Wong Kim Ark, in a photograph taken from a 1904 U.S. immigration document. Source: Creative Commons

On March 28, 1898, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, holding that children born in the United States, even to parents not eligible to become citizens, were nonetheless citizens themselves under the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Born in San Francisco to Chinese immigrants who were barred from ever becoming U.S. citizens under the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, Wong Kim Ark was denied re-entry to the United States after a trip to China, on the grounds that the son of a Chinese national could never be a U.S. citizen.

Wong sued the federal government, resulting in the Supreme Court’s seminal decision that the government could not deny citizenship to anyone born in the United States. [This text was adapted from Asian Americans Advancing Justice and PBS’s “Becoming American: The Chinese Experience.”]

Learn More

1882 Exclusion Act at OurDocuments.gov.

Picture book I Am an American: The Wong Kim Ark Story by Martha Brockenbrough and Grace Lin 

We recommend the related text, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America by Martha S. Jones. This book offers a vital examination of the fight for citizenship rights by African Americans before, after, and in light of the Dred Scott ruling.

The NPR Throughline podcast episode By Accident of Birth (2022), which describes Wong Kim Ark’s struggle for citizenship rights.

More related resources below.

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Fred Korematsu, courtesy of Karen Korematsu and the Fred T. Korematsu Institute.

On Dec. 18, 1944, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Korematsu v. United States that the denial of civil liberties based on race and national origin was legal.

Fred Korematsu, a U.S. citizen and the son of Japanese immigrants, had refused to evacuate when President Roosevelt ordered the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII. Korematsu was arrested, convicted, and sent to the Topaz Internment Camp in Utah.

Persuaded by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Northern California, Korematsu filed a case on June 12, 1942. The premise of the lawsuit was that Korematsu’s constitutional rights had been violated and he had suffered racial discrimination. However, the court ruled against Korematsu and he was sentenced to five years probation.

Determined to pursue his cause, Korematsu filed an appeal with Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and, later, to the U.S. Supreme Court. In December 1944, the Supreme Court ruled against him.

In Of Civil Wrongs and Rights, Korematsu says,

I’m an American and just as long as I’m in this country I will keep on going and if there is a chance of reopening the case, I will do it.

An excellent book to introduce the Korematsu story to grades 7+.

This chance came in the form of Peter Irons, a law professor, researching the internment for a book. [Howard Zinn helped Irons become a lawyer.] Irons discovered long-forgotten documents that proved that the Justice Department had misrepresented the facts to the Supreme Court. He took this evidence to Korematsu, and they both decided to re-open the case.

Peter Irons enlisted a legal team consisting mainly of Asian-American lawyers. Their efforts ultimately uncovered documents that clearly showed the government concealed evidence in the 1944 case that racism—not military necessity—motivated the internment order. More than 39 years after the fact, on November 10, 1983, a federal judge reversed Korematsu’s conviction, acknowledging the “great wrong” done to him.

On Jan. 30, 2011, the state of California celebrated Fred Korematsu Day, the first day named after an Asian American in the U.S., now recognized by six states. [This description draws from the information on the PBS documentary Of Civil Wrongs and Rights: The Fred Korematsu Story website.]

A 1983 press conference on the Korematsu internment case. Seated (L to R) Dale Minami, Fred Korematsu, and Peter Irons. Standing: Donald Tamaki, Dennis Hayashi, and Lorraine Bannai. Source: Chris Huie.

The Korematsu Institute provides free teaching materials to schools throughout the United States and around the world about Fred Korematsu’s story. Find resources below for teaching about Korematsu, Japanese Internment, and Asian American history.

The post Dec. 18, 1944: U.S. Supreme Court Rules Against Fred Korematsu; Declares Denial of Civil Liberties Legal appeared first on Zinn Education Project.

Source: Tyrone Turner via WAMU/DCist

An Open Letter by Wayne Au and Moé Yonamine

From Rethinking Schools, March 23, 2021

Although the recent increase in anti-Asian attacks has been hard for all of us, the murderous killing spree in Atlanta has our families, our youth, and our communities spiraling.

From a Japanese teacher in Seattle’s Chinatown-International District being assaulted by a man wielding a sock filled with rocks, to the robbery and killing of an Asian American elder in Oakland, to the elderly Asian American woman shoved and spit on in White Plains, New York, to the punching of an Asian man in North Portland, Oregon, these attacks both traumatize and activate us as Chinese American and Okinawan American educators personally. They connect us to our own experiences with hate in this country, and they highlight the deeply rooted history of white supremacy in violence against Asian people.

. . . It is clear to us that in this moment, not only do many Asian Americans not know their own history, but a lot of folks in other communities do not know our history, either.

We don’t blame anyone, since we know how our country’s educational system works to support racism and Eurocentrism, and the sad fact is that we still have very little K–12 curriculum on Asian Americans.

What we see and know is that this limited historical memory shapes — in bad ways — how folks make sense of, and respond to, the rise in anti-Asian violence.

As you learn or unlearn Asian American history, teach about the oppression from white supremacy, but also about the movements, activists, and solidarity across movements.

Continue Reading the Open Letter at Rethinking Schools

Wayne Au is a professor in the School of Educational Studies at the University of Washington Bothell and a long-time Rethinking Schools editor. Moé Yonamine teaches high school Ethnic Studies in Portland, Oregon, and is a Rethinking Schools editor.

Highlighting Asian Americans in People’s History

The Zinn Education Project offers brief profiles of people and events in Asian American history.

Read Stories in Asian American History

The post Dear Educators, It Is Time to Fight for Asian America appeared first on Zinn Education Project.

Fred Korematsu liked listening to music on the radio, playing tennis, and hanging around with his friends—just like lots of other Americans. But everything changed when the United States went to war with Japan in 1941 and the government forced all people of Japanese ancestry to leave their homes on the West Coast and move to distant prison camps. This included Fred, whose parents had immigrated to the United States from Japan many years before. But Fred refused to go. He knew that what the government was doing was unfair. And when he got put in jail for resisting, he knew he couldn’t give up. [Publisher’s description.]

ISBN: 9781597143684 | Heyday Books

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World War II, like so many other events in history, presents the teacher with an overwhelming range of topics. The rise of Nazism and fascism in Europe, the Holocaust, the military history and diplomacy of the war, the attack on Pearl Harbor and the war in the Pacific, the Nuremberg Trials, the dropping of atomic bombs, the beginnings of the Cold War — there is no way to cover all these events in a typical month-long unit.

One event that invariably gets neglected is the war-time internment of Japanese Americans from the West Coast of the United States. The reasons are numerous. But I suspect the main reason is that serious investigation of the internment would contradict the traditional presentation of the U.S. role in the war — how U.S. ingenuity and power turned back Hitler, liberated the concentration camps, halted Japanese expansionism, and generally fought the good fight. Such an interpretation does not leave much room for aberrations, particularly one as anti-democratic as the Japanese internment.

More resources on the incarceration (internment) of Japanese Americans during WWII.

This lesson was published by Rethinking Schools in Rethinking Our Classrooms: Teaching for Equity and Justice (Volume 2). For more lessons like “A Lesson on the Japanese American Internment,” order Rethinking Our Classrooms: Teaching for Equity and Justice (Volume 2) with a rich collection of from-the-classroom articles, curriculum ideas, lesson plans, poetry, and resources. See Table of Contents.

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Japanese Peruvians en route to U.S. Internment Camps, 1942.

By Moé Yonamine

“They’re Latinos . . . I think they’re some kind of farm workers.”

“No, they’re Asians with name tags.”

And then a student in a quiet voice walked by me slowly and muttered, “I think something really bad is happening to them.”

My students at Roosevelt High School in Portland, Oregon — one of the state’s most racially diverse schools — studied each black and white photo posted around the room, inspecting the background and the facial expressions; confused, anxious, frustrated. They began a journey to uncover the hidden story of the Japanese Latin American removal, internment, and deportation during World War II.

Most U.S. history textbooks now acknowledge that beginning in 1942, the U.S. government rounded up more than 110,000 people of Japanese descent — even those who were U.S. citizens — and sent them to internment camps. What the textbooks fail to include is that the United States demanded that Latin American governments do the same thing, and turn over their own internees to U.S. authorities — and that these internees went on to become refugees with no country to call home.

Even before Pearl Harbor, in October 1941, the U.S. government initiated plans to construct an internment camp near the Panama Canal Zone for Japanese Latin Americans. The United States targeted people it deemed security threats and pressured Latin American governments to round them up and turn them over. Beginning in 1942, 13 Latin American governments arrested more than 2,300 people of Japanese descent in their countries — largely from Peru — including teachers, farmers, barbers, and businessmen. The U.S. government transported these individuals from Panama to internment camps in the United States, confiscating passports and visas. Most remained in the camps until the end of the war, when the government deemed them “illegal aliens.” Meanwhile, the Peruvian government refused to readmit any of its citizens of Japanese origin, thus hundreds were deported to Japan.

Posted Japanese American Exclusion Order.

Asian Pacific American Heritage Month is a good opportunity for teachers — and all the rest of us — to explore important untold stories like this one.

I learned this history by coincidence 14 years ago. I was on a bus from Portland to Tule Lake, California, site of one of the largest Japanese American incarceration camps. My former middle school teacher, who had first taught me the history of Japanese American internment, had asked me to join her on this pilgrimage, which included hundreds of survivors. “I am from Japan,” the elder sitting next to me said in Japanese. “But I am originally from Peru.” An elder sitting in front of us turned around and said in English, “He looks very familiar.” As I translated their conversation, it came out that they were both young boys interned at Tule Lake. “I know him!” said the Japanese American elder. “He was my friend!” Grabbing the Peruvian man’s hand and shaking it firmly, he explained that they played baseball together often but that one day his friend disappeared. His friend spoke Spanish, so he could never ask him what he was doing in the camp. The Peruvian Japanese elder’s face beamed with joy as the two continued to shake hands, not letting go. “I am so glad you are safe,” he said.

As I absorbed this moment between the two long-ago friends, I was struck with joy and at the same time, anger. How could this be that through all of my education there was never even a mention of this?

I remembered elderly people I knew and loved in my home island of Okinawa. These elders were Okinawan by ethnicity but spoke Spanish. I remember that some of them told about their childhood days in Peru. Could they too have survived such a past?

From subsequent research, I discovered that large numbers of Okinawans migrated to South America beginning in the late 1800s as the once-sovereign Ryukyu island chain was brought under Japanese control. By World War II, the majority of immigrants to Peru were Okinawan. There was also a large group in Brazil. As a result, many families in Okinawa today have relatives from South America including my own, but stories of their migration and their lives thereafter remain largely untold.

My own questions turned into my inquiry as a history teacher. How can I teach my students to imagine the experiences of people from another time and make connections to today?

Map of camps in the U.S. available. Source: Japanese American Citizens League

Back in the classroom, as part of our study of the internment of Japanese during World War II, I showed the class a map of the detention centers and incarceration camps. Immediately, students saw Portland on the map and a hush spread through the room.

I walked over to one of the photos posted on the wall and said, “This is the Expo Center.” Shouts of disbelief rang through the room. The Expo Center is in North Portland near our own high school, now used for large community events and cultural festivals. I explained that many people from Portland were affected and the Expo Center was a detention center used to round up Japanese American families from our own area. I developed a role play — included at the Zinn Education Project website — to spark the students’ curiosity.

The students’ job was to represent characters with different perspectives and to present to the Commission on whether or not Japanese Latin Americans should receive redress for their forced removal, internment, and deportation.

In each class, students passionately debated, staying in character. The student judges delivered various decisions but all concluded that this history must be taught.

“The Other Internment” teaching activity is available online.

In one class, Nikki said, “How are we supposed to make sure that this doesn’t happen again if we don’t talk about it?” She went on: “If we don’t teach the kids, they’re not going to learn from all of the mistakes that have been done . . . just like with the Native Americans here and the Aboriginal people in Australia.” Joseph, who played a member of the Congressional Judiciary Committee, approached me after class: “It was so hard to have to make the decision . . . This is really people’s lives. You can’t make it all better by any of this. It’s not enough.”

How then do we “undo” injustice? I believe it is through empowering young people to imagine a different world. In my classroom, students filled the room with interruptions and passion to call out the injustice they see and to say how this connects to their own lives. What’s more, they stood up for how it should be; how such acts of racism, hatred, and violence should never occur. Steve stated it best, writing, “We can’t afford not to learn this history and histories like this. It has everything to do with us because injustice is all around us — whether it’s racism or war. . . . The only thing that separates doing the right thing and the wrong thing is learning from the past.”

During this commemorative month to raise awareness of Asian/Pacific Island peoples, I draw hope from my students who are leading the way to unlearn the past and imagine a more just world for all people.

Grace Shimizu holds a portrait of her father Susumu Shimizu. Susumu was a Japanese-Peruvian sent to World War II internment camps in the United States.  Source: © Tyler Sipe, PRI’s The World

Art Shibayama holds a portrait of his family taken in Peru. Art was born in Lima and was deported to a U.S. internment camp. Source: © Tyler Sipe, PRI’s The World

This article is part of the Zinn Education Project’s If We Knew Our History series.

Posted on: Huffington Post | Common Dreams.

© 2012 The Zinn Education Project, a project of Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change.

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Yuri Kochiyama speaks at an anti-war demonstration in New York City’s Central Park around 1968. Courtesy of the Kochiyama family/UCLA Asian American Studies Center.

Yuri Kochiyama (May 19, 1921 – June 1, 2014) was a tireless political activist who dedicated her life to contributing to social change through her participation in social justice and human rights movements.

She was born and raised in San Pedro, California. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, her father, just out of surgery, was arrested and detained in a hospital. “He was the only Japanese in that hospital,” Kochiyama recalls, “so they hung a sheet around him that said, ‘Prisoner of War.’” He died shortly thereafter.

In 1943, under President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, Kochiyama and her family were sent to a concentration camp in Jerome, Arkansas, for two years. This experience and her father’s death made Kochiyama highly aware of governmental abuses and would forever bond her to those engaged in political struggles. After being released, she moved to New York and married Bill Kochiyama, veteran of the all-Japanese American 442nd combat unit of the U.S. Army.

Kochiyama’s activism started in Harlem in the early 1960s, where she participated in the Asian American, Black, and Third World movements for civil and human rights, ethnic studies, and against the war in Vietnam. She was a fixture in support movements involving organizations such as the Young Lords and the Harlem Community for Self Defense. As founder of Asian Americans for Action, she also sought to build a more political Asian American movement that would link itself to the struggle for Black liberation. “Racism has placed all ethnic peoples in similar positions of oppression poverty and marginalization.”

Malcolm X and Yuri Kochiyama

In 1963, she met Malcolm X. Their friendship and political alliance changed her life and outlook. She joined his group, the Organization for Afro-American Unity, to work for racial justice and human rights.

As Vincent Intondi explains in an article about organizing against nuclear weapons:

On June 6, 1964, three Japanese writers and a group of hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors) arrived in Harlem as part of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki World Peace Study Mission. Their mission: to speak out against nuclear proliferation.

Yuri Kochiyama, a Japanese American activist, organized a reception for the hibakusha at her home in the Harlem Manhattanville Housing Projects, with her friend Malcolm X.

Malcolm said, “You have been scarred by the atom bomb. You just saw that we have also been scarred. The bomb that hit us was racism.” He went on to discuss his years in prison, education, and Asian history. Turning to Vietnam, Malcolm said, “If America sends troops to Vietnam, you progressives should protest.” He argued that “the struggle of Vietnam is the struggle of the whole Third World: the struggle against colonialism, neocolonialism, and imperialism.” Malcolm X, like so many before him, consistently connected colonialism, peace, and the Black freedom struggle.

Yuri was present on the day Malcolm X was tragically shot and killed in 1965. In the Life magazine article “Death of Malcolm X,” she can be seen crouched in the background, cradling Malcolm X’s head.

In the 1980s, Kochiyama worked in the redress and reparations movement for Japanese-Americans along with her husband Bill. Support for political prisoners — African American, Puerto Rican, Native American, Asian American, and progressive whites — was been a consistent thread in her work.

When Yuri died on June 1, 2014, Lehman College assistant history professor Robyn Spencer wrote:

I hope that remembrances of Yuri Kochiyama don’t start and end with the snapshot of her caretaking Malcolm X in his last moments, just like the tributes that reduced Rev. Vincent Harding to only being Dr. Martin Luther King’s speechwriter.

It compounds the tragedy when people, who represent the grassroots and plural nature of the 60s movement, are reduced upon death to their relationship with Great Men.

What I will remember about Yuri Kochiyama is her careful attention to mentoring and cultivating relationships. The salons she held in her apartment were influential to so many. They are mentioned in several books. She also dutifully collected and saved things.

Kochiyama came to the 1995 round-table on African American liberation movement leader Mae Mallory with a scrapbook full of memories, newspaper articles and the like. I have come across many of her handwritten letters in different archives.

It is a little known fact, for example, that in 1977,

Kochiyama joined the group of Puerto Ricans that took over the Statue of Liberty to draw attention to the struggle for Puerto Rican independence.

Kochiyama bridged people and movements, a true human rights activist.

Watch this remembrance clip from Asian Americans Advancing Justice.

This profile was adapted from various sources, including Asian American Women of Hope: Study Guide (1199 Bread and Roses Cultural Project, 1998).

Learn more about Kochiyama in her memoir Passing It On, the biography Heartbeat of Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama, the film Passion for Justice, and Yuri Kochiyama Solidarity Project website. There are additional resources below.

The post May 19, 1921: Yuri Kochiyama Born appeared first on Zinn Education Project.

In April 1975, Peter Yew, a young Chinese-American, asked that police stop beating a 15 year-old whom they had stopped for a traffic violation. For his concern, Yew was savagely beaten right on the spot, taken back to the police station, stripped, beaten again and arrested on charges of resisting arrest and assault on a police officer.

Yew’s beating was the last straw as 15,000 Chinatown community members took to the streets to fight back against police attacks and brutality against their community. The community united around demands for the dismissal of all charges against Yew, an end to discrimination of the Chinese community, and an end to discrimination in employment, housing, education, health, and all other social services for all minorities and working people.

Peter Yew police brutality protests in front of New York City Supreme Court. Source: Corky Lee/Interference Archives

A week before the May 19th demonstration, several thousand people had marched on City Hall under an action sponsored by the Asian Americans for Equal Employment (AAFEE), raising demands similar to those raised at the May 19th action. The local business community and establishment refused to publicize or endorse the AAFEE action.

A week later, the Consolidated Benevolent Association (CCBA) called the May 19th action, bringing out old and young in one of the most united and militant actions ever taken by Chinatown residents. Although the CCBA tried to keep demands focused just on Peter Yew, the people of Chinatown clearly saw the broader issues, the fact that police repression was coming down in communities all across the United States. This was shown by the slogans raised such as “Fight Police Brutality, Fight all Oppression!” [Excerpted and reprinted from Vietnam Veterans Against the War.]

Listen to This Post

Voice-over artist Corey A. Lee prepared and shared an audio recording of this post.

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Lee Yick and Wo Lee, Chinese immigrants, ran laundries in San Francisco. In 1880, San Francisco passed a law requiring a permit for laundries housed in wooden buildings as they were more vulnerable to fires. Of the 320 laundries in San Francisco, 310 were in wooden buildings, and most of them — 240 — were owned by Chinese persons. Not one Chinese laundry applicant was issued a permit.

When Sheriff Hopkins tried to arrest Yick and Lee for not having a permit, they refused to pay the $10 fine, and were jailed. Each sued, arguing that the fine and discriminatory enforcement of the ordinance violated their rights under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Their case, compiled under the name Yick Wo v. Hopkins, was argued at the Supreme Court in 1886 (Yick Wo was the name of the laundry that Lee Yick worked at).

In an unanimous opinion authored by Justice T. Stanley Matthews, the court concluded that, despite the impartial wording of the law, its biased enforcement violated the Equal Protection Clause. According to the court, even if the law is impartial on its face, “if it is applied and administered by public authority with an evil eye and an unequal hand.”

The kind of biased enforcement experienced by the plaintiffs, the court concluded, amounted to “a practical denial by the state of that equal protection of the law” and therefore violated the provision of the Fourteenth Amendment. [Adapted from PBS’s “The Strange Case of the Chinese Laundry,” and  Oyez.org.]

The application of the ruling was a different story, since it was followed just a decade later by Plessy v. Ferguson.

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Congratulations on your anti-napalm protest. You saved the life of a dog. Now, how about saving the lives of tens of thousands of people in Vietnam.

Born in the Heart Mountain, Wyoming, incarceration camp in 1943, Kiyoshi Kuromiya (May 9, 1943 – May 10, 2000) was a lifelong activist participating in several movements including civil rights, protesting the Vietnam War, LGBT rights, and AIDS/HIV advocacy.

Kuromiya spent the spring and summer of 1965 in the South fighting for civil rights, and became friends with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. When King was assassinated, Kuromiya helped take care of the King children.

Kuromiya participated with the Gay Pioneers in the first organized gay and lesbian civil rights demonstrations, “the Annual Reminders,” held at Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell each Fourth of July from 1965 to 1969. He was one of the founders of Gay Liberation Front-Philadelphia and served as an openly gay delegate to the Black Panther Convention that endorsed the gay liberation struggle. Diagnosed with AIDS in 1989, Kuromiya became a self-taught expert on the disease, operating under the mantra “information is power.” He founded the Critical Path Project, which provided resources to people living with HIV and AIDS, including a newsletter, a library, and a 24-hour phone line. [Adapted from LGBT History Month, NBC News, and ACT UP-New York.]

Video Remembrance

Learn more about Kuromiya from You Should Know This Gay Asian-American Civil Rights, Anti-War, and HIV/AIDS Activist by Juan Michael Porter II and from this remembrance video by friend Alfredo Sosa:

Google Doodle

On June 4, 2022, Kiyoshi Kuromiya was featured in Google Doodle in the United States. (The artist was not identified.)

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