Martin Luther King Jr said that the arc of the universe is long but it bends towards justice. I have faith that he is right, but that arc is sometimes very long and goes in convoluted paths.
Take for instance, the story of school desegregation. From the standard American History textbooks you’d learn that Brown v Board of Education desegregated America’s schools in 1954. However there’s a story of school desegregation very few have heard of, pointing to an earlier point in time where the forces for equal justice won, for a time. The story is that of Mamie Tape v Hurley where the California Supreme Court found the exclusion of a Chinese American student from public school due to her ancestry to be unlawful. In 1885.
The story begins actually with Mamie Tape’s parents – Joseph and Mary Tape. Joseph was born Jeu Dip in Guangdong province in China, but came to the United States in around 1864 at the age of 12. Mary Tape came from Shanghai in 1868 at the age of 11 and had been forced to work in a brothel until she was “rescued” by the local Ladie’s Protection and Relief Society. She took her name from the matron of her rescue home. By the mid 1870s, Jeu Dip was a successful entrepreneur with a thriving delivery service and met Mary on one of his routes. They married in 1875 in a Christian ceremony, both having grown up in the US and been thoroughly westernized, and Jeu took the name Joseph. They anglicized their name to Tape and settled in the Cow Hollow neighborhood of San Francisco, a predominantly white neighborhood. They had three children – Mamie in 1876, and later Frank, and Emily. For the most part, they fit right in. That is, until they tried to enroll Mamie in their neighborhood public school.
The late 1800s was the time of the great anti-Chinese sentiment in American, especially on the West Coast. This the era of the cry of Yellow Fever, the passing of the Chinese Exclusion Act, and the 1871 LA Chinese Massacre. Despite the fact that Joseph was actually well regarded by the white community as a businessperson, and despite the fact that in 1880 California has passed a law to guarantee all children free public school education, social custom and local board policies made it difficult if not impossible for non-white children to attend public schools. This is what the Tapes faced when time came for them to enroll their eldest daughter, Mamie, in their local public school. They did not want to send Mamie to mission-run schools in Chinatown but were opposed by entrenched hostility from the local school board who refused on the grounds of her Chinese ancestry. But the Tapes did not back down. They did what all great Americans do – they sued. They sued the San Francisco Board of Education and with the help of a lawyer names William Gibson. Their initial victories in the CA Superior Court were met with appeals and it was the extraordinary Mary Tapes who tirelessly championed her daughter’s cause that the case went all the way to the California Supreme Court, ultimately winning a decision in their favor.
Unfortunately, although the Tapes won a legal battle in the courts, it led to a backlash action in the legislature. Soon after, California passed Assembly Bill 268 that established “separate but equal” schools for children of “Chinese and Mongolian” descent. And of course, whatever legal victory the Tapes v Hurley decision held for non-whites was only limited to California.
The fight for equal treatment under the law is a long and hard one filled with victories that can take us two steps forward, but then is followed by three steps back. It wouldn’t be until the 1940s that the Chinese Exclusion Act – the only law in US history that barred a specific nationality – was repealed. It wouldn’t be until the 1950s with Brown vs Board of Ed that schools were desegregated across the US. And it wouldn’t be until the Civil Rights Act of 1965 that immigration quotas would be eliminated.
For more information on this story, check out the following links:
https://www.history.com/news/chinese-american-segregation-san-francisco-mamie-tape-case
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape_v._Hurley
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Tape