Citizens of Asian America

Democracy and Race during the Cold War

Cindy I-Fen Cheng

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781479880737
• eBook ISBN: 9780814770085
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Winner, 2013-2014 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, Adult Non-Fiction presented by the Asian Pacific American Librarian Association

During the Cold War, Soviet propaganda highlighted U.S. racism in order to undermine the credibility of U.S. democracy. In response, incorporating racial and ethnic minorities in order to affirm that America worked to ensure the rights of all and was superior to communist countries became a national imperative. In Citizens of Asian America, Cindy I-Fen Cheng explores how Asian Americans figured in this effort to shape the credibility of American democracy, even while the perceived "foreignness" of Asian Americans cast them as likely alien subversives whose activities needed monitoring following the communist revolution in China and the outbreak of the Korean War.

While histories of international politics and U.S. race relations during the Cold War have largely overlooked the significance of Asian Americans, Cheng challenges the black-white focus of the existing historiography. She highlights how Asian Americans made use of the government's desire to be leader of the "free world" by advocating for civil rights reforms, such as housing integration, increased professional opportunities, and freedom from political persecution. Further, Cheng examines the liberalization of immigration policies, which worked not only to increase the civil rights of Asian Americans but also to improve the nation's ties with Asian countries, providing an opportunity for the U.S. government to broadcast, on a global scale, the freedom and opportunity that American society could offer.

CHAPTER 1
Legislating Nonwhite Crossings into White Suburbia

Just two days after Tommy Amer moved into his newly purchased home in South Los Angeles, his neighbors stopped by to inform him that they had filed an injunction against him. The petition before the Los Angeles Superior Court demanded that Amer be removed from the premises of his home. As Amer recounted many years later, his neighbors emphasized that the filing of the injunction was nothing personal; they merely acted to protect their property values from diminishing with the residence of an Asian American in their suburban tract. While Amer was aware that the home he purchased in 1946 was in a covenanted area—that homeowners had come together since 1941 to sign an agreement limiting the residency of the Firth Main Street Boulevard Tract to persons of white or Caucasian race—he claimed not to have understood how this racial restrictive covenant could actually ban him from living in the house that he lawfully purchased. Amer noted that he was only twenty-four at the time and had just returned home from fighting in World War II. He believed in earnest that his rights were protected by the Constitution and was not aware that the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled in 1926 that racial restrictive covenants were the actions of private individuals and not of the state and were thereby not in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.¹

There were other reasons that led Amer to believe that his living on 127 West 56th Street was not going to incite the ire of his neighbors. From what Amer could tell, the area where he purchased his home looked as if it were on the verge of being integrated. His neighbors across the street, the Hickersons, were black. Amer learned only after he was served with the injunction that the Hickersons were also embroiled in a legal battle to retain the ownership and occupancy of their home. Amer remembered how the previous homeowner had hinted to him that his white neighbors would not go after him since they were mainly concerned with ridding the neighborhood of the two black families that had moved in. But as he learned, the whites-only restriction that worked to prohibit his black neighbors from living in the Firth Main Street Boulevard Tract had applied to him, a Chinese American, as well. Following the receipt of court papers, Amer embarked on a two-year legal battle to reside in his home in South Los Angeles. Later he recalled in an interview that his campaign against residential segregation was born not out of a desire to fight for equal rights but out of an imposed necessity to do so, as he was unable to find housing elsewhere and was unsure if he could recover financially from the loss of his home. What Amer did not foresee was that his case would be among the seven lawsuits admitted for review by the U.S. Supreme Court that resulted in the 1948 landmark ruling against the state enforcement of racial restrictive covenants.²

This chapter examines the Amer case, along with a companion suit that involved a Korean American, Yin Kim, to explicate the various forces that called into question the practice of race-based restrictions in housing during the early Cold War years. While the housing shortage of the postwar period triggered a rise in the number of lawsuits that contested the legality of racial restrictive covenants, the advent of the Cold War incited the federal government to come out in support of the legal struggle against housing segregation. Much of the federal government’s efforts to invalidate the whites-only rule grew out of the need to counter Soviet propaganda that highlighted racist practices in the United States to undermine the credibility of American democracy. The campaign against race-based restrictions in housing had thereby enabled the state to tell a different story about U.S. democracy, one that emphasized the nation’s commitment to creating a socially just world. This chapter details how the Amer and Kim cases importantly shaped this story about race and U.S. democracy in the national legal campaign against the state enforcement of racial restrictive covenants.

Before these two lawsuits gained national prominence, they were embroiled in California’s legal campaign to end housing segregation. The Amer and Kim cases thus provided a window into the contestations that were taking place on a local level, particularly in Los Angeles, to invalidate the whites-only housing restrictions. These local struggles were notable because it was during these campaigns that civil rights activists and liberal supporters began to organize across racial lines to challenge the whites-only rule. The interracial activism importantly put Los Angeles on the map for legal battles against housing segregation while drawing national attention to the problem of unequal property rights between whites and non-whites. The efforts further supplied the national campaign with a rationale for securing the equal rights of all. Drawing on sociological studies on urban and suburban America, advocates of housing integration argued that residential freedom was key to mitigating urban and suburban decay, as residential segregation gave rise to the formation of black ghettos across the United States. This line of thinking put forward in concrete terms how the granting of equal access to housing benefited the whole of society and moved the nation toward social progress. In so doing, it helped to turn racial desegregation into a desirable endeavor in Cold War America.

The Amer and Kim cases also played an essential role in the national legal campaign against housing segregation. They revealed how the construct of Asian Americans shaped legal understandings of race in the landmark civil rights cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. The Amer and Kim cases achieved national significance after the U.S. Supreme Court admitted these lawsuits for review as it prepared to reconsider the constitutionality of racial restrictive covenants. The Court agreed to review the two cases because it wanted to see whether the experiences of other racialized groups were relatable to those of blacks in regard to housing segregation. It further recognized that significant proportions of Asians in the United States were American citizens and thus entitled to equal protection under the law. As the Court ultimately decided to hear only the cases that involved blacks, it determined to use blacks as the representative racial category that would speak to the interests of all racialized groups. This maneuver critically established that rulings to secure blacks’ rights functioned to safeguard the rights of all.

But the move in favor of legal expediency, where a ruling on blacks applied to all racialized citizens, generated some adverse effects. Not only did it bolster the perception that race was a black/white issue, it also relied on this simplified view of race relations to simplify the problem of racism and turn it into a containable matter. By sidelining the Amer and Kim cases, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed people to forget that the fight against residential segregation was an interracial effort. The desire to make coherent the problem of racism further ignored the way interracial tensions had worked to shape the unequal access to housing. What these effects promoted with this limited understanding of race and property rights was the advancement of a story about the nation’s unwavering commitment to democratic principles and how this adherence had prompted the Court to strike down the whites-only rule in housing. As this chapter traces how the category of blacks came to represent the interests of all racialized groups in the landmark ruling on property rights, it explores how Asian Americans were figured into discourses surrounding race and U.S. democracy.

Whiteness as Property

The early Cold War years witnessed a decided shift in the efficacy of the whites-only restriction in housing. In ruling unconstitutional the state enforcement of racial restrictive covenants, the U.S. Supreme Court upended a trail of legislative acts that previously worked to build and preserve the worth of whiteness as property. According to the legal studies scholar Cheryl Harris, the recognition that whiteness was both a characteristic to inhabit as well as a resource to be accessed came about with the systematic seizure and appropriation of lands from Native Americans, blacks, and other racialized groups by Anglo Americans.³ The legislative history of land use segregation based on race demonstrated the repeated attempts of the state to preserve the value of whiteness and the property rights of whites in the face of challenges to that privilege. Moreover, it detailed the making of a nonwhite category that functioned to assess the worth of whiteness as property.

Prior to the rise of the nonwhite category in land use segregation laws, a set of disparate policies had been enacted during the late nineteenth century that worked together to uphold the value of whiteness as property even as individual legislations functioned to limit the property rights of a particular racialized group. While restrictions leveled against one group often served as the legal basis for restrictions against another, they also exposed ambiguities about the applicability of these prohibitions. As the cultural critic Leslie Bow has detailed in her 2010 book Partly Colored, the institution of Jim Crow laws to segregate blacks from whites in all public facilities had turned Asians in the South into an anomaly in the colored/not colored binary.⁴ For Bow, the inability of these categories to neatly determine the place of Asian Americans showed not just the constructedness of racial classifications but also their instability. Outside the South, this instability was apparent as Asian Americans during the postwar period were on occasion granted access to restricted neighborhoods of the West Coast, as whites regarded Asians as less troublesome than blacks. The shakiness of this black/white schema is even more pronounced when the uncertainty over the place of Asian Americans in postwar America is juxtaposed to the situation of the late nineteenth century, when Asians were the principal targets of urban residential segregation.

During the height of anti-Chinese sentiments in the late nineteenth century, California amended its constitution to include Article XIX, simply entitled, “The Chinese,” for the purpose of limiting Chinese residents access to state resources and services. Among the restrictions outlined in this 1876 measure was the confinement of the land use of the Chinese to certain portions of cities and towns.⁵ In addition to this constitutional amendment, state officials passed a series of Alien Land Laws during the early decades of the twentieth century that importantly showed how the category of “aliens ineligible for citizenship” and not just ethnic and racial designations functioned to restrict the property rights of all Asians in California.⁶ These laws documented how Asian Americans emerged as the principal targets of exclusionary measures on the West Coast during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, during a time when Mexican Americans were legally classified as whites in the California census. This legal classification resulted in the uneven enforcement of laws to limit the land use of Mexican Americans.⁷

As the civil rights lawyer Loren Miller noted in his 1947 study on residential segregation laws, restrictions that were leveled against the Chinese during the late nineteenth century laid the groundwork for the development of urban residential segregationist measures to prohibit the land use of all racialized minorities. According to Miller, the first attempt to impose urban residential segregation occurred with the passage of the 1890 Bingham Ordinance in San Francisco. As this city zoning ordinance requested the removal of all Chinese who were residing or conducting business within a designated area, it carried out the provision of the 1876 California State Constitution that granted to incorporated cities and towns the authority to enact measures for the removal of the Chinese.⁸ But almost as soon as the ordinance was enacted, the case of re Lee Sing rose to challenge its legality. Notably, the San Francisco judge who presided over this case ruled that the Bingham Ordinance was in violation not only of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment but also of the 1868 Burlingame Treaty, which granted to Chinese in the United States certain rights and privileges in accord with China’s most-favored-nation status.⁹

In light of this ruling, the 1890 case of re Lee Sing took on an added significance. It revealed how the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment necessitated the development of a different approach to preserving the worth of whiteness as property that did not explicitly rely on the state to enforce land use segregation based on race. When state-mandated zoning laws were outlawed, residential segregation policies arose in the form of private agreements between consenting parties that were incorporated into property deeds to limit the use and occupancy of specified lands to white Americans. The first court case that tested the legality of such agreements took place in 1892. In Gandolfo v. Hartman, a covenant in deed was signed by two consenting individuals to prohibit the use and occupancy of a designated tract of land in San Diego by Chinese residents. The San Diego district judge who deliberated on the case ruled against this practice and issued a telling statement on how the legality of racial restrictive covenants rested on one’s interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment, specifically the interpretation of what constituted state action.¹⁰ This was because the use of racial restrictive covenants in the form of private agreements to protect the privilege of whites did not appear to be the direct result of state action. But as the judge noted,

It would be a very narrow construction of the constitutional amendment in question and of the decisions based upon it, and a very restricted application of the broad principles upon which both the amendment and the decisions proceed, to hold that, while state and municipal legislatures are forbidden to discriminate against the Chinese in their legislation, a citizen of the state may lawfully do so by contract, which the courts may enforce. Such a view is, I think, entirely inadmissible.¹¹

Thus the San Diego judge determined that the court’s upholding of such agreements constituted state action. He thereby ruled racial restrictive covenants in the form of private agreements unenforceable. Despite obtaining the backing of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which denied the request for an appeal, this decision was overturned by the California Supreme Court in 1919.

Two key developments prompted the widespread use of racial restrictive covenants to grant white Americans greater access to property rights than other racialized groups. Following the huge influx of blacks to urban areas from 1915 to 1929, known as the Great Migration, the noticeable increase of black residents in the nation’s cities spurred the enactment of policies to limit the land use of blacks, not just of the Chinese.¹² The reliance on racial restrictive covenants to maintain white privilege further grew after the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed in 1917 all forms of state and city ordinances that restricted the use and occupancy of lands by racialized minorities.¹³ The Court’s 1917 Buchanan v. Warley decision, which upheld the 1890 re Lee Sing ruling, had thereby set constitutional limits on state action even though the Court believed that residential segregation helped to mitigate racial hostility.¹⁴ This decision, together with the increase of black residents in urban areas and the barring of Asian immigration to the United States in 1924, importantly worked to turn blacks into the main targets of urban housing restrictions.¹⁵ The shifts that took place in residential segregation policies after the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment further documented how restrictions leveled against the Chinese during the late nineteenth century became antecedents to the prohibitions directed against blacks during the first part of the twentieth century.

Following the Buchanan v. Warley ruling, racial restrictive covenants became the primary method of enforcing residential segregation, as state court...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Legislating Nonwhite Crossings into White Suburbia
• Chapter 2 Living in the Suburbs, Becoming Americans
• Chapter 3 Asian American Firsts and the Progress toward Racial Integration
• Chapter 4 McCarran Act Persecutions and the Fight for Alien Rights
• Chapter 5 Advancing Racial Equality and Internationalism through Immigration Reform
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author