A question about segration.

The reason that any discussion of segregation in the US is always couched in terms of black-and-white, Diest, is twofold -- (1) until recently, African-Americans were the largest minority in the USA (they've been overtaken by Latinos in the last half a dozen years); and (2) it was specifically against African-Americans that most discriminatory state laws were aimed. Certainly other minorities -- Hispanics, Asians, other non-Caucasians -- were discriminated against but -- except in California -- I'm not aware of any other minority having been legally segregated from the mainstream population.

I well recall the first time I saw this legalized sort of segregation for myself. A European immigrant, I had come to this country at the age of eleven and had been living in Boston. By the age of 15 I had traveled, with my family, over a good portion of the Northeast -- New England, New York City, etc. At school, I sat next to a number of black schoolmates and made friends with quite a few of them. In fact, at the time, my best friend was a boy my age who lived just down the street and was the son of an African-American father and a mother who, as a young girl, had immigrated from Kingston, Jamaica. (She had the loveliest accent!) This guy and I have stayed in touch over the years. We're both in our sixties now.

I had heard of and read about segregation in the South, but that was not a reality for me. And then my parents and I took a Greyhounf bus to Baltimore, MD, to visit some friends of my parents and to take a side-trip to the nation's capital, Washington, D.C. When we got off the bus in Baltimore, the first thing I looked for was a men's room. Found the door in the bus depot marked "Men." Opened the door and was confronted with two more doors -- marked "White" and "Colored." I was dumbfounded and shocked. I don't know which door I would have used if I were, like you, partly of Asian descent. What does "Colored" mean, anyway? Whom does it include? Or exclude, for that matter?

That first encounter with institutionalized segregation has stuck in my memory all these years. I saw much more of it in later years, of course, and in the 1960s became quite involved in the so-called Civil Rights Struggle. I perticipated in the famous March on Washington and heard Martin Luther King Jr. make his "I have a dream" speech. But that one incident in the Baltrimore bus terminal men's room has stayed with me more than other similar event of the ensuing years.

People of Asian and mixed Hispanic descent were certainly treated badly (still are in many venues) but I know of no laws that were aimed at specifically segregating them from the rest of the people.

It started when in 1905, the Section 60 of California's Civil Code was amended to forbid marriage between whites and "Mongolians" .... more such laws etc here.

Walter has sent you off in a good direction. There was a profound and virulent anti-Chinese and anti-Japanese prejudice in California, and it expressed itself in many ways, including a prohibition on Japanese children being educated in the same schools as "white" children. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., who was President at the time, expressed a good deal of exasperation at the idiotic measures which were commonly passed in California against the Japanese.

The member known as "C.I." (cicerone imposter), is an American of Japanese descent, who i believe is old enough to remember the internment in the Second World War, and the general atmosphere in California toward Japanese-Americans. Perhaps he will stop by to let you know what it was like.

American Indians didn't achieve U.S. citizenship and the right to vote nationally until 1924. It wasn't until 1948 that they were allowed to vote in New Mexico elections. A federal law guaranteed their religious freedom in 1978.
Asians, specifically chinese, were not allowed to own property in New Mexico until a vote on the issue in 2006.

Dys - you just blew my mind.

Thanks for all the replies. just so I know I have a correct basis for the segregation. This stemed from the "Jim Crow" laws correct? This is where the notion of "separate but equal" was from right? I've always struggle with what the "Separate" part meant in terms of people who weren't either black or white.

Set - I met CI when I was in San Fransisco. I'm not sure, but he may just to young by a handful of years to talk to me about the internment camps. He's 3rd gen. I'm 4th gen, and my grandparents have certainly talked about the camps to me in great detail. Post WWII was equally as discriminatory as during the war itself. My Grandparents had their children in that era and my aunt and my father were born very shortly after my grandmother was released. My Grandfather worked for the army and so he didn't go to the camps. that was an alternative that the government offered. The other was deportation, which some of m family opted to do.

Walter - Hey thanks for the link!

T
K
O

Well, c.i. had stayed in those camps, if I'm not totally wrong.

Walter- I remember a discussion that C.I. had on another thread some time ago about being in the camps.

I can remember segregation. When I was a kid, I went by train to Florida. As we passed Washington D.C., there was a curtain that separated the black and white passengers.

In Florida, I saw not only the black and white bathrooms in stores, but separate drinking fountains for each race. Schools and movie theatres were segregated. If a black person went on a bus, they had to sit in the back, even if the bus were otherwise empty.

Many southern states had miscegenation laws, whereby it was illegal for blacks and whites to marry.

Let's get him in here then.

*yells for CI*

T
K
O

Actually. the "separate but equal" doctrine comes from Plessy v. Ferguson. It (the case and the doctrine) was overthrown by Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.

My understanding is that most of the segregation stuff was intended to keep anyone who was not white from mixing with white people. Hence it was just whites separated from nonwhites, as opposed to whites, then African-Americans then everyone else although that's not always the case. As I recall, for example, the case of Loving v. Virginia was to challenge a law prohibiting marriage between whites and nonwhites, but I don't believe that the Virginia Legislature at the time much cared about marriages between two people of two different shades that were not white.

You might also want to take a look at the Chinese Exclusion Act.

I think we need to recognize that there is a difference between discrimination as a widespread social practice and legal segregation, a practice which has the force of law. The Supreme Court, in Plessy v. Ferguson, recognized Southern Jim Crow laws as constitutionally valid as long as the segregated facilities for non-whites were "equal" to those reserved for whites. The Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, KS ruling reversed that and invalidated the underlying segregationist philosophy prevalent in so many jurisdictions. Did that end all discrimination? Of course not. Federal military force had to be used to enforce school integration at places like Central High School in Little Rock, AR and at the University of Mississippi.

Until Dys revealed that Asians had been barred from owning property in New Mexico until very recent times, indeed, I had always been under the impression that segregation and discrimination by law against Asian-Americans had been strictly a California aberration. (I'm not talking here about the Asian Exclusion Act, a Federal mandate which, on its face, at least, was intended only to limit immigration of persons of Asian extraction. It did not address the status of those Asians already living here legally.) The first Asians to come to North America (if we exclude the ancestors of the so-called Native Americans ) came here during the California Gold Rush of 1849 et seq.. They were not exactly welcomed with open arms. Others, mainly Chinese, followed these early immigrants and found work laying tracks for the transcontinental railroad. Indeed, the tracks for Union Pacific and the Central Pacific were laid almost exclusively by Chinese laborers working West-to-East and Irish immigrants, working East-to-West.

California enacted numerous discriminatory laws against this influx of people who did not resemble Europeans. Segragation of schools and other places of public accommodation became legalized. The Japanese, always in smaller numbers that the Chinese, bore as much of the hateful bias as any other ethnic group. And after Pearl Harbor, of course, the Japanese became the scapegoats and whipping-boys. There are entire towns in Hawaii which, before World War Two, were almost exclusively Japanese enclaves. Today you have to go through old nespaper files to find any traces of Japanese presence in these towns. Property was expropriated, the original owners sent to detention camps on the mainland, and now towns like Halualoa on the Big Island have perhaps one or two Nisei families living among all the white folks who moved in.