672 ★ CHAPTER 17 Freedom’s Boundaries, at Home and Abroad
the city to admit Chinese students to public schools. The state legislature
responded by passing a law authorizing segregated education, and the city
established a school for Chinese. But Joseph and Mary Tape, who had lived in
the United States since the 1860s, insisted that their daughter be allowed to
attend her neighborhood school like other children. “Is it a disgrace to be born
a Chinese?” Mary Tape wrote. “Didn’t God make us all!” But her protest failed.
Not until 1947 did California repeal the law authorizing separate schools for
the Chinese.
The U.S. Supreme Court also considered the legal status of Chinese-
Americans. In Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886), the Court unanimously ordered San
Francisco to grant licenses to Chinese- operated laundries, which the city gov-
ernment had refused to do. To deny a person the opportunity to earn a living,
the Court declared, was “intolerable in any country where freedom prevails.”
Twelve years later, in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the Court ruled that the
Fourteenth Amendment awarded citizenship to children of Chinese immi-
grants born on American soil.
Yet the justices also affirmed the right of Congress to set racial restrictions
on immigration. And in its decision in Fong Yue Ting v. United States (1893), the
Court authorized the federal government to expel Chinese aliens without due
process of law. In his dissent, Justice David J. Brewer acknowledged that the
power was now directed against a people many Americans found “obnoxious.”
But “who shall say,” he continued, “it will not be exercised tomorrow against
other classes and other people?” Brewer proved to be an accurate prophet. In
1904, the Court cited Fong Yue Ting in upholding a law barring anarchists from
entering the United States, demonstrating how restrictions on the rights of one
group can become a precedent for infringing on the rights of others.
Exclusion profoundly shaped the experience of Chinese- Americans, long
stigmatizing them as incapable of assimilation and justifying their isolation
from mainstream society. Congress for the first time also barred groups of
whites from entering the country, beginning in 1875 with prostitutes and con-
victed felons, and in 1882 adding “lunatics” and those likely to become a “pub-
lic charge.” “Are we still a [place of refuge] for the oppressed of all nations?”
wondered James B. Weaver, the Populist candidate for president in 1892.
The Emergence of Booker T. Washington
The social movements that had helped to expand the nineteenth- century
boundaries of freedom now redefined their objectives so that they might be real-
ized within the new economic and intellectual framework. Prominent black
leaders, for example, took to emphasizing economic self- help and individual
advancement into the middle class as an alternative to political agitation.