Today, I was trying to find some information on Wong Kim Ark and where his family came from. His name and his case are well-known in San Francisco to citizens of Chinese descent. We have been reading and discussing a lot about the case bearing his name, but I thought he should have his own thread. I think he is about to become a lot more famous as the ballot challenges continue and his name keeps coming up along with that of Virginia Minor.

Chinese came to California to look for gold and to labor on the railroads. But they were aliens and had no rights and were not allowed to naturalize. After the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Acts, many were forced to self-deport (as Romney/Gingrich expect the Mexicans to do. ) Wong Kim Ark was born here and grew to manhood here. He worked in Chinese restaurants in San Francisco. He parents decided to return to China. He went with them for a visit and returned. When he tried to return from a second visit to his parents, he was detained and not allowed to enter. He was held along with many other Chinese on Angel Island in the entrance to the Bay.

Here is an article about him and his progeny that I found very moving. I often pass by the archives mentioned in the story and have known people that worked there.

http://www.sfweekly.com/1998-11-04/news ... izen-wong/

The case history says that Wong Kim Ark was born at 751 Sacramento Street in San Francisco. Google Street shows what the spot looks like now. At 755 is the Nam Kue School founded by one of the Nam Hoy Fook Yum Benevolent Societies for Chinese children in 1925. It is still operating today.

http://www.sanfranciscochinatown.com/at ... namkue.htm

It's just around the corner from Waverly Place and Uncle's Coffee Shop above which Sun Yat Sen did some of planning and plotting of the Chinese Revolution. I used to go there every Friday afternoon to pick up my Chinese tutor. Of course, I had no idea about this spot connection to WKA, but it would have been his play ground growing up. If you plug the address in Google Street View and look around, you can see that almost all the signs and the shops are still Chinese.

I know an awful lot of people around here who would be very upset if you told them neither they nor any of their relatives would be eligible to be president because they were 'Fourteenth Amendment Citizens.'

I have viewed Wong Kim Ark as a hero since I became aware of his fight for his rights, and wondered why he isn't more well known. Similarly, I have wondered why Jewish heroes of the American Revolution, like Haym Solomon, are also virtually absent from the history books taught to children, despite being very well known to Jewish people and having a prominent place in any serious history of the Revolution.

There were other Chinese heroes who fought against discrimination and won, other than Wong Kim Ark. At one time, I was spading a law review article on civil rights litigation and came across the statement that the 1961 case Monroe v. Pape was the first time a federal court awarded monetary damages to a citizen for violation of rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution. I had also encountered this statement in a standard textbook on constitutional torts, and didn't find it objectionable. The statement also had a nice looking footnote with a bunch of cites to similar sources. However, I generally try to upgrade cites to better than tertiary sources, if I can.

There are actually a number of problems with that statement, but the best I found was a case called Ho Ah Kow v. Nunan, 12 F. Cas. 252 (C.C.D. Cal. 1879) (No. 6,546). The background of this case is simple. Under the guise of hygiene, the State of California adopted an ordinance, often called the "Queue Ordinance" or "Pigtail Ordinance," that involved shaving or cutting the hair off any person admitted to jail. The plaintiff, a citizen of China or, in the language of the opinion, "a subject of the emperor of China," was punished under another of the petty ordinances enacted to harass Chinese people, and the punishment was a $10 fine or five days in jail. This was a housing ordinance, again drafted apparently neutrally but in intent targeted at Chinese, who often lived in tight quarters in rooming houses, for obvious financial reasons.

I note that the "subject of the emperor of China" characterization is not throwaway racism, but actually important to the case. It is why the queue had a religious as well as social significance to him, and why having it cut off was a social disgrace as well as a threat even to his afterlife.

In short, unable or unwililng to pay the fine (I was not able to determine this though I would reckon San Francisco historians of the anti-Chinese hysteria would know), Ho Ah Kow reported to jail, where they cut off his queue (I somehow can't avoid imagining gleeful racists taunting him about doing this though they are absent from the opinion). Unlike many people whose honor had been insulted in this manner, Ho Ah Kow sued. For damages. Based on the Fourteenth Amendment. The plea for relief was "ten thousand dollars." (I'm remiss on my research on what that might mean, but it has the sound of a jurisdictional threshold.) It also relied on the Privileges and Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Equal Protection Clause, and other such assertions of rights.

The federal court decided that despite its neutral nature, the "justification" defense was insufficient, and remanded the case for further proceedings. Citing Jewish people as an example, and a penal sentence involving being sentenced to eating pork for all inmates, the Court was highly skeptical of the claims of religious neutrality of an ordinance demanding all inmates have their hair cut off, especially in the waves of hysteria then current.

Despite this, the opinion concludes with a burst of sympathy for the racist opinions of Californians, who felt in their dear little racist hearts that the Chinese were overwhelming them. Nevertheless, in enthusiastic support of federalism, and even of the racist exclusion of Chinese people, the Court noted that the relation with foreign nations and immigration concerns were federal in nature and should be addressed to Congress, and that "nothing can be accomplished in that direction by hostile and spiteful legislation on the part of the state[.]"

Legally, this is only important because it remanded a case for monetary damages for violation of civil rights, and essentially invalidated an ordinance on Equal Protection grounds. Historically, it is interesting, because even though it is a lower federal court, the opinion was written by "Circuit Justice Field." That would be Stephen Johnson Field, who himself was an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court at the time, when active Supreme Court Justices "rode circuit" to act as judges in other courts. While this system is more or less abolished, its vestiges remain in such practices as seeking a stay from a single Justice over one's Circuit and retired Supreme Court Justices acting on panels of lower appellate courts.

Justice Field is often regarded as having a spotty record, at best, on racial issues in general and Chinese issues in particular. As far as I can tell, he had a low opinion of Chinese people. However, to bring this back to the original topic of Wong Kim Ark, critical elements of the ratio decidendi of Wong Kim Ark cite to Field's opinions.
Slaughter-House Cases, 83 U.S. 36, 95 (1873) (Field, J., dissenting).

They even cited to those expressing opinions by Field that would now be considered racist. Even that racist language clearly states that those born in the country are citizens. Field, whatever his flaws, was a jurist, and based his decisions on the actual law, not his personal opinions. Therefore, it can be in the United States that what might be considered one of the first civil rights opinions under the Equal Protection Clause and part of the basis of Wong Kim Ark arose under the law in the opinions of someone who would today be considered an avowed racist.

The ideal that allows this kind of result is the principle of the rule of law. Not trust in benevolent rulers. Even a jerk who upholds the law will tend to treat people equally. Birthers (and most conspiracy creeps) are completely against this principle. That's why I hate them.



Oops. I guess I messed up the non-legalistic part of this, though I think I made up for it by bloviating a lot.

Oh I dunno. There's more than ample bloviation historical perspective and insight to make your post a great addition to the thread, Loh.

To me, one of the more interesting and salacious bits of trivia from the Wong Kim Ark case involves the San Francisco Lawyer who argued the case on behalf of the United States in the Supreme Court.

George D. Collin’s written brief for the WKA case is possibly one of the vilest racist screeds ever argued before that body; certainly it was on a par with the Dred Scot arguments.

The interesting thing about Mr. Collins is that the WKA case represented the apex of his career. Things fell apart for him in a big way just a few short years after. In 1905, it all came crashing down as he was accused and subsequently convicted of bigamy and perjury. It’s a wonderfully sordid tale.


http://nativeborncitizen.wordpress.com/ ... able-case/

I love how this thread is developing -- humanizing the law. These cases are literally academic to many, but highly personal to the names on either side of the "v". Knowing the players and the times is fascinating. More!

And here he is. Nice face. He looks kind.

Yes, he does look kind. I've always thought that he had the look of a gentle person always on the brink of a smile or laughter. I hope that was true.

He's got that All-American, kid-next-door face. Thanks, Mr. Wong!

Not only that, but Collins was responsible for bringing on the Great Earthquake of 1906.

I always heard it was Caruso.

The Library of Congress has prepared a teachers' guide "The Chinese in California, 1850-1925". Although it was designed for secondary school teachers and is not a scholarly document, it provides useful links to anti-Chinese propaganda. Among the papers referenced by the Library is Incidents of Chinese Life at UC-Berkeley. A brief quote from this document of The Workingmen's* Party of California:

The subject index provides even more links to materials held in the Library of Congress (most not on the Web).

The extent of anti-Chinese attitudes and politics in California is exposed by these materials. Collins was a particularly offensive proponent of those attitudes, but he was far from alone. Prominent politicians, including Governor John Bigler, favored anti-Chinese and anti-immigration policies. Although Bigler was of German descent, much of the anti-Chinese agitation (including riots) was led by other recent immigrants and their descendants, particularly the Irish. This has been a pattern in American history: immigrants of the recent past are opposed, often violently, to immigration of another group. Those recent immigrants have often entered at the bottom of the job ladder and want no competition for those jobs. Governor Bigler was opposed to slavery and was a founder of the Free Soil Democrats, but his motives may have involved only the fear that slaves would undercut the job market for recent immigrants.

The leader of the Workingmen's Party, a drayman named Dennis Kearney**, proclaimed:

That sentence "We will fill the offices with honest men who will make laws to protect themselves" strikes me as revealing not only of the nature of politics in California in the 19th century but also of the nature of Republicans in the 21st century.

The California bigots of the 19th century were far more articulate than are the bigots of today.

*The name of the party appears in both plural and singular form. It may have been part of the move to establish the first Marxist political party in the U.S., the Workingmen's Party of the United States.

**For whom the street, Kearny, is not named.

I did not realize that we have already had a 'Wong Kim Ark Day' and it seems that we need one every year to be reminded of who he was and how important he was to Constitutional history.

From the SF Board of Supervisors Minutes:

The reference librarian at UC Hastings Law School has created an interesting and useful site with information concerning the Wong Kim Ark case.

Wong is a hero to every lawyer of Asian descent in the United States, and he should be to every person of direct immigrant descent (which is now the majority of the American population, i.e., a majority of Americans are either immigrants, children of immigrants, or grandchildren of immigrants).

In the South Asian (Indian) legal community, a historic figure also of rising prominence is Bhagat Singh Thind. Thind immigrated to the U.S. from India in 1913 and quickly found himself swept up in World War I as a Sergeant in the U.S. Army. After his honorable discharge in 1918, the federal government thanked him for his service to the nation by trying to deport him because he was not white. His lawyers took his case to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that Indians are anthropologically "Caucasian", in keeping with the statutory term used by Congress. The Court's unanimous 1923 ruling on this interpretation of the word was:



http://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal ... /case.html

Thind battled valiantly to become an American citizen even after losing this fight. The State of New York conferred citizenship on him through a new law allowing it to do so for war veterans, in 1936. He died, a proud American, in 1967.

March 28 should be Wong Kim Ark Day here as well.

He is a living example of how a person bravely seeking his own rights, as a natural-born citizen of the United States, created a precedent that is now protecting the rights of the current President of the United States.

I suggest the date as the annual holiday of the Fogbow.

I will add it to the Birther Calendar.

March 28th. Just a few more days until Wong Kim Ark Day!

Second the motion.

We will need appropriate celebratory items. A recipe naturally. What does one eat on Wong Kim Ark day? Something Asian yet American I would think. And what color scheme? I always bring a baked good to the office for holidays. What to bring and how to decorate my office space?

Free food will give me the chance to educate a hundred people! For some reason I'm thinking a vanilla cupcakes with a lychee buttercream Icing.

Chop suey and fortune cookies?

lychee nuts

... and watch Big Trouble in Little China.

HAPPY WONG KIM ARK DAY!

It's time to head down to Henry's Hunan for some of their chow mein and jasmin tea. Grandfather Henry may have even known Wong Kim Ark.