to educate Chinese American children, established that the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection applies against discriminatory enforcement — an argument later used to overturn Jim Crow laws in the South — and confirmed that only the federal government may regulate immigration.

Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886)

Yick Wo came to the United States from China in 1861 and in 1864 opened a laundry at 349 Third Street in San Francisco. He ran it, licensed, for decades — until he was jailed for defying an 1885 city ordinance requiring permits for laundries not housed in brick or stone buildings.

Yick Wo’s laundry at 349 Third Street, San Francisco, an exhibit for the Supreme Court, 1886. National Archives and Records Administration.

His case went from the California Supreme Court to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1886, which struck down the law as unconstitutional because permits were being denied to Chinese laundries while others received them. The Court held that this violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which requires laws to be applied equally to all persons, not selectively enforced by race or nationality. The decision established that the amendment protects individuals against discriminatory laws and discriminatory actions by government.

United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898)

Wong Kim Ark was born in San Francisco in 1873 to Chinese parents living legally in the United States. Returning from a trip abroad, he was refused re-entry on the grounds that he was not a citizen. He sued, and in 1898 the Supreme Court ruled that under the Fourteenth Amendment — which makes citizens of all persons born or naturalized in the United States — he was a citizen by birth. The case affirmed birthright citizenship and is cited in many later citizenship and immigration cases.

Wong Kim Ark’s application for preinvestigation of his status, November 15, 1894. National Archives.

Tape v. Hurley (1885)

Chinese Americans led early battles for equal education. Until Tape v. Hurley, children of Chinese descent were barred from San Francisco’s public schools. In 1885 the California Supreme Court ordered the schools to admit them. California responded by establishing separate “Chinese” schools — part of the “separate but equal” doctrine in schooling that lasted until the U.S. Supreme Court struck it down in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.

The Tape family — Joseph, Emily, Mamie, Frank and Mary Tape — about 1884–85.

Chy Lung v. Freeman (1875)

Twenty-two women who had sailed alone from China to San Francisco were branded prostitutes by California’s Commissioner of Immigration simply because they traveled without men, and held on $500 bonds. In Chy Lung v. Freeman, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered them released, ruling that only Congress, not individual states, has the power to regulate immigration, and that only federal immigration authorities could determine the women’s status.

Chinese women held in detention on Angel Island, 1910. Library of Congress.

Sources

Based on "Chinese Americans Use the Legal System to Fight Back," Golden Gate National Recreation Area, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The source says the Equal Protection Clause requires equal treatment of “all citizens”; the clause, and Yick Wo’s case, concern all persons, and the page uses that wording. It also names the plaintiff “Nick Wo” once; his name was Yick Wo.