THE RIGHTEOUS FIGHT FOR CIVIL RIGHTS

From its very beginnings, the wealth and economic success of America was built on the hard work and ingenuity of many peoples, including the indigenous peoples of the Americas as well as those from Europe, Africa and Asia. Systems of deep inequality gave great privilege to some who benefited substantially from the exploitation and enslavement of Black people. Land-owning, upper-class European Americans enriched themselves by enforcing a racial hierarchy, for example, through unequal laws, intimidation and violence that reinforced divisions based on skin color, class background, gender and other societal markers. It took centuries, but enslaved people and their allies worked to bridge some of those divides and eventually overthrew this shameful system of slavery. After slavery was formally abolished, people continued to fight against other forms of oppression aimed at keeping a caste system in place. Their efforts have made this country more fair for everyone. The struggle for civil rights tells the story of Black people in America who resisted the brutality of enslavement and inequality as they fought to be treated as human beings and to receive their full rights as Americans. Their fight for basic human dignity has helped to lift up others who have been denied liberty and justice for all.

SLAVERY: AN AMERICAN INSTITUTION

Europeans first began to colonize the Americas in the 15th and 16th centuries. Their efforts to inhabit and settle into “the New World” required a huge amount of labor. The Europeans chose to do it as cheaply as possible—by enslaving people on a mass scale. Spanish colonizers relied on the labor of enslaved Africans, as well as enslaved Indigenous people. They forced them to work as laborers on plantations and in mines, under extremely harsh conditions. In Great Britain, a similar system to slavery had long existed: Poor indebted white people sometimes worked as indentured servants. They were the property of their master until they had worked off their debt. Sometimes, they never reached that point, or were unfairly prevented from reaching that point. When the British began to establish colonies overseas, this was the system that was initially used. They used both white and African people as indentured laborers. The first 20 enslaved Africans were brought to Virginia in 1619, and had worked enough to be released from servitude by 1651, 30 years later. As time went on, landowners in the colonies began to push for complete ownership over other people, an arrangement that would benefit them economically. In 1661, Virginia legalized enslavement, then also made it law that children born into slavery would be kept enslaved for life. Before long, the economy of the American South relied on the enslavement of African people. Some worked the fields on plantations, while others served white families inside houses, and depending on the state, some enslaved people were used for industrial rather than agricultural work. In 1808, the US made it illegal to import enslaved people from Africa. However, slavery continued: Slave traders made money from “breeding” enslaved people and selling their children, and by kidnapping and selling freed Black people. In 1846, an enslaved Black man named Dred Scott who had been brought into free territories famously tried to sue for freedom. However, the US Supreme Court ruled that people of African descent could not be US citizens, and therefore, had no right to sue in federal court. That ruling helped keep the slavery system in place for decades longer. With the Spanish Galleon trade that began in the 1500s, ships traveled between the Americas and the Asia/Pacific region. Filipino and Polynesian navigators came to North America. In the 16th and 17th centuries, Chinese were recorded in what is now Mexico City, while Filipinos were living in what is now Louisiana.

To meet the insatiable demand for labor in the Americas and the Caribbean, hundreds of thousands of indentured workers from Asia, especially India and China, were forced into servitude, often to labor on plantations for many years. Some were kidnapped and locked into a crowded ship’s hold. Chinese women and girls were bought and sold by sex traffickers in the Americas.

More than 300 men from Asia, the Middle East and the Pacific Islands fought in the American Civil War. Most fought in the Union Army, but a few foughnt for the Confederacy, including a ship with a Chinese crew that was captured in the South and pressed into the Confederate army.

Tens of thousands of Chinese men arrived in the US to join the 1848 Gold Rush. These miners were later joined by railroad workers, imported to build the transcontinental railroad across the Rocky Mountains. Other Chinese were brought to Massachusetts, Mississippi and Pennsylvania to fill labor shortages.

In cities like San Francisco, Seattle, Denver, Los Angeles and throughout the western states, Chinese, Punjabis and other Asian ethnicities were restricted to living in crowded ghettos. During the ethnic cleansing of the “driving out” period of the late 1800s, white supremacists tried to eliminate all Asians from America. Massacres and lynchings were commonplace and entire Chinatown districts were destroyed.

Numerous draconian laws were imposed on Chinese, and later applied to other Asian immigrants. They were pushed into segregated schools and living areas, prevented from working in better-paid jobs and subject to unequal laws and taxes. Asians were barred from becoming US citizens, from testifying in court even if they were victims of violence, and from owning a home or farmland. Asian Americans tried to fight such racism and discrimination in the courts, taking 17 cases all the way to the Supreme Court. The case of Yick Wo established that separate is NOT equal and was cited decades later to desegregate schools in the South. The Wong Kim Ark case determined birthright citizenship for all Americans.

During this period, acts of “driving out” and barring Chinese and other Asians included the introduction of the federal Page Act barring Chinese women (1875) and the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882). The great Black American leader Frederick Douglass and others argued against the discriminatory exclusion of Chinese and other Asians from America.

THE CIVIL WAR, RECONSTRUCTION AND WHITE SUPREMACY

Eventually, the US went to war over the issue of slavery. More than a million people died in the American Civil War, and the South was economically devastated. In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed some—but not all—enslaved people. The rest were freed in 1865 when the 13th Amendment of the Constitution was passed. The abolition of slavery freed millions of Africans. Some white people were angered by losing the advantages they had enjoyed from slavery. White supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the White League sprang up. Such groups pushed for white people to maintain their privileged status in society, and terrorized African Americans. During the post-War period known as Reconstruction, some Southern states used the legal system and law enforcement to control African Americans and prevent them from rising in society. For example, they enforced laws extremely harshly against African Americans, and made it easy to arrest and jail them for so-called crimes like “disobedience.” They also created laws to keep Black people physically separate from white people. This policy was called segregation. The set of laws that enforced segregation and otherwise curtailed civil rights for African Americans became known as “Jim Crow” laws. In 1868, the federal government passed the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution. It granted citizenship and “equal protection” to all people born or naturalized in the US, including formerly enslaved people. However, Jim Crow laws remained in place for many decades. This began to change in 1915 with a series of Supreme Court cases that helped dismantle formal segregation.

In 1909, one of America’s most prominent civil rights activist organizations was founded: the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). It became famous for its role in fighting school segregation. A head lawyer from the NAACP, Thurgood Marshall, later became a Supreme Court Justice. From the 1920s through 1940s, advocates tried to fight lynching, a brutal form of murder that has been used against African Americans, Indigenous peoples, Chinese and other groups throughout American history. Three efforts to ban lynching passed in the US House of Representatives but did not pass in the Senate, due to white supremacist senators from the South. In 2005, the Senate passed a resolution apologizing for its history of blocking anti-lynching laws. Even then, several Southern senators did not join the resolution. In the 1950s, the NAACP began suing school districts in multiple states, arguing that Black and white children should not be kept in separate schools. In 1954, one of those cases, Brown v. Board of Education, became one the most important milestones of the civil rights movement. The Supreme Court ruled that the 14th Amendment also applied to the country’s public school system, leading to the desegregation of schools.

EMMETT TILL AND ROSA PARKS

One of the most famous injustices of the Jim Crow era was the 1955 murder of Emmett Till. While visiting deeply segregated Mississippi, the 14-year-old supposedly flirted with a white woman, who later claimed he had grabbed and harassed her. The woman’s husband and another man abducted, tortured, and killed the boy. Till’s mother in Chicago chose to display his body in an open casket, so that people could see how her son had been tortured and brutalized. Americans were shocked by magazine photos of his mutilated body. But a jury in Mississippi acquitted the murderers, sparking protests around the country. The following year, the men admitted the killing to a journalist. In 2007, it was also revealed that the white woman who had accused Till had lied. In another landmark event in 1955, Rosa Parks was riding the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, part of the segregated South, when a group of white men got on and demanded to sit in her row. There were plenty of other seats, but the bus driver ordered Parks to get up too. When she refused, she was arrested, put on trial, found guilty, and fined. In response, Black Americans organized a boycott of the city’s bus system. It lasted 381 days, attracted nationwide attention, and ended when the Supreme Court ruled segregation on city buses unconstitutional. More federal laws were passed that extended the Chinese Exclusion Act to severely limit immigration from all Asian countries. The laws that barred Asian immigrants from becoming naturalized citizens were gradually lifted between 1943 and 1952. Only then could Asian American communities engage as voters, run for elective office and begin to be participants in the American democracy.

Executive Order 9066 to remove and incarcerate 120,000 Japanese Americans from the West Coast states was issued on February 19, 1942, on the grounds that their Japanese ethnicity made them national security threats. Not a single Japanese American was ever convicted of espionage or sabotage. More than 40 years later, a national civil liberties movement obtained an apology and redress for the Japanese American community.

During the Cold War years, with the Korean War and McCarthy “Red scare,” heightened surveillance of Chinese Americans in search of potential Communist sympathizers put Chinatowns on edge as FBI agents cast dragnets to arrest and deport suspects and disrupt community organizations.

Grace Lee and Jimmy Boggs organized among workers and the Black community in Detroit, advocating revolutionary activism for evolutionary change.

Concerned Asian Americans supported and participated in the civil rights movement, including a contingent from Hawai’i led by Rev. Abraham Akaka that brought leis for Dr. Martin Luther King, John Lewis and other civil rights leaders as they marched across the notorious Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. The Supreme Court had found school segregation unconstitutional in 1954, but it took many years to get some school districts to comply. However, the NAACP forced integration to happen faster by enrolling nine Black students in a formerly all white high school. Many white people opposed it, but federal troops escorted the students into the school in the fall of 1957. In higher education, many colleges and universities refused to admit Black students. It took until 1962 for James Meredith to become the first Black student to attend the University of Mississippi at Oxford. He applied and was denied twice before filing and winning a suit in 1971. The state government fabricated criminal charges against him to prevent his enrollment, but the federal government intervened. Hundreds of US marshals had to accompany him on the first day of school, and large crowds of white people rioted in protest.

NON-VIOLENCE AND CIVIL RIGHTS

Throughout the South, many lunch counters refused to serve Black people. In February 1960, four Black college students in Greensboro, North Carolina, ordered coffee at the lunch counter of a Woolworth’s chain store. The staff ignored them, but they stayed all day, and returned each day with hundreds more people. Five months later, in July, the store finally desegregated. The peaceful sit-ins were popularized by the civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and inspired by India’s Mahatma Gandhi. Neatly-dressed, polite protesters would go to segregated spaces, stay, and submit peacefully when they were arrested, even when police charged at them on horseback or with vicious dogs, or when fire hoses were turned on them. The NAACP helped organize many more sit-ins, at churches, libraries and beaches. Freedom Rides were another tactic used in the civil rights movement. They began when activists of different races traveled together by train and bus to attend a mass protest in Washington, D.C. Interstate trains and buses in the South were segregated even though the Supreme Court had ruled it unconstitutional. All these forms of activism in the South were often met by harassment and violence from angry whites. Civil rights activists of various races, genders and religions were murdered by white supremacists. The lives of Black freedom fighters were always at risk. In 1963, Medgar Evers, the leader of the Mississippi NAACP, was shot to death in front of his children. The white man who killed Evers was found not guilty. It took another 31 years to get the killer retried and convicted. In 1963, more than 250,000 people attended the March on Washington in D.C., the largest public protest in American history. The massive protest helped spread the message of the civil rights movement across the country. Among many other now-famous speakers, Rev. King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

NEW LAWS TO PROTECT CIVIL RIGHTS

Voting rights were a main focus of the civil rights movement. In 1964, for example, activists went to Mississippi to register Black Americans to vote. Ever since Reconstruction, Black Americans were often discouraged from voting by obstacles designed to make it more difficult for them to vote. The passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 struck a major blow against the Jim Crow era. It was passed five days after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, making segregation in public accommodations illegal, as well as racial discrimination in public and in places of employment. The act also created a federal agency called the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), to prevent and investigate workplace discrimination. The following year, the Voting Rights Act was passed. It stopped the efforts of Southern lawmakers to make it more difficult for Black Americans to vote—though unfortunately today there are renewed efforts to make voting difficult for people of color, immigrants and others. Immigration policies of the US underwent a sea change with the passage of the Immigration Act of 1965. For more than 100 years, only a trickle of immigrants from the continent of Africa, Asia and Latin America were allowed to enter the US—for example, only 105 Chinese per year versus tens of thousands of Anglo Europeans per country each year. The Civil Rights Act of 1968 included the Fair Housing Act, Title VIII, which made it illegal to discriminate against people based on their race, religion, national origin, or sex in the selling, renting and financing of housing. These and other civil rights laws, arising from the Black-led struggle for equality, have brought incalculable benefits to other Americans and to the principles of a fair and just democracy. Yet even as these new civil rights laws became law, counter efforts to reverse civil rights laws were underway—for example, to undermine the fight to stop school desegregation by attacking school busing for desegregation, or to undermine voting rights to reduce the number of votes from Black and other communities of color. Filipino American and Chicano farmworkers united in California to fight for humane working conditions, as their union leaders—Larry Itliong and Cesar Chavez—rejected societal pressures to divide and pit their communities against each other.

Student activists at San Francisco State and University of California at Berkeley joined together with Black, Latinx and Native American protestors. These Asian students coined the term “Asian American,” giving a name to the multiethnic pan-Asian movement as they joined the Third World Liberation Front to stand united against racism and war.

Civil rights laws that broke down barriers in housing, for example, allowing people of color, including Asian Americans, to move into neighborhoods where they had previously been barred by restrictive covenants and discriminatory red-lining practices. Meanwhile, many refugees from the American war in Southeast Asia were moved into poor, largely Black, urban areas with no guidance or framework for any of the affected communities.

In Boston, Asian American, as well as Black and other communities came under attack from white opposition to busing for school desegregation.

As a result of such civil rights policies as affirmative action, women and people of color, including Asian Americans, began to break through barriers into jobs that they had been previously shut out of, professions ranging from policing, firefighting, construction and skilled trades to law, medicine, journalism, publishing, and into pathways to management and leadership.

Lifelong civil and human rights activist Yuri Kochiyama, who was a friend and supporter of Malcolm X, rushed to his side as he lay fallen from an assassin’s bullet.

During the long recession of the 1980s with its continual Japan-bashing, numerous possibly racist killngs of Asian Americans occurred, including the murder of Vincent Chin in Detroit by two white autoworkers, which catalyzed a new civil rights movement and contributed to the hate crimes laws that extended protections to immigrants, Asians and other groups of Americans who may be targets of hate.

South Asian Americans, Arab, Middle Eastern and Muslim Americans have increasingly faced harassment and hate crimes, especially since 9/11. Numerous Islamophobic killings have occurred, including the 2012 mass shooting at a Sikh gurdwara in Oak Creek, WI.

Asian American and Pacific Islander communities have long experienced harassment, injustice and violence from policing authorities, including immigration and the FBI. In the 1970s, Chol Soo Lee, a Korean immigrant, was wrongly convicted and imprisoned for murder, until investigative reporting by K.W. Lee sparked an national pan-Asian movement that led to Lee’s release.

In 1991, Latasha Harlins, a15-year-old Black teen, was shot and killed by a Los Angeles Korean American shopkeeper after an alleged shoplifting incident. Though convicted of manslaughter, the shopkeeper was sentenced to probation and fines— eerily similar to what Vincent Chin’s killers received. As in Detroit, outrage over the lenient sentence contributed to the 1992 LA uprisings over the acquittals of the white police who brutalized Rodney King and inflamed the existing tensions between Black residents and Asian Americans. An estimated two-thirds of the businesses destroyed in the rioting were Korean-owned. Affirmative action is another civil-rights-era strategy that has come under attack. In the 1960s, employers began to implement affirmative action plans to proactively hire people of more races, women, disabled people and other minorities, for example. In college admissions, many lawsuits have been filed against schools that have tried to increase diversity, starting with the anti-affirmative action lawsuit filed by Allan Bakke, a white male, whose case was decided in his favor by the Supreme Court in 1978. In the current day, opponents of affirmative action now maintain Asian Americans are most harmed by the policy—as a strategy to eliminate it. Efforts to update and revamp federal hate crime legislation began in 1968, with additional laws over the years to collect hate crimes statistics related to race, color, religion, national origin or ethnicity. In 2009, the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act broadened the categories of protection to include crimes motivated by actual or perceived gender, sexual orientation, gender identity and disability.

COMBATTING RACISM IN POLICING AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE

In 1991, a bystander in a nearby apartment building videotaped a group of Los Angeles police savagely beat Rodney King, an unarmed Black motorist. The video went viral through the news media in those pre-internet days, and people across the country were shocked by the graphic violence of the white police officers. It made more people aware of the dangerous and harmful experiences that many Black Americans have with police. Today, more than 30 years later, many more incidents of deadly police violence against Black people have been captured on cell phones, surveillance video and police body cameras, footage which shows the systemic violence that Black individuals and communities have experienced throughout history and that continues today. In 2020, George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer who knelt on Floyd’s neck for nine minutes and 29 seconds as the handcuffed man begged

for air and three other police watched. George Floyd’s murder, together with numerous other police killings of Black people, drew outrage and calls for systemic change, launching a global Movement for Black Lives. Due to institutional racism, Black Americans are far more likely to be poor, to be sent to prison, and to have had their educations disrupted. Inequalities that divide people into social classes are common in every society. Civil rights laws in the latter part of the 20th century attempted to address these inequities; these laws also advanced other underrepresented groups, including women and other people of color. But in recent decades, campaigns have attempted to reverse such programs by pitting different groups against one another. The voices for democracy and civil rights have achieved a great deal. However, institutional racism harms all Americans and remains an enormous and foundational problem for the entire country. By learning about the movements for equality, civil rights, and how communities working together in solidarity can overcome great obstacles, everyone can be involved in making America a fair and just place for all. —Numerous sources contributed to this article One of the police officers who stood and watched as George Floyd was suffocated to death was Asian American. Many Asian Americans, including Hmong Americans, have been actively organizing support for the movement for Black lives and to address anti-Blackness among Asians and systemic racism in society.

More than any other racial group, Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islanders (AANHPI) have the largest income gap between affluent and impoverished. Disaggregation of AANHPI data shows high poverty levels and low education attainment in various communities, which gets further obscured by the racist myth of the “model minority.”

The harmful “model minority” myth was invented in 1966 to use Asians as a wedge against Black people during the civil rights movement. Asian Americans have been used by white conservatives to dismantle civil rights laws and policies such as affirmative action.

The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed many systemic faultlines in society, including its devastating impact on low income and uninsured people, immigrant and undocumented populations, and those who are targets of violence due to race, ethnicity, age, gender, sexual orientation, and religion.

Conversation Questions

» Do civil rights apply to all people in the United States today? » How have non-Black people and communities benefited from racial justice movements started by Black Americans throughout history, and today? » How did the Civil Rights Movement pave the way for Asian American organizing efforts? » What are some of the critical civil rights movements you see building in your communities today?