1885 Anglo miners riot against Chinese workers. Twenty-eight
Chinese^1 laborers are killed in the riots.1905 Anti-Japanese rhetoric escalates. Newspapers fuel this
panic, and the Asiatic Exclusion League is formed in San
Francisco.
1922 The Cable Act revokes the U.S. citizenship of any woman
who marries an Asian.
1923 A Japanese immigrant challenges the Exclusion Act so that
he might become a naturalized citizen (Takao Ozawa v.
United States), and the Supreme Court rules that the
Japanese – and all other Asians – are unassimilable races
and thereby ineligible. A few months later the Supreme
Court rules that while Bhagat Singh Thind, a native of
Punjab, is Caucasian, he is not white. In accordance with
the Congressional Act of 1790, this means Thind cannot
apply for American citizenship, and further, all natives of
India who were naturalized citizens at the time were
stripped of that status.
1933 Time Magazine runs a story with the headline Again: Yellow
Peril:
Japan has driven a strategic wedge of Japanese dominion
between the two American island possessions, the
Philippines and the Hawaiian Islands ... Japan’s purpose is
obviously to absorb both of these American possessions ...
The Philippines we are helping the Japanese to acquire
through our political corruption and stupidity.1942 A few months after the Japanese military attacks Pearl
Harbor, President Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9066,
which allows military authorities to take whatever action
they deem necessary to contain Asian presence. There is no
right to a trial or representation. The end result is the
removal of Japanese Americans to internment camps.
1964 The California Initiative allowing landlords to discriminate
passes with 65 percent of the vote. At that point, a property