Racism

In a previous essay, the author proposed a definition of chauvinism, e.g. chauvinism based on race, gender, sexual orientation, social class, religion, ability etc., which combined the attitudes and the rejective behaviors of prejudice. Let us review that definition of chauvinism focusing on "race." Chauvinism based on race (racial bigotry) can be characterized as:

This definition of chauvinism based upon "race" implies an exercise of power (individual and institutional) but is vague on the issue of macrocultural support of the discriminatory behaviors that deny power, privilege and status in "racial" out groups. As such, it is necessary for us to revisit our definition of racial chauvinism to address specifically the issues of power and cultural sanction that become pronounced under the rubric of racism.

Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) and Charles V. Hamilton (1967) emerged as important "marginal" activist/academic voices offering explanations for the social unrest of the 1960s that came to be known as the "Black Power" movement. Carmichael, the former president of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Hamilton, a researcher at the New York Metropolitan Applied Research Center added their voices to those who attributed the causes of the "Black revolt" to racism. They were, if not the first, among the first to make distinctions between overt and covert, individual and institutional racism.

Gordon Allport (1958) and Vincent Parrillo (1994) have described a range of behaviors, driven by prejudice, that act to deny individuals and groups power, privilege and status . These were designated:

The author asserted in his essay on "race" (See "Race: A Most Dangerous Myth) that a broad, general (and simple) categorization of racism is not possible. An individual (or individuals) who holds prejudices against members of other "racial" groups may direct the abovementioned behaviors against members of those groups, but can we call these behaviors "racism" According to Carmichael and Hamilton, individual racism:

Missing from the Carmichael/Hamilton definition is specific reference to direct or indirect sanction of these overt acts by a society's institutions and dominant culture. If an individual kills a member of another "race" in a fit of racial hatred, then s/he is a bigot and murderer. If an individual who belongs to a predominant culture and "racial" group kills a member of another "race" in a fit of racial hatred, and knows that because of the society s/he lives in there is a good likelihood that s/he will not be charged for his crime or may be convicted of a much lesser crime, s/he is a racist and a murderer and the murder is an act of overt, individual racism.

The ubiquity of overt, individual racist violence is conspicuous throughout the history of the United States of America. Most persistent "racial" groups in the United States -- those "nonwhite" groups who either chose not to assimilate or who were prevented from assimilating into the American macroculture -- have been victims of overt, individual racist violence.

1954 and the Brown vs. Board of Education in Topeka Kansas decision galvanized efforts among African Americans and their supporters to assault the symbols segregation, including the laws (Plessy vs. Ferguson) which made it legal. The following is an account from the web site of Liza Cozzens (1998) which summarizes this momentous decision:

An unwelcome outcome of the Brown victory was the entrenchment of segregation, especially in the southern states. This resistance was marked by incidents of racial violence and hate crimes. Many African Americans, particularly those forty-five years and older and regardless of where they were in the country at the time, have had impressed upon their individual and collective psyches the following acts of overt, individual racist violence. For many, consciousness of these acts extends beyond the actual into the symbolic:

In August, 1955, in Le Flore County, Mississippi, fourteen year old Emmett Till was brutally murdered and thrown from the Tallahatchie bridge into the Tallahatchie River (remember the popular hit "Ode to Billie Joe" sung by Bobbi Gentry?). His crime? It was alleged that he whistled at a white woman. Fredric B. Hudson chronicles the story:

September 23, 1957 was no ordinary school day for Thelma Mothershed Wair, Elizabeth Eckford, Gloria Ray Karlmark, Jefferson Thomas, Melba Patillo Beals, Ernest Green, Carlotta Walls Lanier, Minnijean Brown Trickey, and Terence Roberts. Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas was desegregating by court order. And these nine students, who would be known as The Little Rock Nine, would be the first African Americans to attend Little Rock's Central High.

As they drove toward the school that morning, the students knew what awaited them--an angry group of white protesters. Just a few weeks before, the nine had walked past just such a crowd to the high school's entrance. That morning, Arkansas National Guardsmen had turned the nine away, and, along with police, stood by while the mob pelted the black students cars with stones, assaulted them, and threatened their lives. The web site"We Shall Overcome: Historic Places of the Civil rights Movement" gives this account:

In April of 1959, in Poplarville, Mississippi, in Pearl River County, Mack Charles Parker, accused of the rape of a white woman, was abducted from the Poplarville jail by Klansmen and lynched. He never had a chance to defend himself in a court of law. Willie L. Robinson gives this personal account:

The Montgomery boycott pushed a young Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. into national prominence. In 1958 he wrote his book, Stride Toward Freedom, which outlined his philosophy of non-violent resistance. Four students in Greensboro, North Carolina attempted to put King's theory in action: According to the Spartacus. Schoolnet.com web site:

January 6, 1961 Macon Georgia judge William Bootle instructs the University of Georgia to admit Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes to the University of George, finding that they had been excluded from admission simply because they were black.

(Note: The Georgia-born writer notes with pride that the same University of Georgia who went to court to keep African Americans out of the university was in court in 2001 defending its affirmative action policy.)

In September 1962, the University of Mississippi was ordered by a federal court to admit James Meredith, a twenty-eight-year-old Air Force Veteran, as a student. Governor Ross Barnett said he would never allow the school to be integrated.

After days of violence and rioting by whites, Meredith, accompanied by federal officials, enrolled on October 1, 1962. The Spartacus Schoolnet web site reports:

1963 and the months of April, May and June in that year stand out as a watershed in the American struggle against racism and its pursuit of civil rights for all of its citizenry. From the Alabama State archives we read:

The popular movie, Mississippi Burning paints a rather distorted picture of the events surrounding the murder of Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman. It is important that some of those distortions are addressed. Les Bayless, writing in the People's Daily World, makes a noteworthy attempt to do just that. The following is excerpted from that article:

On October 7, 1967 the case of the United States versus Cecil Price et al. began in the Meridian Mississippi courtroom of Judge William Cox. Seven white men and five white women were selected as jurors. One white juror who admitted being a member of the KKK "a couple of years ago," was challenged by the prosecution. Trial Judge Cox denied the challenge. All twelve potential black jurors were dismissed by the Defense's preemptory challenge.

Three Ku Klux Klan informants made up the bulk of the case presented by U.S. Government prosecutors. These Klansmen were Wallace Miller, Delmar Dennis, and James Jordan. Douglas O. Linder reports the details of the governments case:

On the morning of October 20, 1967, the jury returned with its verdict. For the first time in the history of Mississippi white men were convicted for the killing of civil rights workers. Seven defendants, Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price, Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers, trigger man Wayne Roberts, Jimmy Snowden, Billey Wayne Posey, and Horace Barnett, were convicted. Eight men were acquitted, including Sheriff Lawrence Rainey, burial site owner Olen Burrage, and Exalted Cyclops Frank Herndon. The jury was unable to reach a verdict in the case of Edgar Ray Killen. Linder continues:

In February, 1965 the Rev. C. T. Vivian led a group black people up the stairs of the county courthouse in Selma, Ala. Their intent was to register to vote. Pam Adams relates what happened that day:

Jimmy Lee Jackson was beaten and shot by a state trooper as he tried to protect his mother and grandfather during a civil rights march in Marion, Alabama. The march from Selma to Montgomery, called to protest his death, led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act. The Sparticus Schoolnet web site remembers :

The assassination of Malcolm X on February 21, 1965 was one of the many watershed events in the American Civil Rights movement. The term "watershed" typically means critical point that marks a change of course; a turning point . This was certainly true of Malcolm's murder. Malcolm was more than a Afro-American civil rights leader. His performance of one of the five tenets of Islam, the Hajj, and his various trips to Africa and the Middle East made him an international figure. It is fair to say that he internationalized the American Civil Rights Movement, like no other leader with the exception of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Many speculate that his international popularity/notoriety as an Afro-American Freedom fighter and a self-proclaimed ally to the revolutionary movements throughout the world made him dangerous to "powerful interests" and ultimately got him killed. The circumstances of his death are shrouded in suspicious circumstances and popular conspiracy theories implicate almost everyone, including the F.B.I., C.I.A., the New York police department, the Nation of Islam, the honorable Elijah Muhammad and the current leader of the Nation of Islam, Minister Louis Farrakhan. Court T.V.'s Crime library web site presents this excerpted account of the assassination:

On Tuesday, March 9, 1965, three European American ministers from Boston, Massachusetts were attacked either by Klansmen or Klan sympathizers in downtown Selma, Alabama. One of them, Rev. James J. Reeb, received a fatal head wound. Rev. Reeb was eulogized by The Rev. (Dr.) Martin Luther King:

On March 25, 1965, a European American housewife from Detroit, Viola Gregg Liuzzo, who had come to Selma, Alabama to support the Alabama campaign of the Civil Rights movement, was shot and killed by a carload of Ku Klux Klan nightriders while ferrying marchers back to Selma from Montgomery. From the University of South Florida Student Affairs web site we learn:

On June 6, 1966, James Meredith, one of the first African Americans to integrate a major southern university, the University of Mississippi, was shot on the second day of his march through Mississippi to determine if the state was safe for people of African descent :

On April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony at the Lorraine motel in Memphis Tennessee, the Rev. Martin Luther King was killed by a sniper's bullet. Earl caldwell writing for the new york Times provides the official account:

In almost all of the foregoing acts of racist violence, few of the criminals were caught, convicted or sentenced with the maximum penalties these crimes carry. (James Earl Ray was convicted of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, but questions of a larger conspiracy still loom large in the minds of those close to the incident. Bryant and Milam were acquitted of the murder of Emmett Till. No one was charged in the lynching of Mack Parker. Byron de la Beckwith was finally convicted of the murder of Medgar Evers after thirty-one years in February, 1994. Klansmen accused of murdering Viola Liuzzo were arrested and tried in 1965/66 but their court case ended in a mistrial. They were finally convicted of depriving Ms. Liuzzo of her civil rights.

In the other instances, e.g., the Birmingham bombing arrests and convictions were finally made in 1977 (Chamblis) and 2001 and 2002 for Blanton and Cherry respectively, almost forty years after the bombing. Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price, Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers, trigger man Wayne Roberts, Jimmy Snowden, Billey Wayne Posey, and Horace Barnett, were convicted of violating the civil rights of Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner by murdering them, even though the Sheriff, Mayor and others implicated. were acquitted.

The failure to arrest, convict and punish individuals who perpetrate "racial" crimes exemplifies direct or indirect support of these crimes by the predominant culture and its institutions.

Several distinguished African American scholars have attempted to differentiate racism from racial bigotry by introducing into the definition of "racism" an element which may be described as the "power to oppress."

James M. Jones (1972), professor of psychology at the University of Delaware, provides a most elegant definition of this type. Racism, he says:

This definition encompasses racism at the individual, institutional and cultural level. The "exercise of power against a racial group defined as inferior by individuals . . . with the intentional or unintentional support of the entire culture" would be what Jones would describe as individual racism. This definition is certainly descriptive of the patterns of European or "white" racism and of course its most virulent form, "white" supremacy.

There is little doubt that the concept "race," hierarchical (biological and otherwise) classifications of human beings and the systematic oppression of whole groups of people because of their "race" are inventions of eighteenth and nineteenth century European cultural thought and European capitalism. These concepts and practices must be relentlessly resisted and opposed whenever and wherever they surface.

Jones' definition and others like it, however, may leave the impression that the victims of European or "white" racism can't be "racist." Are "people of color" are less culpable, blameworthy, censurable or reprehensible when they commit acts of verbal abuse (ethnophaulisms), avoidance, differential treatment, physical abuse and murder? Is it fair to say that because they neither derive power from nor have the support of the dominant culture to exercise power against the "superior" or dominant racial group that their racial chauvinism is any less odious?

Racial bigotry -- the attitudes of racial prejudice and behaviors of discrimination acted out by individuals without institutional or macrocultural sanction or support -- is no less an evil than the same behaviors which are acted out by individuals driven by "white" racism.

The magnitude of institutional or cultural racism with respect to its historical "body count" and its potential to cause human suffering for a large number of people is certainly greater than individual acts of "bigotry." Certainly individual acts of racial "bigotry" do not compare in matters of scale with genocide or "ethnic cleansing." On the level of individual, interpersonal interactions, however, ethnophaulisms, avoidance, differential treatment, physical abuse and murder are just as heinous whether the perpetrator is "white," "black," "brown," "yellow" or "red."

The writer has had the disconcerting experience of witnessing the relief play across the faces of the victims of European or "white" racism when they "learn" that they are not, by definition, racist. They have been told that they are not racist when they describe or characterize members of other "racial" groups with derogatory names, words and expressions; minimize or avoid completely any social interaction whatsoever with them. They have been told that they are not racist when they treat members of other "racial" groups differentially and unequally, when they physically abuse and/or murder members of other "racial" groups. They have been told that they are not racist because they don't have the power to oppress large groups of people or the direct or indirect support of the dominant culture.

The distinction between acts of racism and bigotry with respect to the impact on the individual victim is difficult to discern, especially by the victim. Whether one calls it racism, chauvinism or bigotry, the humiliation, the pain, and the mortality experienced by the victim is just as acute -- and just as morally repugnant.

There is another kind of racism, which is greater in destructive scope than the worst of overt, individually racist (or racially bigoted) acts. It is a kind of racism that

If individual racism is overt acts by individuals rooted in racial prejudice which cause death, injury or the violent destruction of property, then institutional racism consists of overt and covert acts by institutions rooted in racial prejudice which cause death, injury, and the destruction or confiscation of property and which deny power, privilege, status and personal freedom to members of other so-called "racial" groups.

Slavery and the Naturalization Act of 1790 are probably the most obvious early examples of American institutional racism. According to Parillo:

The history of the United States of America provides as clear a theater as any in which one may observe the villainous role of institutional racism develop and unfold. The United States, with its predominant European population, more than any of the other European colonies enjoyed an almost complete transfer of European cultural and capitalist institutions to its shores. In the process, it established a fairly synthetic Anglo-European macroculture and a "powerful capitalism" built upon the exploited labor of millions of African slaves. According to Walter Rodney:

The racist beliefs promulgated by European and American interests that served to justify the African slave trade have already been cited and discussed in "Race: A Most Dangerous Myth. The system of slavery as a legal and socioeconomic practice in America is as clear an example of institutional racism as any other.

Mining, the production of sugar and the lucrative profits to be made there from impelled several European countries to conquer and enslave millions of the native peoples in the islands of the Caribbean, Brazil and South America in the 16th century. Military operations against the native populations, the deplorable conditions in the mines and on the sugar plantations coupled with the indigenous people's lack of immunity to European diseases decimated those native populations. Jose Barreiro (1999) describes the initial contact with these native people:

Taino is the name that includes such groups as the Ciboney, Guanahatabey, Lucayo, Arawak. Macorix, Jivaro, Cuajiro, Ciguayo (Bohio), Boricuas and the Caribe, the proud people who welcomed the Europeans sailing under the charter of Spain into what is now known as the Caribbean (particularly the Bahamas, Haiti and the Dominican Republic) and South America. Barreiro continues:

Within 20 years of these first contacts, the native populations had lost their good will toward the European. Driven by a lust for gold and for women, the Spanish began to enslave the natives. There was of course met with resistance, but the military might and the "biological warfare" of the European was overwhelming:

The Portuguese, soon to become dynastic partners with Spain, leveled the forests on the Madeira islands in 1420 and turned them into farmland. Here the sugar plantation, which was to become a major source of revenue of early colonial economy, was developed. The first slaves from the African coast nearby were brought to Madeira to cut and harvest sugar cane. With the progress of the Portuguese discoverers along Africa's west coast, the focus of sugar production moved to Sao Tome (settled by the Portuguese in 1483), and later to Brazil, which from the 1530's onward became the world's major supplier of sugar.

The native populations in Brazil fared no better than their cousins in the Caribbean. By 1600 Indian resistance had been broken in many places either by military action, missionary activity, or by epidemic disease. Millions of Africans were transported across the Atlantic and sold into slavery in the Americas. With the growth of the African slave trade, slavery in the Western mind became associated with race as with the collapse of Native American populations, it was Africans who were enslaved in huge numbers. Good European Christians who would neither consider nor tolerate the enslavement of other Europeans altered their Christian mind set to allow the enslaving black Africans.

When the English established colonies in North America, they too, tried to enslave the native populations. The colonial "wars" against the Pequots, the Tuscaroras, the Yamasees, and numerous other Indian nations led to the enslavement and relocation of tens of thousands of Native Americans. http://www.innercity.org/holt/slavechron.html

Rick Green (2002), writing for the Northeast Magazine, relates this illustrative incident:

In the late summer of 1619 a Dutch Ship, a man of war, appears out of a violent storm in Jamestown harbor. The ship's cargo hold is empty except for twenty or so Africans whom the captain and his crew have recently robbed from a Spanish ship. The captain exchanges the Africans for food, then sets sail. The arrival of these Africans changed the "complexion" of American slavery.

The Encyclopedia AfricanaOnline in an article on American slavery suggests that the native American did not make the ideal slave, at at least for American agricultural interests. They were to say the least troublesome:

What made the African such an "ideal slave?" Africans captured by European slavers or sold into slavery by other Africans were more often than not farmers and cattle-breeders. Some slavers targeted Africans who had special skills in the cultivation of rice and other labor intensive crops. More importantly, Africans were generally immune to Old World diseases (African themselves brought malaria to the New World) and they had nowhere to escape to once brought to America. Audrey Smedley (1997) writes:

Yet contrary to popular opinion, Africans came from cultures that had cosmologies, philosophies industries, arts, sciences, crafts, governments and commerce. They were no more heathen than the Europeans themselves. Branding Africans heathen was nothing more than an attempt on the part of some Europeans to assuage their guilt.

By the early part of the 18th century, slavery was fully established for Africans and their descendants. Large numbers of slaves flooded the southern colonies and even some northern ones. Sometimes they outnumbered whites, and the laws governing slavery became increasingly harsher. It is beyond the scope of this essay to engage in a full blown discussion of slavery. The following is a summary characterization of American slavery as an instrument of institutional racism.

The writer would be remiss if he left the reader with the impression that the African meekly accepted his lot without resistance. Consonant with white supremacist notions of the suitability of the African for servitude is the missing information in historical documents about the uprisings and revolts of enslaved Africans against their enslavement. Marxist historian Herbert S. Aptheker in his book Negro Slave Revolts (1943/1993) was one of the first to portray the African as something less than docile and servile and accepting of slavery. According to Richard Hines:

The ultimate slave rebellion in the 18th century that put American slave owners in constant fear happened on the island of Haiti in 1792. According to Joanne Spadaro:

Gabriel Prosser led the first major slave revolt in the south. 24 year old Prosser, a blacksmith, was an educated slave and because of his trade, was able to move freely about, being hired out by his master, Thomas Prosser. In 1800, Prosser began plan to take the city of Richmond, Virginia, by force.

By August of 1800, he had an army of thousands of armed slaves. He was betrayed by two of his followers who leaked the plan to white men in Richmond. On the day of the scheduled revolt, September 22, 1800, with over a thousand followers ready to attack Richmond, the weather also betrayed Gabriel because the bridges into Richmond were washed out in a flood. Prosser postponed the attack that day which allowed the Virginia militia to muster and attack him on the next day. Prosser and his followers were hanged. If Prosser had not been betrayed and if the bridges had not washed out, it is almost certain that he would have succeeded in capturing the city of Richmond.
http://www.co.henrico.va.us/rec/gabriel.htm

Regarded by some as one of the most courageous black men to ever to threaten the racist foundations of America, Denmark Vesey (1767-1822), also planned an abortive slave revolt. Vesey hate slavery and slaveholders. A brilliant man, Vesey plotted to revolt against the slaveholders in Charleston south Carolina. The Africawithin.com web site gives this account:

The human side of this story is told ably by Steve Courtney. It is a story worth hearing and is retold here in Courtney's words in its entirety:

The following chronology of African slave revolts puts paid to any notion that the African was by nature accepting of his fate as a human being destined for involuntary servitude. (The writer has also included accounts of William Lloyd Garrison and John Brown as two of the enormous number of well-meaning European-Americans who worked to end the nefarious institution of slavery)

(These accounts were culled from the cited web sites and literature, edited and reassembled by the writer. The writer is responsible for any errors in dates, times or representation. JM )

Two particular racist ideas promulgated by European and American interests served to justify the African slave trade and permeate the entire fabric of American life in its aftermath. In its long and ugly history in the United States, white racism has improvised a thousand variations on these two basic themes. The first is that African people are born with inferior brains and a limited capacity for mental growth. The second is the personalities of African people tend to be abnormal, whether by nature or nurture.

These concepts of inferiority and pathology are interrelated and reinforce each other. Both have served to sanctify a hierarchical social order in which "the Negroes place" is forever ordained by his genes and the accumulated disabilities of his past.

From early invocations of scriptural authority, to sophisticated treatises rooted in "scientific" racism, "white" racist/"white"supremist assumptions and beliefs have been prominent in the core of American cultural thought. These assumptions and beliefs gave sanction to institutions and institutional policies and practices that denied power, privilege and status to people of African descent . The same effects have been experienced by other cultural groups beyond the pale of the phenotypic and genotypic boundaries of "white" racism/supremacy.

Carolyn Harper-Brown, on her web site, has cited ten (10) examples in the works of other authors, including Thomas and Sillen who expose white racism/white supremacy in the canons of higher education to the halls of government:

Lewis Terman
http://www.aceviper.net/aceviper_net/ace_intelligence/aceviper_detailed_history_of_the_iq_test/lterman.gif

Nobles, W.W. (1986). African Psychology: Toward its reclamation, reascension, and revitalization. Oakland: The Institute for the Advanced Study of Black Family Life and Culture. "(Black and other ethnic minority children) are uneducable beyond the nearest rudiments of training. No amount of school instruction will ever make them intelligent voters or capable citizens in the sense of the world...their dullness seems to be racial, or at least inherent in the family stock from which they come...Children of this group should be segregated in special classes and be given instruction which is concrete and practical. They cannot master abstractions, but they can be made efficient workers...There is no possibility at present of convincing society that they should not be allowed to reproduce, although from a eugenic point of view they constitute a grave problem because of their unusual prolific breeding." Lewis Terman, The measurement of intelligence, 1916.

McDougall, W. (1921). Is America safe for democracy? New York: Scribner, pp 54-55. The colored men of this country are largely, I suppose, of mixed White and Negro descent. It may be suggested that the native inferiority in respect to this quality (intelligence) is an evil effect of crossbreeding of these two widely dissimilar races. This is a possibility. But facts are strongly against it. First the colored men of the Northern states showed distinct superiority to those of the South. Have they not a large proportion of White blood? I do not know, but I suspect it...We have allegation frequently made, that every colored man who has risen to distinction has been of mixed blood. It is perhaps difficult to prove the rule, but it is difficult to find exceptions."
.

Sullivan, H. S. (1964). The fusion of psychiatry and social science. New York: Norton, p. 103. "Heterosexual activity seems to be one of the few unrestricted recreational outlets (for Negroes). I judge that there are many definitely promiscuous people and that this laxity arises from factors of personality development as well as from a promiscuous culture."

Norman Bradburn
http://www.the-scientist.com/yr1997/sept/sep_art/bradburn.jpg

Flanders, J. (1976), Practical Psychology. New York: Harper and Row, p. 15. "At the time of his writing, Bradburn's findings represent Psychology's best guess about the nature of psychological well-being. It is interesting to see where such well being is found nowadays and what factors seem likely to produce it. Bradburn found the usual socioeconomic indices to be strongly related to overall psychological well being. Having a higher income is associated with greater well being at all ages, even with the effect of education level removed. If you have a higher level of education, you are likely to feel happier, but only if you are under 35 years of age. Being black means less happiness." Norman Bradburn, The structure of psychological well-being, 1969

Ronald Takaki
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2002/11/images/takaki.jpg

Ronald Takaki (1993, citing Labaree, 1959) reports that the venerable American statesman, Benjamin Franklin, noted with alarm "that the number of 'purely white people' in the world was proportionately very small" (Takaki, p. 79):

.All Africa was black or tawny, Asian chiefly tawny, and "America (exclusive of the newcomers) wholly so." The English were the "principle Body of white people," and Franklin wanted more of this type in America.

Benjamin Franklin
http://trillian.com/ben/ben.jpg

"And while we are . . . Scouring our Planet, by clearing America of Woods, and so making this Side of our globe reflect a brighter Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in Mars or Venus," he declared, "why should we in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its People? Why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawnys, of increasing the lovely White . . . " (Takaki, p. 79).

THE NATURALIZATION ACT OF 1790

With respect to the Naturalization Act of 1790, Takaki contends that it defined political membership in the new American republic:

Prospective citizens would be required to go through a probationary period so they would have time to understand republican principles and demonstrate "proper and decent behavior."

Through this careful screening, the government would exclude "vagrants," "paupers," and "bad men."   But the policy makers went further in their efforts to create a homogeneous society. Applicants for naturalized citizenship were required to reside in the United States for two years as well as provide "proof" of good character in court and document their republican fitness.They also had to be "white" (Takaki, p. 80).

Abigail Graber, a 2002 student at Digital Directions comments on the 1790 immigration act on her web site. Her student insight is instructive:

At the First Congress, the delegates created the Naturalization Act of 1790, the racist concepts of which would dominate federal and social policy towards immigrants for several hundred years to come. The Naturalization Act of 1790 revolved around the policy that the government would only grant citizenship to any immigrant “being a free white person” (U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates 2). The legislation of the First Congress only discusses the government’s policy towards naturalization; however, immigration and naturalization have always been closely, if not identically managed by the national government, and are concepts so interrelated as to become nearly inseparable (Schock). To be denied the full rights and recognition that stem from being a citizen of the country in which one resides due to an insubstantial and irrelevant quality, such as race, “dehumanizes” a person (Liptak). While citizens may enjoy full protection from the government of their constitutional rights and full public acknowledgement of their rightful place in a civilized society, those specifically denied naturalization possess neither insurance of dignity and happiness. From both of these points, one can reasonably infer that one of the primary purposes of the First Congress in creating the Naturalization Act of 1790 was to discourage immigration to the United States by non-white persons. While the Fourteenth Amendment later granted citizenship to African-Americans in the mid-1800s, immigrants of other nationalities, continued to be discriminated against through federal immigration policy for nearly 100 years after the Civil War. http://www.mith2.umd.edu/digdir/students/agraber/research.html

Samuel G. Morgan
http://www.pbs.org/wotp/resources/images/doc/SamuelMorton.jpg

The "inferior brain" ascribed to Africans and "limited mental capacity" rendered them unsuitable for the requisite republican citizen performance criteria -- hard work, self-control and the accumulation of wealth. Dr. Samuel G. Morton in 1840 gave the white supremist ideologues the "scientific" evidence needed to prove this long held theory. From PBS.Org we learn:

Samuel G. Morton (1799-1851), a Philadelphia doctor, collected and measured hundreds of human skulls in order to confirm that there are inborn differences among the races -- above all, a difference in brain size. His systematic large-scale experiments made him a pioneer of American science, especially the discipline of Physical Anthropology, which studies the biology of human populations.

Living in a time of slavery, when Indians were in full retreat, Morton was confident whites were naturally superior. He belonged to a school of thought called 'polygenism,' which held that the different races are different species, with separate origins. This contradicts the Biblical story of Adam and Eve. Morton also thought he could identify any skull's racial origin simply by measuring it. Modern physical anthropologists no longer make this claim. And 'race' is now seen not as a biological fact, but as a social and cultural perception.

Morton assumed that brain size bore a direct relation to intelligence, so he tried to rank the races by measuring the brain cavities of human skulls. He poured skulls full of lead pellets, then dumped the pellets into a glass measuring cup. When he found that individuals within each race varied widely he set out to compare averages by measuring many skulls.

He ended up with more than 300 Native American skulls from North and South America, probably because they were the easiest to obtain. He also had 100 skulls from Egyptian mummies and a sampling of skulls from other races and populations. His tables assign the highest brain capacity to Europeans (with the English highest of all). Second rank goes to Chinese, third to Southeast Asians and Polynesians, fourth to American Indians, and last place to Africans and Australian aborigines.
http://www.pbs.org/wotp/scientists/samuel_morton/

(The writer would be remiss if he didn't point out that anthropologist Stephen Jay Gould found that Morton had manipulated his data to insure the outcome he wanted.)

Dred Scott
http://www.nps.gov/jeff/images/scott.jpg

The stresses of republicanism, according to the Founding Fathers of American democracy, would be much too traumatic for the African's delicate mental health. Slavery kept African people happy and safe "within the limits of . . . [their] . . . handicap." Thus no "Black" immigrant was suitable for citizenship. Neither were former slaves who found themselves living in "free" states.

This idea of the unsuitability of the African, including freedmen and former slaves, for citizenship so integral to the Immigration act of 1790 was a central cohesive element for subsequent legal decisions and institutional practices amounting to differential treatment of the African in America. The Supreme Court of the United States has a checkered history when it comes to the fundamental rights of its African citizens. It has in several landmark decisions been as complicit as any other American institution in promulgating white supremacy and institutional racism. The Dred Scott decision of 1857 bears this out:

Dred Scott was born a slave and had been taken by his master, an army surgeon, into the free portion of the Louisiana territory. Upon his master's death, Scott argued that he was entitled to freedom. He contended that since slavery was outlawed in the free territory, he had become a free man there, and "once free, always free." The argument was rejected by a Missouri court, but Scott and his white supporters managed to take this case into higher federal court, where the issue simply became whether a slave had a legal right to even sue in a federal court. So the first question the Supreme Court had to decide was whether it had jurisdiction to rule over this case. If Scott had standing - that is, a legal right - then the Court had jurisdiction, and the justices could go on to decide the merits of his claim. But if, as a slave, Scott did not have standing, then the Court could dismiss the suit for lack of jurisdiction.

The Court ruled that Scott, a slave, could not achieve U.S. citizenship and therefore could not exercise the privilege of a free citizen to sue in federal courts. That should have been the end of the case, but then Chief Justice Taney and the other southern sympathizers on the Court hoped that a definitive ruling would settle the issue of slavery in the territories once and for all. They therefore continued on to rule that the Missouri Compromise of 1820 was unconstitutional since Congress could not forbid citizens from taking their property, i.e., slaves, into any territory owned by the United States. A slave, Taney ruled, was property, nothing more, and could never be a citizen.

Dred Scott's case holds a unique place in American constitutional history as an example of the Supreme Court trying to impose a judicial solution on a political problem. The ruling, which helped to precipitate the Civil War, has long been considered one of the court's great "self-inflicted" wounds. http://supreme.lp.findlaw.com/supreme_court/landmark/dredscott.html

Even after slavery was abolished, racist beliefs regarding the African's mental capacity and very humanity had become so fundamentally a part of the core beliefs of American cultural thought that, with the exception of the brief period known as Reconstruction, they manifested themselves in state and local laws ("Jim Crow" laws and the Black Codes), Supreme Court decisions (Plessy vs. Ferguson), and official policy (segregation) which legitimized differential racial treatment.

The so-called Black Codes were said to represent the Southern effort to "solve the problem of the freedmen." What was the problem? President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, as the nation approached its third year of bloody civil war. The proclamation declared "that all persons held as slaves" within the rebellious states "are, and henceforward shall be free." The Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in December 1865, abolished slavery in all areas of the United States. In the summer of 1866, Congress passed two bills over President Andrew Johnson's veto. The first, the Freedmen's Bureau Bill, extended the powers of a government agency that had been established in 1865 for the purpose of providing medical, educational, and financial assistance for the millions of impoverished southern blacks. The second, the Civil Rights Bill, gave full citizenship to blacks, along with all the rights enjoyed by other Americans.

The aim of "Reconstruction" implemented by Congress and which lasted from 1866 to 1877, was to reorganize and readmit the Southern states after the Civil War back into the Union. It was intended to define the means by which the African and the European might live together in a non slave society. Sandra Thomas, in Frederick Douglass Abolitionist/Editor writes:

During the years after the war, black and white teachers from the North and South, missionary organizations, churches and schools worked tirelessly to give the emancipated population the opportunity to learn. Former slaves of every age took advantage of the opportunity to become literate. Grandfathers and their grandchildren sat together in classrooms seeking to obtain the tools of freedom.

After the Civil War, with the protection of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, African Americans enjoyed a period when they were allowed to vote, actively participate in the political process, acquire the land of former owners, seek their own employment, and use public accommodations. Opponents of this progress, however, soon rallied against the former slaves' freedom and began to find means for eroding the gains for which many had shed their blood. http://www.history.rochester.edu/class/douglass/part5.html

White southerners were angered and threatened by this wave of change. In the minds of some, the image of former slaves parading themselves around as equals to white men was unbearable. They felt that white womanhood was particularly vulnerable and kept themselves up worrying at night at the thought of delicate white women being ravaged by "lusty, subhuman black savages" They believed that these "freedmen" posed a threat to every thing good about white southern life and livelihood. The Black Codes, from 1865 through 1866 and "Jim Crow" laws from 1877 through the mid 1960's were an attempt to keep the "nigra in his place."

White southerners created the Black Codes in 1865. These served to control and inhibit the freedom of former slaves. These codes controlled virtually all aspects of black life, keeping African Americans from enjoying the freedoms they had been granted by law.  Thomas continues:

The codes varied in harshness: those of Georgia, for example, were notably lenient; those of Louisiana and Mississippi severe. "The legislation," says Professor Fleming, "showed the combined influence of the old laws for free negroes, the vagrancy laws of the North and South for whites, the customs of slavery times, the British West Indies legislation for ex-slaves, and the regulations of the U. S. War and Treasury Departments and of the Freedmen's Bureau" ... Most of these black laws were suspended by the military governors of the reconstructed states, and the Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment were designed to protect the negro in his civil and legal rights. http://www.history.rochester.edu/class/douglass/part5.html

The Black Codes were different from state to state, but most contained the same kinds of restrictions. They regulated where the freedman could live, who he or she could marry and their legal status as a witness in a court of law. It was usually a major felony for an African to marry a white person. Any children of such a union were usually designated black. The following is excerpted from the Black Codes of Mississippi :

CIVIL RIGHTS OF FREEDMEN IN MISSISSIPPI

Sec.l. Be it enacted, . . . That all freedmen, free negroes, and mulattoes may sue and be sued, implead and be impleaded, in all the courts of law and equity of this State, and may acquire personal property, and chores in action, by descent or purchase, and may dispose of the same in the same manner and to the same extent that white persons may. Provided, That the provisions of this section shall not be so construed as to allow any freedman, free negro, or mulatto to rent or lease any lands or tenements except in incorporated cities or towns, in which places the corporate authorities shall control the same. . . .

Sec. .3. . . . All freedmen, free negroes, or mulattoes who do now and have here before lived and cohabited together as husband and wife shall be taken and held in law as legally married, and the issue shall be taken and held as legitimate for all purposes, that it shall not be lawful for any freedman, free negro, or mulatto to intermarry with any white person; nor for any white person to intermarry with any freedman, free negro, or mulatto; and any person who shall so intermarry, shall be deemed guilty of felony and on conviction thereof shall be confined in the State penitentiary for life" and those shall be deemed freedmen, free negroes, and mulattoes who are of pure negro blood, and those descended from a negro to the third generation, inclusive, though one ancestor in each generation may have been a white person.

Sec. 4; . . . In addition to cases in which freedmen, free negroes, and mulattoes are now by law competent witnesses, freedmen, free negroes, or mulattoes shall be competent in civil cases, when a party or parties to the suit, either plaintiff or plaintiffs, defendant or defendants, and a white person or white persons, is or are the opposing party or parties, plaintiff or plaintiffs, defendant or defendants. They shall also be competent witnesses in all criminal prosecutions where the crime charged is alleged to have been committed by a white person upon or against the person or property of a freedman, free negro, or mulatto., Provided, that in all cases said witnesses shall be examined in open court, on the stand; except, however, they may be examined before the grand jury, and shall in all cases be subject to the rules and tests of the common law as to competency and credibility. . . . http://www.iath.virginia.edu/seminar/unit6/blmscode.jpg

Black Codes required that the former slave work. The freedman could be arrested as a vagrant if he or she didn't work. Most of the work available to the freedman was agricultural or domestic labor. The Codes dictated their hours of labor, duties, and the behavior. Even the freedom to chose a type of work was often regulated. Racist beliefs suggested that blacks were predestined to "work the land. " Southern agriculture was still dependent upon black labor. With the abolition of slavery, white southern agriculturalist had to devise means to keep former slaves tied to the land. The Black codes served this purpose. In some states, a special license and certificate from a local judge attesting to a freedman's skill had to be obtained in order to pursue work in any occupation other than in agriculture or domestic work.The Black Codes were suspended by 1866. They were soon replaced shortly thereafter in 1877 by the infamous Jim Crow Laws.

http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/academics/courses/is182/s01/263.gif

Who was Jim Crow? Ronald L. F. Davis gives us this answer:

The term Jim Crow originated in a song performed by [Thomas Dartmouth] "Daddy" Rice, a white minstrel show entertainer in the 1830s. Rice covered his face with charcoal paste or burnt cork to resemble a black man, and then sang and danced a routine in caricature of a silly black person. By the 1850s, this Jim Crow character, one of several stereotypical images of black inferiority in the nation's popular culture, was a standard act in the minstrel shows of the day. How it became a term synonymous with the brutal segregation and disfranchisement of African Americans in the late nineteenth-century is unclear. What is clear, however, is that by 1900, the term was generally identified with those racist laws and actions that deprived African Americans of their civil rights by defining blacks as inferior to whites, as members of a caste of subordinate people.

Rice was said to be inspired by "an elderly Negro in Louisville, Kentucky crooning and dancing to a song that ended with the same chorus:

'Weel about and turn about and do jis so, Eb'ry time I weel about I jump Jim Crow.' "
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/academics/courses/is182/s01/paint167.html

In one of the incredible ironies of American life, the minstrel show, with white actors imitating parodying black folk may be credited as being the genesis of the megaAmerican entertainment industry including Vaudeville, Broadway and Las Vegas. Back then in 1832, Rice's imitation of the Negro's song and dance routine was a show stopper. American comedy was defined in the act of imitating a "silly old coon." It is said that Rice's routine was so popular all over the country that he was finally able to hit the big time in New York City. He then took his show abroad to London and Dublin.

http://www.holtlaborlibrary.org/images/jimcrow.gif

But Jim Crow was not funny to the African American . David Pilgrim ably tells the ugly tale of Jim Crow:

Jim Crow was the name of the racial caste system which operated primarily, but not exclusively in southern and border states, between 1877 and the mid-1960s. Jim Crow was more than a series of rigid anti-Black laws. It was a way of life. Under Jim Crow, African Americans were relegated to the status of second class citizens. Jim Crow represented the legitimization of anti-Black racism. Many Christian ministers and theologians taught that Whites were the Chosen people, Blacks were cursed to be servants, and God supported racial segregation. Craniologists, eugenicists, phrenologists, and Social Darwinists, at every educational level, buttressed the belief that Blacks were innately intellectually and culturally inferior to Whites. Pro-segregation politicians gave eloquent speeches on the great danger of integration: the mongrelization of the White race. Newspaper and magazine writers routinely referred to Blacks as niggers, coons, and darkies; and worse, their articles reinforced anti-Black stereotypes. Even children's games portrayed Blacks as inferior beings.... All major societal institutions reflected and supported the oppression of Blacks. http://www.ferris.edu/news/jimcrow/what.htm

African Americans born in the south prior to the 1960 can remember vividly the oppression of Jim Crow Laws and Jim Crow etiquette:

The Jim Crow system was undergirded by the following beliefs or rationalizations: Whites were superior to Blacks in all important ways, including but not limited to intelligence, morality, and civilized behavior; sexual relations between Blacks and Whites would produce a mongrel race which would destroy America; treating Blacks as equals would encourage interracial sexual unions; any activity which suggested social equality encouraged interracial sexual relations; if necessary, violence must be used to keep Blacks at the bottom of the racial hierarchy. The following Jim Crow etiquette norms show how inclusive and pervasive these norms were:

A Black male could not offer his hand (to shake hands) with a White male because it implied being socially equal. Obviously, a Black male could not offer his hand or any other part of his body to a White woman, because he risked being accused of rape.

Blacks and Whites were not supposed to eat together. If they did eat together, Whites were to be served first, and some sort of partition was to be placed between them.

Under no circumstance was a Black male to offer to light the cigarette of a White female -- that gesture implied intimacy.

Blacks were not allowed to show public affection toward one another in public, especially kissing, because it offended Whites.

Jim Crow etiquette prescribed that Blacks were introduced to Whites, never Whites to Blacks. For example: "Mr. Peters (the White person), this is Charlie (the Black person), that I spoke to you about."

Whites did not use courtesy titles of respect when referring to Blacks, for example, Mr., Mrs., Miss., Sir, or Ma'am. Instead, Blacks were called by their first names. Blacks had to use courtesy titles when referring to Whites, and were not allowed to call them by their first names.

If a Black person rode in a car driven by a White person, the Black person sat in the back seat, or the back of a truck.

White motorists had the right-of-way at all intersections. http://www.ferris.edu/news/jimcrow/what.htm

"If you were black, get back!" Or so the saying went. If you were an African American living the American South from 1877 to 1967, you didn't look the white man in the eye. You knew to step off of the sidewalk when a white person approached. If you went to a white person's house, you had to go to the back door. If you road the bus, you had to ride in the back of the bus or give up your seat in the front or middle of the bus if a white person boarded the bus and needed a seat. Even if you knew a white person was lying, you didn't dare say so. Nor did a black man ever imply that a white person's intentions were less than honorable. You never let the white person suspect you were as smart as or smarter than he or her. You didn't laugh at white people. You didn't curse at them. And under no circumstances, if you were a male, did you ever say anything about a white woman. Any breaches in this etiquette could get you killed.

The Martin Luther King Interpretive Site staff compiled the following examples of formal Jim Crow Laws:

Barbers. No colored barber shall serve as a barber (to) white girls or women (Georgia)

Blind Wards. The board of trustees shall...maintain a separate building...on separate ground for the admission, care, instruction, and support of all blind persons of the colored or black race (Louisiana).

Burial. The officer in charge shall not bury, or allow to be buried, any colored persons upon ground set apart or used for the burial of white persons (Georgia).

Buses. All passenger stations in this state operated by any motor transportation company shall have separate waiting rooms or space and separate ticket windows for the white and colored races (Alabama)

Child Custody. It shall be unlawful for any parent, relative, or other white person in this State, having the control or custody of any white child, by right of guardianship, natural or acquired, or otherwise, to dispose of, give or surrender such white child permanently into the custody, control, maintenance, or support, of a negro (South Carolina).

Education. The schools for white children and the schools for negro children shall be conducted separately (Florida).

Libraries. The state librarian is directed to fit up and maintain a separate place for the use of the colored people who may come to the library for the purpose of reading books or periodicals (North Carolina) Mental Hospitals. The Board of Control shall see that proper and distinct apartments are arranged for said patients, so that in no case shall Negroes and white persons be together (Georgia).

Militia. The white and colored militia shall be separately enrolled, and shall never be compelled to serve in the same organization. No organization of colored troops shall be permitted where white troops are available and where whites are permitted to be organized, colored troops shall be under the command of white officers (North Carolina).

Nurses. No person or corporation shall require any White female nurse to nurse in wards or rooms in hospitals, either public or private, in which negro men are placed (Alabama).

Prisons. The warden shall see that the white convicts shall have separate apartments for both eating and sleeping from the negro convicts (Mississippi).

Reform Schools. The children of white and colored races committed to the houses of reform shall be kept entirely separate from each other (Kentucky).

Teaching. Any instructor who shall teach in any school, college or institution where members of the white and colored race are received and enrolled as pupils for instruction shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and upon conviction thereof, shall be fined... (Oklahoma).

Wine and Beer. All persons licensed to conduct the business of selling beer or wine...shall serve either white people exclusively or colored people exclusively and shall not sell to the two races within the same room at any time (Georgia). http://www.ferris.edu/news/jimcrow/what.htm

http://1912.history.ohio-state.edu/race/images/voteinsouth.jpg

The the agents of white supremacy relied not only on the legal institutions to enforce their racism, but terrorism as well. According to Davis:

Segregation and disfranchisement laws were often supported, moreover, by brutal acts of ceremonial and ritualized mob violence (lynchings) against southern blacks. Indeed, from 1889 to 1930, over 3,700 men and women were reported lynched in the United States--most of whom were southern blacks. Hundreds of other lynchings and acts of mob terror aimed at brutalizing blacks occurred throughout the era but went unreported in the press.

http://aztlan.net/lynching.jpg

Numerous race riots erupted in the Jim Crow era, usually in towns and cities and almost always in defense of segregation and white supremacy. These riots engulfed the nation from Wilmington, North Carolina, to Houston, Texas; from East St. Louis and Chicago to Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the years from 1865 to 1955. The riots usually erupted in urban areas to which southern, rural blacks had recently migrated. In the single year of 1919, at least twenty-five incidents were recorded, with numerous deaths and hundreds of people injured. So bloody was this summer of that year that it is known as the Red Summer of 1919. http://www.jimcrowhistory.org/history/creating2.htm

Black Codes and Jim Crow Laws were given legitimacy when the highest court in the land ruled in Plessy versus Ferguson in 1896. The Plessy versus Ferguson decision is perhaps the clearest example of judicial complicity in institutional racism. The FIND LAW for Legal Professionals web site provides this summary:

After the Civil War, the South enacted black codes to keep their former slaves under tight control. For example, some states prohibited blacks, who were not a party to a suit, from testifying in court. Others subjected blacks to criminal penalties for breaching labor contracts. In contrast, whites were only liable in a civil suit for the same action. To strike down these black codes, the nation passed the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibits states from denying "to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

During the years that followed, the Supreme Court attempted to define the parameters of equal protection. In Strauder v. West Virginia (1879), the Court struck down the murder conviction of the petitioner, a colored man, because the state only permitted "white males who are twenty-one years of age and who are citizens of this State" to serve as jurors. The Court found that the state denied the petitioner the equal protection of the laws because it compelled him "to submit to a trial for his life by a jury drawn from a panel from which the State has expressly excluded every man of his race." The Court added, "The very fact that colored people are singled out and expressly denied by a statute all right to participate in the administration of the law, as jurors, because of their color, though they are citizens, and may be in other respects fully qualified, is practically a brand upon them, affixed by the law, an assertion of their inferiority, and a stimulant to that race prejudice which is an impediment to securing to individuals of the race that equal justice which the law aims to secure to all others."

In 1896, the Court was presented with another opportunity to hear an equal protection case. This time, the petitioner challenged a Louisiana statute, which prohibited persons from occupying seats in railway coaches, "other than the ones assigned to them, on account of the race" to which they belong. Persons violating this statute may be subject to a fine or imprisonment.

Separate But Equal
On June 7, 1892, Homer Plessy, a 30-year-old shoemaker, boarded a passenger train of the East Louisiana Railway and took a seat in the "white" railcar. When he refused a conductor's orders to move to the "colored" railcar, Plessy was forcibly removed and jailed.

Plessy argued that the Louisiana statute violated, among others, the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. After the state courts found the railcar statute to be constitutional, Plessy petitioned the United States Supreme Court, which upheld the lower court rulings.

In the majority opinion, Justice Brown distinguished between political and social equality. The Justice explained that the purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment was only "to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law," and not to enforce social equality or "a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either." Moreover, "[l]aws permitting, and even requiring, their separation, in places where they are liable to be brought into contact," such as with the establishment of separate white and colored schools, do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other, and have been generally, if not universally, recognized as within the competency of the state legislatures . . . ." Accordingly, "[w]hen the government, therefore, has secured to each of its citizens equal rights before the law, and equal opportunities for improvement and progress, it has accomplished the end for which it was organized, and performed all of the functions respecting social advantages with which it is endowed."

Lone Dissenter
The lone dissenter, Justice John Harlan, declared, "Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law." He then predicted that "[t]he sure guaranty of the peace and security of each race is the clear, distinct, unconditional recognition by our governments, national and state, of every right that inheres in civil freedom, and of the equality before the law of all citizens of the United States, without regard to race."

Justice Harlan concluded by condemning the majority opinion. "In my opinion, the judgment this day rendered will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott Case."

Aftermath
While the majority opinion did not use the phrase "separate but equal," it effectively approved of legally enforced segregation as long as the law did not make facilities for blacks inferior to those of whites. This "separate but equal" doctrine soon extended to other areas of public life, such as restaurants, theaters, restrooms, and public schools. It was not until 1954, in another landmark case, Brown v. Board of Education, that the Supreme Court finally closed this disgraceful chapter in American History. http://supreme.lp.findlaw.com/supreme_court/landmark/plessy.html

While the Brown vs. the Board of Education decision gave the Supreme Court the opportunity to correct its previous errors, it took the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with additional legislation in 1965, 1968 and 1991 to begin to prohibit racial discrimination and discrimination of other kinds. This has proven difficult as instances of discrimination, racial and otherwise, persist to this very day.

The Naturalization Act of 1790, certainly one of the earliest forms of institutional racism practiced in the United States (another was slavery) did not merely single out Africans, but (in the words of Benjamin Franklin) the "Tawnys" as well, specifically those domestic "foreigners," known as Native Americans.

RACISM AND THE NATIVE AMERICAN

In the minds of the Founding Fathers, Native Americans may not have had the severity of disability of the African. But because they were not "white," they were disabled nonetheless and unsuited for republican citizenship.

Powhatan
http://cuip.uchicago.edu/~jmckennis/2001/ai/Library/powhatan.jpg

According to Takaki:

Though they were born in the United States, they were regarded as members of tribes, or as domestic subjects; their status was considered analogous to children of foreign diplomats born here. As domestic "foreigners," Native Americans could not seek naturalized citizenship, for they were not "white" (p. 80).

Institutional racism as experienced by the Native American took the form of annihilation, expulsion, segregation, isolation and deculturalization.

Native drawing of a person suffering from smallpox or measles.
(from the Dakota winter count by Yellow Lodge for the year 1845)
http://www.museum.state.il.us/muslink/nat_amer/post/images/C6d3-124.JPG

Annihilation

Early contacts between Native Americans and European were marked initially by cooperation and hospitality when Europeans were few and depended for their survival on "good neighbor" relations. As the numbers of Europeans increased, relations became increasingly hostile and marked by sporadic warfare as European designs on Native American land became evident. Another lethal consequence of Native American-European contact was the fact that whole populations of Native Americans were decimated by such European diseases as cholera, tuberculosis and small pox (Parillo, 1994).

Samuel De Champlain
http://images.virtualology.com/images/1037.gif
http://www.civilization.ca/vmnf/explor/images/brule1.jpg

According to Takaki:

When the colonists began arriving in New England, they found that the Indian population was already being reduced by European diseases. Two significant events had occurred in the early seventeenth century: infected rats swam to shore from Samuel de Champlain's ships, and sick French sailors were shipwrecked on the beaches of New England. By 1616, epidemics were ravaging Indian villages (p. 39).

How extensive were these epidemics? From the 16th century to the early 20th century, it is estimated that as many as 93 epidemics and pandemics (very widespread epidemics) of European diseases afflicted and decimated the native population. In addition to smallpox and measles, explorers and colonists brought a host of other diseases: bubonic plague, cholera, typhoid fever, scarlet fever, pleurisy, mumps, diphtheria, pneumonia, whooping cough, malaria, yellow fever, and various sexually transmitted infections. Ann Ramenofsky in article in "Archaeology" describes the toll taken on the native American populations:

While European explorers were colonizing American territories, infectious diseases such as measles, influenza, smallpox, and malaria were colonizing native people. Because Native Americans lacked the biological defenses to ward off these microbial invaders, hundreds of thousands of them perished...

In 1698, St. Cosme, a Jesuit missionary traveling down the Mississippi River, recorded the devastating effects of smallpox among the Qawpaw: "We were deeply afflicted by finding this nation of the Arkansas, formerly so numerous, entirely destroyed by disease. Not a month has elapsed since they had rid themselves of smallpox, which has carried off most of them. In the villages are now nothing but graves ... and we estimated that not a hundred men were left. All of the children had died, and a great many women."

In the Lower Mississippi Valley (between Memphis, Tennessee, and Natchez, Mississippi) there were at least 50 towns between 1450 and 1550. By 1600, that number had dropped to ten--a decline of 80 percent in only 50 years... Because the timing of population decline in the Southeast is consistent and rapid, the spread of European diseases is the only reasonable explanation. No other mechanism could have had such an effect. The outbreak of smallpox St. Cosme observed among the Qawpaw was not the first epidemic in the Mississippi Valley. The experience may have been a new one to St. Cosme; it was not new to the Indians... http://muweb.millersv.edu/~columbus/data/art/RAMENOF1.ART

Many European colonists cited the "pathogenic" annihilation of the Native American as a "sign" from God--that God was clearing the land to make way for European destiny.

http://occawlonline.pearsoned.com/bookbind/pubbooks/nashbrief_awl/chapter1/medialib/nash-visual02.html

Small pox more than any other pathogen was responsible for the wholesale decimation of so many native American tribes, Christopher Minson of the Zkea project reveals:

Smallpox was accidentally introduced to the America's during its first contact with the Europeans. The broad exchange that followed is known as the Columbian Exchange and resulted in a two-way transfer of a number of plant and animal species - as well as virulent pathogens. This exchange of pathogens, particularly smallpox, was devastating to the Native American societies. Due to the resulting epidemics, they suffered a demographic implosion. Some regions lost over 90% of their original native population.

At the time of the Columbian Exchange the estimated population of North and South America was at least 40 million. Due to imported pathogens, in a few centuries these populations fell to just a few million. This demographic catastrophe had some obvious ramifications, such as paving the way for easy conquest of the America's by European settlers. But it also had some less-obvious ramifications. For example, the introduction of slavery was largely due to the lack of enslaveable natives. Native Americans were simply too few and tended to die too easily. Thus the forced import of Africans became necessary to provide labor for the plantation economies.

Smallpox is devastating when introduced naturally, but it is also a preferred weapon for "artificial" epidemics. The virus is deadly and easily transmitted, and can easily generate enough fear and panic so as to overwhelm any society. This is particularly true for biologically naive populations, such as the original Native Americans, where smallpox usually means death or permanent disability.

... at least once, smallpox was used directly as a weapon. This was the infamous case of General Jeffrey Amherst in 1763, for which Amherst Massachusetts is named. The good general was in command of troops in the Ohio area. Certain native tribes in the area had become increasingly hostile. In response, the general wrote a letter to a subordinate outlining a plan to "Extirpate this Execrable Race" via the dispensation of smallpox-infected blankets. The order was carried out with military efficiency. A smallpox epidemic duly took hold amongst the tribes. Mortality was very high. Some tribal groups virtually vanished, and the rest suffered severe population losses. The virus did a very thorough job in breaking the rebellion. http://www.zkea.com/archives/archive01002.html

Between 1763 and 1978 there have been twenty-two (22) official government actions visited on the Native American in what is now known as the United States of America. Some of these such as the Royal Proclamation of 1763 established Native American "tribes" as independent nations and created the context and rationale for treating Native Americans as domestic "foreigners."

Isolation

The Royal Proclamation of 1763 was designed by Britain's King George III to control and even prohibit the movement of settlers in the thirteen American colonies into the Ohio valley which was now free from French influence after the French and Indian War. The lands of the Ohio valley were still in the possession of Indian Nations who neither trusted nor appreciated the intrusions of American settlers. The proclamation served to isolate the native people.

Surprised and angered by the defeat of their French allies in the French and Indian War, the Indian tribes of the Ohio Valley were suspicious of the new European monarch. During their association with the French they retained possession of their homelands and had little feeling of loss. When word arrived in the Ohio Valley that the tribes were expected to turn their loyalty to George III of Britain, they were outraged. Pontiac's Rebellion along the frontier began in August of 1763

.
http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h598.html

Pontiac (c.1720-1769), an Ottawa chieftain, a fairly decent orator and a strong supporter of the French in the French and Indian war, persuaded the Delaware, Seneca, Chippewa, Miami, Potawotomi and Huron, among others to resist this change in the status quo. The resulting conflict in the Ohio Valley has been labeled Pontiac’s Rebellion.The allied tribes were highly successful during much of 1763. Eight British forts fell, which included major installations at Presque Isle, Sandusky and Michilimackinac.

After 1764, Pontiac's influence among the tribes waned rapidly. He made recruiting trips into the South and West, but found few interested parties. In 1766, Johnson managed to conclude a general peace treaty in which Pontiac received a pardon. He lived quietly for several more years before being killed by a fellow Indian.

Here is what the Royal Proclamation of 1763 did with respect to the Native Americans:

Protected "the several Nations or Tribes of Indians with whom We are connected, and who live under our Protection" from molestation in the lands that "are reserved to them, or any of them, as their Hunting Grounds."

Prohibited the granting of " Warrants of Survey, or pass any Patents for Lands beyond the Bounds of their respective Governments.

Prohibited the granting of "Warrants of Survey, or pass Patents for any Lands beyond the Heads or Sources of any of the Rivers which fall into the Atlantic Ocean from the West and North West, or upon any Lands whatever, which, not having been ceded to or purchased by Us as aforesaid, are reserved to the said Indians, or any of them."

Reserved "for the use of the said Indians, all the Lands and Territories not included within the Limits of Our said Three new Governments, or within the Limits of the Territory granted to the Hudson's Bay Company, as also all the Lands and Territories lying to the Westward of the Sources of the Rivers which fall into the Sea from the West and North West as aforesaid.

Forbade "all our loving Subjects from making any Purchases or Settlements whatever, or taking Possession of any of the Lands above reserved, without our especial leave and Licence for that Purpose first obtained.

Enjoined and required "all Persons whatever who have either wilfully or inadvertently seated themselves upon any Lands within the Countries above described. or upon any other Lands which, not having been ceded to or purchased by Us, are still reserved to the said Indians as aforesaid, forthwith to remove themselves from such Settlements."

Forbade the " purchase from the said Indians of any Lands reserved to the said Indians, within those parts of our Colonies where We have thought proper to allow Settlement"

Forbade the Indians from disposing said land accept to the King

Authorized, enjoined and required the "the Governors and Commanders in Chief of all our Colonies respectively, as well those under Our immediate Government as those under the Government and Direction of Proprietaries, to grant such Licences without Fee or Reward, taking especial Care to insert therein a Condition, that such Licence shall be void, and the Security forfeited in case the Person to whom the same is granted shall refuse or neglect to observe such Regulations as We shall think proper to prescribe as aforesaid."

Required " all Officers whatever, as well Military as those Employed in the Management and Direction of Indian Affairs, within the Territories reserved as aforesaid for the use of the said Indians, to seize and apprehend all Persons whatever, who standing charged with Treason, Misprisions of Treason, Murders, or other Felonies or Misdemeanors, shall fly from Justice and take Refuge in the said Territory, and to send them under a proper guard to the Colony where the Crime was committed, of which they stand ." http://www.bloorstreet.com/200block/rp1763.htm

Thus was the precedent set for the native American to become a domestic "foreigner"

Indian Removal
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Expulsion

The Indian Removal Act (1830), the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek (1830), the Dawes Act (1871) and the Termination Act (1953) were either transparent "legal" processes designed to dispossess Native Americans of their land holdings or misguided policies that had the same effect.

The Indian Removal Act of 1830 was passed by the Twenty-First Congress of the United states of America on May 26, 1830. President Andrew Jackson prevailed after months of debate and signed this disgraceful bill into law. With the passage of this act, the Federal government became complicit with those forces attempting to steal Native American lands. More importantly, the Act codified the hatred of the Native American as expressed by the so-called frontiersmen whose interests were well represented by Andrew Jackson. This usage of the legislative process is nothing less than institutional racism.

Andrew Jackson: Forceful Proponent of Indian Removal
http://www.americanpresidents.org/images/07_150.gif

The Indian Removal act was the culmination of a process that had begun in Georgia in 1802. The Georgia legislature signed a compact giving the federal government all of her claims to western lands in exchange for the government's pledge to extinguish all aboriginal (India) titles to land within the state. In 1824, however, Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams and President James Monroe met with a Cherokee delegation to do just that -- to extinguish aboriginal title in Georgia, and this meeting was seen by Georgians as a federal promise for removal. But, according to Mark Trahant:

But the Cherokee delegation, led by ... Major Ridge, was equally firm in its right to stay. Even if the United States paid all of the money in its treasury or exchanged twice as much land, the Cherokee Nation said, such compensation would fall short of equity. Moreover, the Cherokee Nation said it could not recognize "the sovereignty of a state within the limits of [its] territory."

The state enacted a number of laws in the 1820s and 1830s designed to destroy Cherokee sovereignty-and the will of tribal members to resist "removal" from their homeland. The greed of the Cherokee's Georgia neighbors intensified after gold was found in 1828, and tribal members were forbidden by law from mining, even on their own land. A removal champion, Wilson Lumpkin, was elected governor on the Union Party Ticket in 1831. Union Party newspapers predicted the new governor would settle this problem once and for all, aided by the old Indian fighter and now president, Andrew Jackson. The state annexed Cherokee lands, banned the tribal legislature from meeting and seized property from tribal members. http://cherokeehistory.com/picture.html

Sequoyah of the Cherokee
http://ngeorgia.com/people/sequoyah.html

The treatment of the Cherokee nation is particularly ironic because the Cherokee went to extraordinary lengths to prove to the white man that they were truly civilized. They built roads, schools and churches, and were farmers and cattle ranchers. The Cherokee created a syllabary to inscribe their own language, produced a weekly newspaper and a written constitution as a product of their own system of representative government among other accomplishments. The man who gave writing to the Cherokee was a warrior named Sequoyah:

Probably born handicapped, and thus the name Sequoyah (Sikwo-yi is Cherokee for "pig's foot"), Sequoyah fled Tennessee as a youth because of the encroachment of whites. He initially moved to Georgia, where he acquired skills working with silver. While in the state, a man who purchased one of his works suggested that he sign his work, like the white silversmiths had begun to do. Sequoyah considered the idea and since he did not know how to write he visited Charles Hicks, a wealthy farmer in the area who wrote English. Hicks showed Sequoyah how to spell his name, writing the letters on a piece of paper. Sequoyah began to toy with the idea of a Cherokee writing system that year (1809).

He moved to Willstown, Alabama, and enlisted in the Cherokee Regiment, fighting in the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, which effectively ended the war against the Creek Redsticks. During the war, he became convinced of the necessity of literacy for his people. He and other Cherokees were unable to write letters home, read military orders, or record events as they occurred.

After the war, he began in earnest to create a writing system. Using a phonetic system, where each sound made in speech was represented by a symbol, he created the "Talking Leaves", 85 letters that make up the Cherokee syllabary (he would later add another symbol, making the total 86). His little girl Ayoka easily learned this method of communication. He demonstrated his syllabary to his cousin, George Lowrey by sending Ayoka outside the house, then asking Lowrey to answer a question. Sequoyah wrote the answer down on a piece of paper, then had Ayoka read the answer to Lowrey. Lowrey encouraged Sequoyah to demonstrate the syllabary in public. A short time later in a Cherokee Court in Chattooga, he read an argument about a boundary line from a sheet of paper. Word spread quickly of Sequoyah's invention. In 1821, 12 years after the original idea, the Cherokee Nation adopted Sequoyah's alphabet as their own. Within months thousands of Cherokee became literate. http://ngeorgia.com/people/sequoyah.html

Principal Chief John Ross
http://www.indianer-web.de/chiefs/chijross.jpg

None of this was enough to convince the avaricious Georgia legislature and President Andrew Jackson to "leave them be." The Cherokees fought forcible removal from their lands all the way to the Supreme Court. In 1832, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Cherokee Nation; that the Cherokee Nation was sovereign and, thus, the removal laws were invalid. The Cherokee would have to agree to removal in a treaty. The treaty then would have to be ratified by the Senate. Their betrayal came at the hands of some of their own people:

By 1835 the Cherokee were divided and despondent. Most supported Principal Chief John Ross, who fought the encroachment of whites starting with the 1832 land lottery. However, a minority(less than 500 out of 17,000 Cherokee in North Georgia) followed Major Ridge, his son John, and Elias Boudinot, who advocated removal. The Treaty of New Echota, signed by Ridge and members of the Treaty Party in 1835, gave Jackson the legal document he needed to remove the First Americans. Ratification of the treaty by the United States Senate sealed the fate of the Cherokee. Among the few who spoke out against the ratification were Daniel Webster and Henry Clay, but it passed by a single vote. In 1838 the United States began the removal to Oklahoma, fulfilling a promise the government made to Georgia in 1802. Ordered to move on the Cherokee, General John Wool resigned his command in protest, delaying the action. His replacement, General Winfield Scott, arrived at New Echota on May 17, 1838 with 7000 men. Early that summer General Scott and the United States Army began the invasion of the Cherokee Nation.

http://www.tngenweb.org/bios/firstpeople/major-ridge.jpg

In one of the saddest episodes of our brief history, men, women, and children were taken from their land, herded into makeshift forts with minimal facilities and food, then forced to march a thousand miles(Some made part of the trip by boat in equally horrible conditions). Under the generally indifferent army commanders, human losses for the first groups of Cherokee removed were extremely high. http://ngeorgia.com/history/nghisttt.html

The Creek nation was driven out of the Georgia in the 1820's. The Chickasaw and Choctaw disputed their land ownership with the state of Mississippi. The Seminole tribe fought the state of Florida over their lands. Claiming that its intention was to preserve the peace, the federal government forced these five civilized tribes to move out of their ancestral lands and move to land given to them in parts of Oklahoma.

Over fifteen thousand (15,000) Native Americans died on forced marches from the southeastern states to Oklahoma territory between 1830 and 1846. According to Greg O'Brien:

One of Mississippi's and the United States' most inhumane actions was the forced removal of American Indians from the South to lands west of the Mississippi River in the early 1800s.

Removal occurred because of an incessant demand for Indian lands. Demands for Indian land resulted from Anglo-American population growth in the South, the expansion of the short-staple cotton industry after Eli Whitney's cotton gin became widely available in the 1790s, the discovery of gold and other minerals on some Indian land, and simple racism.

It did not help Indians that the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 provided lands to the west to which the United States could banish them, or that by 1815 there was no longer a viable European ally in the area who could counteract American demands.

The Mississippi Legislature passed a resolution that went into effect in January 1830 extending its jurisdiction over Choctaw and Chickasaw territories within the state. Many Indians opposed this move and appealed to the United States government for assistance. Others accepted this new state of affairs and sought the best terms possible.

With the passage by the U.S. Congress of the Indian Removal Act that same year, the legal mechanisms were put in place for President Andrew Jackson to negotiate with Indian groups for their deportation.

The Choctaws, Mississippi's largest Indian group, were the first southeastern Indians to accept removal with the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek in September 1830. The treaty provided that the Choctaws would receive land west of the Mississippi River in exchange for the remaining Choctaw lands in Mississippi. The Choctaws were given three years to leave Mississippi. http://mshistory.k12.ms.us/features/feature14/choctaw_removal.html

Within 10 years of the Indian Removal Act, more than 70,000 Indians had moved across the Mississippi.In the the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, the state of Mississippi divested the Choctaw nation of their land holdings. An excellent summary of the entire Indian Removal Process can be found in the narratives wriiten by Patty Crotty, Meredith Woods and Dennis Gaffney, writers for the Public Broadcasting Company's Africans in America series at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p2959.html

The Dawes Act of 1887

Between 1850 and 1880 Congress established the more than three hundred (300) "Indian" reservations (most of which still exist today). In 1871, it ended the independent nation status of tribal groups, making the Native American a "ward" of the federal government:

The Indian Appropriation Act. This Congressional Act specified that no tribe thereafter would be recognized as an independent nation with which the federal government could make a treaty. (From 1607 to 1776, at least 175 treaties had been signed with the British and colonial governments, and from 1778 to 1868, 371 treaties were ratified the US government.) All future Indian policies would not negotiated with Indian tribes through treaties, but rather would be determined by passing Congressional statutes or executive orders.

President Grover Cleveland
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In 1887, U.S. Congress passed the Dawes Act or the General Allocation Act to provide for the granting of landholdings (allotments, usually 160 acres/65 hectares) to individual Native Americans, replacing communal tribal holdings. This Act authorized President Grover Cleveland to to give certain portions reservation land to individual native Americans. These portions distributed in 160 acre/65 hectares lots to each head of family and 80 acre lots to others. The act allowed individual native Americans to establish private farms, The Secretary of Interior was authorized to negotiate with the tribes for purchasing "excess" lands for non-native settlement. Native Americans were to select their own lands, but if they failed to do so, the Indian agent would select land for them. The federal government was to hold title to the land in trust for 25 years, thus preventing its sale until allottees could learn to treat it as real estate. According Dr. Gayle Olson-Raymer:

Allotment primarily sought to destroy Indian communities where property sharing encouraged "tribalism," and to open Indian lands for non-Indian purchase and settlement. The result was that from 1887 to 1934 (when the Act was repealed), Indian land holdings decreased from 138 million acres to 48 million. The Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles were excluded from the provisions of the Allotment Act. http://sorrel.humboldt.edu/~go1/kellogg/Chrono.html

Segregation

The establishment of Native American reservations, or American "homelands" presented one of the ugliest of America's several faces of legally sanctioned segregation. A predictable outcome of land cessions by the Native Americans to the U. S. Government was the establishment of reservations. Apologists for this unconscionable process of land theft suggest that the establishment of reservations was necessary to provide native people with homes and land for cultivation, and to avoid disputes in regard to boundaries. Reservations, then, were formed chiefly as the result of cessions of land. Native Americans were forced to surrender possession of their lands by treaty to the Government, but were able to "reserve" a part of that land as their own, to live on and to cultivate, etc.

Map of Native American Reservations
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It is important to note at this juncture that Native Americans, while coerced to sign treaties that cede their land to the U.S. government, did not always do this without resistance. An essential element of authentic American history is the record of resistance of Native people against the misappropriation of their lands and their way of life. Here are a few of the heroes of that struggle:

Tecumseh (1768-1813)
http://www.wargamer.com/articles/tippecanoe/tecumseh.jpg

Son of a Shawnee chieftain and a Creek or Cherokee mother, Tecumseh’s name was derived from tecumthe, or “shootingstar.” Tecumseh grew up in a large settlement in the Miami River valley known as “Old Piqua.”

He fought against the United States at the Battle of Fallen Timbers (1794). After the resulting Treaty of Greenville (1795) ceded large tracts of Ohio and Indiana, Tecumseh became an advocate of Indian solidarity, hoping to prevent further encroachment by the white man.

After Tippecanoe, Tecumseh joined the British in Canada, and was commissioned as a Brigadier General. In 1813, he and his brother returned to Indiana to recruit an army from the ranks of the Delaware, Kickapoo, Potawatomi, Winnebago, and Wea. Reinforcing British General Henry Proctor, this multicultural army suffered losses at Fort Meigs and Fort Stephenson, retreating from Fort Malden to the Thames River. Fifteen-hundred warriors abandoned the effort as Harrison pursued the army, engaging in battle east of Chatham. The Prophet fled along with General Proctor during the opening charge at The Battle of the Thames on October 13. Tecumseh fought valiantly, and was killed while rallying his remaining warriors in combat.

Osceola (1803-1838)
http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/9711/images/e-osceola.gif

Osceola was born in Creek Country in Georgia about 1803, his father was a British trader and his mother the daughter of Creek chief. He was said to have had a European appearance because his grandfather was Scottish. He was sometimes called Powell, which was his white step-father's name. His mother took him to northern Florida when he was very young and he grew up to become a leader of the Seminoles. He took the name Osceola from a black drink containing caffeine used in tribal ceremonies.

Osceloa became a leader during the second Seminole war in 1835. He was opposed to the Indians removal from their land and being sent west. As a result of his opposition he was sent to prison. After he was released he killed the Indian agent and began attacks on the Americans which began the warfare. Osceloa defeated force after force that was sent against him. General Thomas Jessup asked Osceloa to discuss a truce. Under a flag of truce Jessup seized Osceola and had him imprisoned. This treachery, plus imprisonment, lead to his death in the Fort Moultrie South Carolina prison in 1838. http://goodies.freeservers.com/osceola.html

Chief John Horse, Leader of the Black Seminoles
http://www.texancultures.utsa.edu/hiddenhistory/Images/Brady/68_1107.jpg

No richer or more colorful life could have been lived than that of John Horse, whose life began as a slave in Florida, took him to Indian Territory as a young man, to Mexico as a leader of his people, and then back and forth from Mexico to Indian Territory.

This young man, was first noted when he was an advisor to Osceola in Florida in the days of the Seminole wars, and during the time, that he fought against the army of Zachary Taylor. Having begun in life in what was then Spanish owned Florida, he was often called by his name in Spanish, Juan Caballo. He was often called Gopher John while a young boy, who after playing a trick on General Brooke by selling him the same gophers several time, the nickname was often applied to the young John.

By the time of the Second Seminole War, John's skill as a negotiator, interpreter, and advisor were noted. Chief Alligator, as well as Osceola often received advise and consulted with John about their strategies. After many negotiations when relocation seemed inevitable for the Indians in the Southeast, like Abraham, John Horse was an interpreter and able to secure safe passage from many who followed and formed a band behind him. However, after arrival in the Territory, the Seminoles, particularly many of the Black Seminoles were not safe from Creeks seeking to kidnap them and to sell them to whites. Chief Micanopy declared that he and others were free, but the threats from the Creeks continued. John Horse was then inspired with his compatriot Wild Cat to relocate again, this time on his own for freedom. With several hundred people, the two leaders, Wild Cat and John Horse led another contingent of Seminoles southward into Mexico.

After many weeks and much danger, particularly from the Comanches John Horse was able to secure safety and passage to Mexico. After the Civil War, many returned to the United States, preferring to settle in Texas. However, John Horse was just as concerned for those who chose to remain in Mexico. He was able to successfully negotiate the right of the Black Seminoles now known as Mascogos de Nacimiento, to remain in Mexico with land. He met at length with Mexican leader Porfirio Diaz.

Though he never lived in Indian Territory after the trek to Mexico, he did travel there often, and did interact with Black Seminoles in the Territory. His focus however, remained with his people both in Texas and Mexico. However, as one who left the Southeast, and was taken westward into Indian Territory, this leader, whose influence is still felt today from Wewoka, to Brackettville Texas, to Musquiz, Mexico, John Horse is one of the Estelusti who life was critical, whose leadership was essential to the survival of the African-Native people and whose history has the same beginning as that of all of the Oklahoma Freedmen.

John Horse died in Mexico City in 1882. http://www.african-nativeamerican.com/john_horse.htm

Mangas Coloradas (Red Sleeves) (1790-1863)
http://home.att.net/~phantom-guy/mangas.jpg

"...the single greatest leader the Apaches had was a physical giant as well as a domineering personality: Mangas Coloradas…" said James L. Haley, in Apaches: A History and Culture Portrait. "He was a truly striking figure with a hulking body and disproportionately large head.

In the summer of 1860, Mangas Coloradas (Red Sleeves, for the color of a shirt he wore), the principal chief of the Bedonkohe branch of the Chiricahua Apaches, had sought peace, not war, with the whites. With wisdom burnished by advancing years, he could see the American invasion surging relentlessly, like a tidal wave, threatening to engulf the Apache people. Facing the inevitable, Mangas had searched for ways to protect his band’s desert basin and mountain forest country in southwestern New Mexico; insure the safety of the Bedonkohes and his family; and forge an American/Apache relationship based on trust and honor. http://www.desertusa.com/ind1/Colradas.html

After resisting the Americans for three years, Mangas presented himself personally to sue for peace. He was treacherously captured and murdered while being held prisoner.

Cochise of the Chiricahuas
http://www.desertusa.com/ind1/Colradas/cochise.jpg

Cochise, the son-in-law of Mangas Coloradas and principal chief of the Chokonen branch of the Chiricahuas along with his family was lured into a trap at Apache Pass by second lieutenant, George N. Bascom and his troopers who pretended to want to negotiate for peace. Cochise managed to escape but:

Bascom held Cochise’s family and warriors captive. Bascom torpedoed negotiations. Fighting erupted. Blood flowed on both sides. Known as the "Bascom Affair," it ended with six warriors, including Cochise’s brother, hanging by ropes from the branches of trees. Like the visions in the witches’ caldron in Macbeth, the swinging corpses foretold the coming nightmare of a long and brutal struggle between the Apaches and the Americans. http://www.desertusa.com/ind1/Colradas.html

Cochise and his Father-in-law wreaked havoc among the American troops for three years until Mangas, in an attempt to sue for peace was murdered. Cochise and 200 followers eluded capture for more than 10 years by hiding out in the Dragoon Mountains of Arizona, from which they continued their raids, always fading back into their mountain strongholds. Cochise surrendered finally to the Chiricahua reservation where he died in 1874.

Geronimo, a Bedonkohe Apache leader of the Chiricahua Apache (1829- 1909)
http://s-campos.com/naps/geronimo.jpg

Geronimo {jur-ahn'-i-moh}, or Goyathlay ("one who yawns"), was born in 1829 in what is today western New Mexico, but was then still Mexican territory. He was a Bedonkohe Apache (grandson of Mahko) by birth and a Net'na during his youth and early manhood. His wife, Juh, Geronimo's cousin Ishton, and Asa Daklugie were members of the Nednhi band of the Chiricahua Apache.

He was reportedly given the name Geronimo by Mexican soldiers, although few agree as to why. As leader of the Apaches at Arispe in Sonora, he performed such daring feats that the Mexicans singled him out with the sobriquet Geronimo (Spanish for "Jerome"). Some attributed his numerous raiding successes to powers conferred by supernatural beings, including a reputed invulnerability to bullets.

Geronimo's war career was linked with that of his brother-in-law, Juh, a Chiricahua chief. Although he was not a hereditary leader, Geronimo appeared so to outsiders because he often acted as spokesman for Juh, who had a speech impediment.

Geronimo was the leader of the last American Indian fighting force formally to capitulate to the United States. Because he fought against such daunting odds and held out the longest, he became the most famous Apache of all. To the pioneers and settlers of Arizona and New Mexico, he was a bloody-handed murderer and this image endured until the second half of this century. http://www.indians.org/welker/geronimo.htm

Red Cloud aka Makhpiya-Luta of the Lakota Sioux
(1822-1909)
http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/resources/archives/images/wimg640/rdcld.gif

Red Cloud orchestrated the most successful war against the United States ever fought by an Indian nation. The army had begun to construct forts along the Bozeman Trail, which ran through the heart of Lakota territory in present-day Wyoming to the Montana gold fields from Colorado's South Platte River. As caravans of miners and settlers began to cross the Lakota's land, Red Cloud was haunted by the vision of Minnesota's expulsion of the Eastern Lakota in 1862 and 1863. So he launched a series of assaults on the forts, most notably the crushing defeat of Lieutenant Colonel William Fetterman's column of eighty men just outside Fort Phil Kearny, Wyoming, in December of 1866. The garrisons were kept in a state of exhausting fear of further attacks through the rest of the winter. http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/people/i_r/redcloud.htm

Sitting Bull Tatanka-Iyotanka
(1831-1890)
http://www.csulb.edu/projects/ais/nae/chapter_4/001_002_4.11.jpg

A Hunkpapa Lakota chief and holy man under whom the Lakota tribes united in their struggle for survival on the northern plains, Sitting Bull remained defiant toward American military power and contemptuous of American promises to the end.

Born around 1831 on the Grand River in present-day South Dakota, at a place the Lakota called "Many Caches" for the number of food storage pits they had dug there, Sitting Bull was given the name Tatanka-Iyotanka, which describes a buffalo bull sitting intractably on its haunches. It was a name he would live up to throughout his life...

The stage was set for war between Sitting Bull and the U.S. Army in 1874, when an expedition led by General George Armstrong Custer confirmed that gold had been discovered in the Black Hills of Dakota Territory, an area sacred to many tribes and placed off-limits to white settlement by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. Despite this ban, prospectors began a rush to the Black Hills, provoking the Lakota to defend their land. When government efforts to purchase the Black Hills failed, the Fort Laramie Treaty was set aside and the commissioner of Indian Affairs decreed that all Lakota not settled on reservations by January 31, 1876, would be considered hostile. Sitting Bull and his people held their ground.

In March, as three columns of federal troops under General George Crook, General Alfred Terry and Colonel John Gibbon moved into the area, Sitting Bull summoned the Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho to his camp on Rosebud Creek in Montana Territory. There he led them in the sun dance ritual, offering prayers to Wakan Tanka, their Great Spirit, and slashing his arms one hundred times as a sign of sacrifice. During this ceremony, Sitting Bull had a vision in which he saw soldiers falling into the Lakota camp like grasshoppers falling from the sky. http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/people/s_z/sittingbull.htm

Crazy Horse Tashunca-uitco
(1849-1877)
http://www.nebraskahistory.org/images/publish/571.jpg

Celebrated for his ferocity in battle, Crazy Horse was recognized among his own people as a visionary leader committed to preserving the traditions and values of the Lakota way of life.

Even as a young man, Crazy Horse was a legendary warrior. He stole horses from the Crow Indians before he was thirteen, and led his first war party before turning twenty. Crazy Horse fought in the 1865-68 war led by the Oglala chief Red Cloud against American settlers in Wyoming, and played a key role in destroying William J. Fetterman's brigade at Fort Phil Kearny in 1867.

Crazy Horse earned his reputation among the Lakota not only by his skill and daring in battle but also by his fierce determination to preserve his people's traditional way of life. He refused, for example, to allow any photographs to be taken of him. And he fought to prevent American encroachment on Lakota lands following the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, helping to attack a surveying party sent into the Black Hills by General George Armstrong Custer in 1873.

When the War Department ordered all Lakota bands onto their reservations in 1876, Crazy Horse became a leader of the resistance. Closely allied to the Cheyenne through his first marriage to a Cheyenne woman, he gathered a force of 1,200 Oglala and Cheyenne at his village and turned back General George Crook on June 17, 1876, as Crook tried to advance up Rosebud Creek toward Sitting Bull's encampment on the Little Bighorn. After this victory, Crazy Horse joined forces with Sitting Bull and on June 25 led his band in the counterattack that destroyed Custer's Seventh Cavalry, flanking the Americans from the north and west as Hunkpapa warriors led by chief Gall charged from the south and east.

Following the Lakota victory at the Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull and Gall retreated to Canada, but Crazy Horse remained to battle General Nelson Miles as he pursued the Lakota and their allies relentlessly throughout the winter of 1876-77. This constant military harassment and the decline of the buffalo population eventually forced Crazy Horse to surrender on May 6, 1877; except for Gall and Sitting Bull, he was the last important chief to yield.

Even in defeat, Crazy Horse remained an independent spirit, and in September 1877, when he left the reservation without authorization, to take his sick wife to her parents, General George Crook ordered him arrested, fearing that he was plotting a return to battle. Crazy Horse did not resist arrest at first, but when he realized that he was being led to a guardhouse, he began to struggle, and while his arms were held by one of the arresting officers, a soldier ran him through with a bayonet. http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/people/a_c/crazyhorse.htm

"Chief Joseph" Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt
(1840-1904)
http://www.theoldwestwebride.com/5_image/joseph.gif

The man who became a national celebrity with the name "Chief Joseph" was born in the Wallowa Valley in what is now northeastern Oregon in 1840. He was given the name Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt, or Thunder Rolling Down the Mountain, but was widely known as Joseph, or Joseph the Younger, because his father had taken the Christian name Joseph when he was baptized at the Lapwai mission by Henry Spalding in 1838...

When his father died in 1871, Joseph was elected to succeed him. He inherited not only a name but a situation made increasingly volatile as white settlers continued to arrive in the Wallowa Valley. Joseph staunchly resisted all efforts to force his band onto the small Idaho reservation, and in 1873 a federal order to remove white settlers and let his people remain in the Wallowa Valley made it appear that he might be successful. But the federal government soon reversed itself, and in 1877 General Oliver Otis Howard threatened a cavalry attack to force Joseph's band and other hold-outs onto the reservation. Believing military resistance futile, Joseph reluctantly led his people toward Idaho.

Unfortunately, they never got there. About twenty young Nez Percé warriors, enraged at the loss of their homeland, staged a raid on nearby settlements and killed several whites. Immediately, the army began to pursue Joseph's band and the others who had not moved onto the reservation. Although he had opposed war, Joseph cast his lot with the war leaders.

What followed was one of the most brilliant military retreats in American history. Even the unsympathetic General William Tecumseh Sherman could not help but be impressed with the 1,400 mile march, stating that "the Indians throughout displayed a courage and skill that elicited universal praise... [they] fought with almost scientific skill, using advance and rear guards, skirmish lines, and field fortifications." In over three months, the band of about 700, fewer than 200 of whom were warriors, fought 2,000 U.S. soldiers and Indian auxiliaries in four major battles and numerous skirmishes.

Joseph's widely reprinted surrender speech has immortalized him as a military leader in American popular culture:

I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed. Looking Glass is dead. Toohoolhoolzote is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say, "Yes" or "No." He who led the young men [Olikut] is dead. It is cold, and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills, and have no blankets, no food. No one knows where they are -- perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children, and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.

Joseph's fame did him little good. Although he had surrendered with the understanding that he would be allowed to return home, Joseph and his people were instead taken first to eastern Kansas and then to a reservation in Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) where many of them died of epidemic diseases.

In his last years, Joseph spoke eloquently against the injustice of United States policy toward his people and held out the hope that America's promise of freedom and equality might one day be fulfilled for Native Americans as well. An indomitable voice of conscience for the West, he died in 1904, still in exile from his homeland, according to his doctor "of a broken heart."

Deculturalization

The Native American "became" an American citizen in 1924 under the Indian Citizen Act. This piece of legislation, more than any other signaled the full-scale deculturalization of the Native American:

An act to authorize the Secretary of the Interior to issue certificates of citizenship to Indians.

Be it enacted…, That all non-citizen Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States be, and they are hereby, declared to be citizens of the United States Provided, That the granting of such citizenship shall not in any manner impair or otherwise affect the right of any Indian to tribal or other property.
http://www.marquette.edu/library/neh/dunne/resource/Act.htm

Deculturalization, according to Joel Spring (1997), refers to the "stripping away of a people's culture and replacing it with a new culture." Native Americans are among the most victimized of all of America's minority groups in this regard. The Meriam Report of 1928 brought the deculturalization of the native American into public focus just four years after the Indian Citizen Act. The following are excerpts from the Summary of the Findings of this Act:

An overwhelming majority of the Indians are poor, even extremely poor, and they are not adjusted to the economic and social system of the dominant white civilization.

The poverty of the Indians and their lack of adjustment to the dominant economic and social systems produce the vicious circle ordinarily found among any people under such circumstances. Because of interrelationships, causes cannot be differentiated from effects. The only course is to state briefly the conditions found that are part of this vicious circle of poverty and maladjustment...

The health of the Indians as compared with that of the general population is bad. ... Tuberculosis is extremely prevalent. Trachoma, a communicable disease which produces blindness, is a major problem because of its great prevalence and the danger of its spreading among both the Indians and the whites...

The prevailing living conditions among the great majority of the Indians are conducive to the development and spread of disease. With comparatively few exceptions, the diet of the Indians is bad. It is generally insufficient in quantity, lacking in variety, and poorly prepared...

The economic basis of the primitive culture of the Indians has been largely destroyed by the encroachment of white civilization. The Indians can no longer make a living as they did in the past by hunting, fishing, gathering wild products, and the extremely limited practice of primitive agriculture. The social system that evolved from their past economic life is ill-suited to the conditions that now confront them, notably in the matter of the division of labor between the men and the women. They are by no means yet adjusted to the new economic and social conditions that confront them.

Several past policies adopted by the government in dealing with the Indians have been of a type which, if long continued, would tend to pauperize any race. Most notable was the practice of issuing rations to able-bodied Indians. Having moved the Indians from their ancestral lands to restricted reservations as a war measure, the government undertook to feed them and to perform certain services for them which a normal people do for themselves. The Indians at the outset had to accept this aid as a matter of necessity, but promptly they came to regard it as a matter of right, as indeed it was at the time and under the conditions of the inauguration of the ration system. They felt, and many of them still feel, that the government owes them a living, having taken their lands from them, and that they are under no obligation to support themselves. They have thus inevitably developed a pauper point of view. http://www.alaskool.org/native_ed/research_reports/ IndianAdmin/Chapter1.html#chap1

The government of the United States used religious organizations as principle agents de deculturalization -- educating Native Americans away from their own culture. According to Susanna Hayes and Kenneth A. Ames :

This process of education is frequently referred to as "systematized deculturalization" in the literature of federal policy reports. When federal boarding schools and day schools were established under the authority of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Native American students learned that being Indian and being educated were two incompatible phenomena. If they wanted to be educated they could not be Indian. http://jaie.asu.edu/v15/V15S2pro.html

Terry Gould, creator of the Native Peoples Ring web site, cites Lakota Woman author Mary Crow Dog's narration of the facts an particulars of Indian education:

... BIA [...Bureau of Indian affairs] agents barging into the homes of the Sioux Indians and dragging children away from their families in order to assimilate them into "white society"... At the boarding schools, the children were forced to cut their hair, kept away from their families, sometimes were told their families were dead or didn't want them anymore and often abused both mentally and physically. In her book, she describes the schools as, "sterile, cold atmosphere, an unfamiliar routine, language problems, and above all the maza-skan-skan, that damn clock-- white man's time as opposed to Indian time, which is natural time."

No better indicator of the effects of deculturalization on the Native American can be found than in the major disparities between key health indicators among Native Americans and the European-American populations. Four Arrows ( Don Trent Jacobs) reports:

According to the most recent available report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Indian Health Service (1998), death rates from the following seven causes were considerably greater for Native people than for the general population (all races):

1. alcoholism—627% greater
2. tuberculosis—533% greater
3. diabetes mellitus—249% greater
4. accidents—204% greater
5. suicide—72% greater
6. pneumonia and influenza—71% greater
7. homicide—63% greater (p. 6)

Further, life expectancy (at birth) is 5.4 years shorter for AI/ AN [...American Indian/Alaskan Native...] people than for Whites. http://216.239.39.104/search?q=cache:DPSqelfcKg8J:www.ael.org/digests/edorc03-11.pdf+impact+of+deculturalization+on+the+modern+Native+American&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

Four Arrows suggests that the accumulated injuries, the emotional/spiritual wounding of the Native American brought about by racism and deculturalization has put the entire Native population at risk. Their tragic history impacts negatively on their health. He continues:

Beyond the influence of poverty on wellness, historical trauma responses may also be a significant cause of mortality and morbidity (Braveheart-Jordon & DeBruyn, 1995). The injustices of the past against Native Americans have not been adequately resolved in the psyche of many Native people (Adams, 1995). The inability to resolve them may continue to have health consequences as long as this tragic history continues to repeat itself in ways that undermine authentic tribal sovereignty (Cook-Lynn, 2001).

Psychological healing is unlikely until those working with AI/AN people come to respect and accept the Native perspective on conditions and events affecting the lives of Native people, and to understand that continuing to view these conditions and events from a Eurocentric perspective only fosters misunderstanding and inequity (Duran & Duran, 1995) http://216.239.39.104/search?q=cache:DPSqelfcKg8J:www.ael.org/digests/edorc03-11.pdf+impact+of+deculturalization+on+the+modern+Native+American&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

Much of the racism, individual and institutional, experienced by the African American and Native American, has been directed at other groups of "color" as well. Let us take a brief look at the experiences of some of the other groups of "Tawneys" and derivative Africans who have had to accommodate American racism. (A full treatment of each of these groups is beyond the scope of this essay. Links to appropriate web sites will be provided the interested reader.)

RACISM AND THE CHINESE AMERICAN

The Chinese began immigrating into California and the western states around 1849. San Francisco was the main point of entry for Chinese:

San Francisco was known as "Dai Fou" (the big city) to the Chinese immigrants, Sacramento was known as "Yi Fou" (the second city) and Marysville was known as "Sam Fou" (the third city). http://members.fortunecity.com/tokenguy/ tokentales/ page51.htm

Immigration to California was accomplished by the Chinese in three principal ways. Rachel Soppet describes each of these systems:

The most popular was the Credit Ticket System which advanced the Chinese immigrants money for their passage as long as they repaid the debt, with interest, from their earnings once they reached California . The second type was Contract-Labor which involved American companies paying for the transportation of the Chinese in exchange for the Chinese immigrants' agreement to work for a specified number of years. The payment of their voyage was then deducted from their wages. The third type of immigration was through the Coolie Trade, a system very similar to that of the African slaves in the Southern United Stares. In this process, potential workers were kidnapped or tricked into signing false contracts . All three systems took advantage of the hopes and wishes of the Chinese.
http://oprfhs.org/division/history/interpretations/1998interp/soppet,rachel.doc.

In 1849 the first Chinese American organization was formed in San Francisco called the Kong Chow Association. The Kong Chow Temple was formed in 1853 by immigrants from the Sun Wui and Hawk Shan districts of China.

The Kong Chow Temple (1853) and the Tien Hau Temple (1852)
http://www.scripophily.net/konchowtemch.html
http://www.harcourtschool.com/activity/chinatown/pages/c31.html

The Chinese were at first considered "model adopted Citizens", working in the California gold mines, on the railroads, transforming the tule swamps and the marshes of the Sacramento and San Joachim river deltas into prime agricultural land. In 1852, the Governor of California, John MacDougal, referred to the Chinese as "the most desirable of our adopted citizens and recommended to the state legislature a"system of land grants to induce further immigration and settlement of that race,,," be established (Wright, 1969, p. 84). Before long, however, they were soon assigned the racial inferiority experienced by Africans, Native Americans and Mexicans before them.

http://www.texancultures.utsa.edu/txtext/chinese/73_1512.htm

According to Takaki:

Indeed the newcomers from a Pacific shore found that racial qualities previously assigned to blacks had become "Chinese" characteristics. Calling for Chinese exclusion, the San Francisco Alta warned in 1853:

"Every reason that exists against the toleration of free blacks in Illinois may be argued against that of the Chinese here." White workers referred to the Chinese as "Nagurs," and a magazine cartoon in California depicted the Chinese as a bloodsucking vampire with slanted eyes, a pigtail, dark skin, and thick lips. Like blacks, the Chinese were described as heathen, morally inferior, savage, childlike, and lustful. (Takaki, 1993, p. 205).

Racism segregated the Chinese into the Chinatowns of San Francisco, Los Angeles, Idaho and Montana. Racism forced them into low-wage jobs. Racism in the form of the Naturalization Act of 1790 prevented them from obtaining citizenship and in California, because of alien land-holding laws, prohibited them from owning land. Albert S. Evans paints this portrait of Chinese life on a San Francisco street circa 1871:

Chinese porters or "coolies," swinging heavy burdens on the ends of pliant bamboo poles balanced on their shoulders, and changed rapidly from side to side as they trot quickly along, meet you at every turn. ...

http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist6/evans.html

Chinese women, according to Takaki " were condemned as a "depraved class," their immorality associated with a physical appearance "but a slight removal from the African race" (Takaki, 1993, p. 205). Evans confirms this in his uncharitable description of the chinese women in on the streets that intersect Main Street:

You will see coming forth from the various narrow alleys which intersect the main streets, and are known by the expressive designations of "Murderer's Alley, "China Alley," "Stout's Alley," etc., any number of Chinese females, clad in their loose drawers or pants of blue or black cotton goods, straight-cut sacques of broadcloth, satin, or other costly or cheap material, according to their condition and social rank; shoes of blue satin, richly embroidered with bullion, and with thick soles of white felt and white wood, anklets or bangles, and bracelets of silver, gold, or jade-stone, and lustrous blue-black hair, braided in two strands, hanging down the back from beneath coarse-striped gingham handkerchiefs, thrown over the head, and tied beneath the chin as a badge denoting slavery, and a life of hopeless infamy; or, if the owner happens to be the wife of a laborer, tradesman or gambling-house proprietor, wonderfully gotten up with a species of transparent mucilage, and fashioned into a rudder-like structure sticking out fully a foot behind, supporting a number of skewer-like pins of gold or silver, each six or eight inches in length, and putting to shame by its size and cleanly appearance, the waterfalls of our Caucasian belles–shuffle along in groups of three or four, talking and laughing together like so many little children, or exchanging compliments, which would never bear translation into English, with the male blackguards, loafers and plug-uglies of their race. http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist6/evans.html

Hardly a Prostitute
http://www.texancultures.utsa.edu/txtext/chinese/68_2943.htm

Evan's "sketches" reflects the racist attitudes toward the Chinese in California. In 1850, 500 hundred Chinese came to California to search for gold. In 1852, two years later, there were nearly 12,000 Chinese in California and only7 were women. The California State legislature re-enacted the Foreign Miners' Tax Law aimed at controlling the Chinese and other immigrant populations in California.

In 1854, the California Supreme Court (People v. Hull) ruled that Chinese and other "nonwhites" could not testify in a court of law against "white" people. The Court ruled that:

the testimony of a Chinese man who witnessed a murder by a white man was inadmissible, largely based upon the prevailing opinion that the Chinese were "a race of people whom nature has marked as inferior, and who are incapable of progress or intellectual development beyond a certain point, as their history has shown; differing in language, opinions, color, and physical conformation; between whom and ourselves nature has placed an impassable difference" and as such had no right " to swear away the life of a citizen" or participate" with us in administering the affairs of our Government." http://www.cetel.org/1854_hall.html

This ruling persisted in the California courts until 1870. By that time, 3,536 Chinese women had emigrated to California, 61 percent (2,157) listed as prostitutes.

http://www.blm.gov/education/00_resources/articles/steel_rails_and_iron_horses/images/chinese1.jpg
http://www.blm.gov/education/00_resources/articles/steel_rails_and_iron_horses/images/chinese2.jpg
http://immigrants.harpweek.com/ChineseAmericans/Illustrations/images/0010w500.jpg

In 1862 the Pacific Railroad Bill provided government aid to build a transcontinental railroad. In 1863, The Central Pacific Railroad began construction on the transcontinental railroad. In 1865 the first Chinese were hired to work for the Central Pacific Railroad as strikebreakers. By 1867, 90% of the workforce were Chinese:

In 1864 thousands of Chinese in Kwantung Province were recruited by Central Pacific Railroad Co. to work on the western portion of transcontinental railroad. The roadbed was blasted out of the solid rock mountainside in the fall of 1865 by lowering Chinese workers (also known as "Celestials" after the "Celestial Kingdom" as these tireless workers referred to their homeland) on ropes down the sheer cliff face. These Chinese men drilled and packed black power charges in the rock, lit the fuses, and had the agility to scamper up the ropes before the explosions. Cape Horn, Sierra Nevada Mountains, California.

“The Chinese made the roadbed and laid the track around Cape Horn. Though this took until the spring of 1866, it was not as time-consuming or difficult as had been feared. Still it remains one of the best known of all the labors on the Central Pacific, mainly because, unlike the work in the tunnel, it makes for a spectacular diorama. As well it should. Hanging from those [ropes], drilling holes in the cliff, placing the fuses, and getting hauled up was a spectacular piece of work. The white laborers couldn't do it. The Chinese could, if not as a matter of course, then quickly and — at least they made it look this way — easily. Young Lewis Clement did the surveying and then took charge of overseeing the railroad engineering at Cape Horn.

“What Clement planned and the Chinese made became one of the grandest sights to be seen along the entire Central Pacific line. Trains would halt there so tourists could get out of their cars to gasp and gape at the gorge and the grade.” http://cprr.org/

http://www.ccrh.org/comm/umatilla/images/chinslab.jpg

The spectacular achievement of Chinese workers was in no way compensated equitably. Central Pacific's Chinese immigrant workers received a paltry $26 a month for a 12-hour day, 6-day work week as compared to the white worker's standard $36 a month. They had to provide their own food and tents while the white workers were furnished with food and shelter. Perhaps a quality that raised the ire of already threatened white workers was the ability of some Chinese to save as much as 20 dollars a month. These thrifty workers went on to purchase tracks of land wherever they legally could.

The first significant law restricting immigration of Chinese into the United States was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Racist sentiments in California, Idaho and Montana were especially prone to attribute declining wages and economic ills on the despised Chinese workers. Although the Chinese composed only .002 percent of the nation's population, Congress passed the exclusion act to placate worker demands and assuage prevalent concerns about maintaining white "racial purity." What follows are some excerpts from the Chinese Exclusion Act:

.
http://collections.ic.gc.ca/generations/racism/cartoon.jpeg

Preamble

Whereas, in the opinion of the Government of the United States the coming of Chinese laborers to this country endangers the good order of certain localities within the territory thereof:

Therefore,
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That from and after the expiration of ninety days next after the passage of this act, and until the expiration of ten years next after the passage of this act, the coming of Chinese laborers to the United States be, and the same is hereby, suspended; and during such suspension it shall not be lawful for any Chinese laborer to come, or, having so come after the expiration of said ninety days, to remain within the United States.

SEC. 6. ... every Chinese person other than a laborer who may be entitled by said treaty and this act to come within the United States, and who shall be about to come to the United States, shall be identified as so entitled by the Chinese Government in each case, such identity to be evidenced by a certificate issued under the authority of said government, which certificate shall be in the English language or (if not in the English language) accompanied by a translation into English, stating such right to come, and which certificate shall state the name, title, or official rank, if any, the age, height, and all physical peculiarities, former and present occupation or profession, and place of residence in China of the person to whom the certificate is issued and that such person is entitled conformably to the treaty in this act mentioned to come within the United States. Such certificate shall be prima-facie evidence of the fact set forth therein, and shall be produced to the collector of customs, or his deputy, of the port in the district in the United States at which the person named therein shall arrive.

SEC. 7. That any person who shall knowingly and falsely alter or substitute any name for the name written in such certificate or forge any such certificate, or knowingly utter any forged or fraudulent certificate, or falsely personate any person named in any such certificate, shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor; and upon conviction thereof shall be fined in a sum not exceeding one thousand dollars, an imprisoned in a penitentiary for a term of not more than five years.

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 suspended Chinese immigration for ten years and declared the Chinese as ineligible for naturalization. Chinese workers already in the country challenged the constitutionality of the discriminatory acts, but their efforts failed. The act was renewed in 1892 for another ten years, and in 1902 Chinese immigration was made permanently illegal. The legislation proved very effective, and the Chinese population in the United States sharply declined.

America would continue to use as principal tools of institutional racism, immigration, the judicial system and legislation to victimize its "colored" masses. Government treatment of the Chinese spurred later movements for immigration restriction against other non-white groups such as Middle Easterners, Hindu and East Indians, and the Japanese. The Chinese did not become eligible for citizenship until 1943.

RACISM AND THE JAPANESE AMERICAN

Nakahama Manjiro, according to Kathleen Wright (1969, p.87-88) is possibly the first Japanese to set foot on the American mainland. This is prior to the treaty negotiated by Commodore Perry with the Japanese in 1851 which opened the door to Japanese immigration to America. Nakahama aka John Mung was a member of the crew of the whaling ship John Howland commanded by a Captain Whitfield of New Bedford, Connecticut. According to Wright:

In June of 1841 an American whaling vessel commanded by by Captain [William] Whitfield of New Bedford came upon a small island[..off of Edo, Japan...]. he sent men ashore to see if there were any turtles on the island. Instead, his crewmen found five shipwrecked Japanese almost dead from hunger and exposure. During the next six months, while the Japanese learned something of whaling from their rescuers, the ship made its way to Honolulu. there four of the Japanese remained; the fifth, Manjiro Nakahama, a fifteen year old boy renamed John Mung by the crew, chose to remain on board the John Howland and return the Uniited States with Whitfield. It was three years later, in 1844, when the John Howland came to port at New Bedford harbor. Bystanders took little notice of the "Chinese looking fellow" who disembarked with Captain Whitfield. There was no publicity for the first Japanese who came to American soil. (Wright, K, 1969, p.88)

http://www.ardentheatre.org/images/2003/pacific_manjiro.jpg

Nakahama Manjiro lived in the United States for several years, first with Whitfield family where he studied at the Old Oxford School in 1843. This was Fairhaven's first public school. While a student, Manjiro traveled and even became a Forty-Niner in the California Gold Rush, did some arubaito -- part-time work undertaken by students in their free time -- before returning to Japan in 1851 to become an official of the Tokugawa shogunate and the Meiji government. On his return to Japan he was interrogated by a Tosa daimyo, or feudal lord who mistrusted anything foreign. He soon found favor with the Sogunate and was instrumental in translating for Commodore Perry during the treaty negotiations. Manjiro wrote Shortcut to Anglo-American Conversation, the first English-language phrase book, interpreted at the negotiation of the Harris Treaty of 1858 which open the doors to Japanese immigration. At the end of his career, Manjiro was appointed an instructor at Kaisei Gakko (the current Tokyo University).

In 1868, Eugene M. Van Reed, an American businessman, sent a group of 150 Japanese to work on sugar plantations in Hawaii. This recruitment and shipment of laborers abroad was neither authorized nor opposed by the Japanese government, yet it marked the beginning of Japanese labor migration overseas. According to Dennis Ogawa:

The Gannen Mono, or the "first year men", arrived in Hawaii from Yokohama in 1868. They numbered approximately one hundred fifty men and women of diverse background, largely urban dwellers, displaced samurai and an assortment of rogues. Treatment of Gannen Mono in Hawaii by certain plantations caused a "distasteful impression" in Japan. Japan, therefore, blocked further migration until the Hawaiian government agreed to protect the laborers.

Hawaii was a key provisioning spot for American whaling ships. American protestant missionaries had targeted the island as a good place for "saving souls". More importantly, Hawaii was a new and profitable source of sugar cane production. According to the web site maintained by the U.S. department of State:

...Hawaii's economy became increasingly integrated with the United States. An 1875 trade reciprocity treaty further linked the two countries and U.S. sugar plantation owners from the United States came to dominate the economy and politics of the islands. When Queen Liliuokalani moved to establish a stronger monarchy, Americans under the leadership of Samuel Dole deposed her in 1893. The planters' belief that a coup and annexation by the United States would remove the threat of a devastating tariff on their sugar also spurred them to action. The administration of President Benjamin Harrison encouraged the takeover, and dispatched sailors from the USS Boston to the islands to surround the royal palace. The U.S. minister to Hawaii, John L. Stevens, worked closely with the new government.

Queen Liliuokalani
http://www.aloha.com/~hvguides/HotPics/Liliuokalani.JPG

Dole sent a delegation to Washington in 1894 seeking annexation, but the new President, Grover Cleveland, opposed annexation and tried to restore the Queen. Dole declared Hawaii an independent republic. Spurred by the nationalism aroused by the Spanish-American War, the United States annexed Hawaii in 1898 at the urging of President William McKinley. Hawaii was made a territory in 1900, and Dole became its first governor. Racial attitudes and party politics in the United States deferred statehood until a bipartisan compromise linked Hawaii's status to Alaska, and both became states in 1959. http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/time/gp/17661.htm

Another group of settlers came from Japan to the United States, the Wakamatsu Tea and Silk Farm Colony under the leadership of John Schnell, arrived at Cold Hill, El Dorado County, California in June 1869. Additional colonists arrived in the fall of 1869. These immigrants brought mulberry trees, silk cocoons, tea plants, bamboo roots, and other agricultural products. The U.S. Census of 1870 showed 55 Japanese in the United States (not counting Hawaii); 33 were in California, with 22 living at Gold Hill. Within a few years of the colony's founding, the colonists had dispersed, their agricultural venture a failure. The following is an account by one of the survivors:

http://www.directcon.net/pharmer/Wakamatsu/Wakamatsu.html

The morning of departure came. Taking his wife and the children, Schnell san left, accompanied by some farmers and carpenters, and a Samurai friend. The others of us were to follow later. Our route was to be the same as that of the first party - down the river in small boats and out to a black ship which would stop in the roadstead. How I hated to be left behind. I should live only with my fears, I thought, with no one to care for, nothing to do...

I do not like to recall our days of waiting or the days, later, on the ship. The stomach sickness overtook me as it did many of my doshu. It felt strange to commit myself to one of these smoking teapots which had caused so many sleepless nights in my homeland. I feared the ship, yet I was hopeful. I feared the new land ahead, yet I dreamed if it.

For a long time after the gleaming hills of my homeland had vanished into the mists of the horizon, I imagined I still could see them. It was like visions of the Isle of Mimiraku where the dead are to be seen in the distance, but vanish if you approach too near.

The day came, finally, when we entered a narrow passage from the sea. Some said this passage was the Kimmon Kaikyo, but I saw no gate and it did not look golden -only waving with yellow grass on the hills.

The first group of our migration had crossed the sea on a big side-wheeler, the "China" of the Pacific Mail Lines. This, I learned later. They had arrived on the 27th day of the Fifth Month in 1869. From San Francisco, they went by riverboat to Sacramento, thence by wagon to Placerville and Gold Hill. (link ) How strange the names sounded. How difficult for us to pronounce.

We, arriving shortly after the first group, followed the same course. As we went up the river, I thought how familiar the
reed-lined watercourse would appear if it only had fish traps and cormorant fishermen. There were fishermen in small boats, but they used long poles which waved in the air like pothooks.

At Gold Hill, Schnell san had arranged to purchase 160 acres (about 640 tan). The land was to be bought from a Charles M. Graner. We thought the region looked much like our homeland. It had green trees in the hills and it was often cold at night. And, too, there were many families in the vicinity who came from the homeland of Schnell san.

Immediately upon our arrival, we set out to clear the land and plant our crops. Some times, the natives of the region were to be seen. They appeared poorer even than we. Often, the neighboring landowners came to look at us as we labored. They were booted men, women in long garments with parasols. Many of the men were bearded and looked like giants to us. The truth is, they frightened us. We did not know what strange powers they possessed. Their tongue was harsh to our ears. Yet - many of these people, we learned, could be kind. It was just the strangeness of everything.

For more than a year we worked and it appeared we would be rewarded for our sacrifices. But a combination of many things defeated us-the dry climate, scarcity of irrigation water, the lack of money, the failure of promised funds to arrive from our homeland.

One day, Schnell san left us, taking his wife and daughters. He assured us he would return with the money we needed so desperately, but he failed and did not return.

We were abandoned in a strange and often hostile land. In that nearby collection of wretched and untidy buildings which our neighbors called a town, it was said they thought us Chinese and they bad been known to kill Chinese for no apparent reason.

Winter came and we thought we bad been lost in the abode of Isonokami who thrives on rain. There was snow and cold. We sold most of our belongings to buy food while awaiting Schnell san's return.

When it became apparent that he would not return, our people began to drift away. The carpenters were the first to go. They were used to wandering the countryside in search of work. Finally, only the Samurai, (link) Matsunoke Sakurai, and I, the lowly nursemaid remained. But I was ill, having contracted the wasting fever in this place.

On those days when I felt strong enough, I climbed to a nearby hill and looked across the land toward the west from whence I had come. Homesickness was a pain in my chest... never again to see my friends and the familiar mountains.

This place was the abode of the dead, I thought. Matsu tried to rally me. "Spring renews everything," he said. "Wait for the spring."

In this time, we both were befriended and employed by the family of Francis Veerkamp, countrymen of Schnell san and pioneers in the land here.

When I grew certain that I would die here, I asked only that they bury me on the hill where I had gazed toward my homeland. The fever was very bad then. At times, I imagined that all these things had never happened, that I was back in my familiar bed at Aizu. I could hear the children scampering about on a frosty morning, blessing themselves against the cold. I thought I heard the sunset bells and the choruses of small bells from the hill temples, the chanting of sutras.

Once, Matsu told me I would be like Takenouchi and live 350 years, but it was not to be in the way he said, for this was truly Shide no Yama for me.
.
In the spring, in the Fourth Month, they carried my body to the hill where I had requested. Over the grave, they placed a headstone inscribed in both English and Japanese: "In memory of Okei, died 1871, aged 19 years, a Japanese girl."

Nearby, the keaki continued to grow. http://www.directcon.net/pharmer/Wakamatsu/Wakamatsu.html

http://www.directcon.net/pharmer/Wakamatsu/Wakamatsu.html

In 1885 the steamship "City of Tokyo" arrived in Honolulu carrying the first 944 official migrants from Japan to Hawaii. In that year, the governments of Japan and Hawaii concluded the Immigration Convention under which approximately 29,000 Japanese traveled to Hawaii for the next nine years to work on sugar plantations under three-year contracts.

The Emperor Meiji of Japan (1868)
http://web.jjay.cuny.edu/~jobrien/reference/meiji.jpg

Around the turn of the century, many young men left Japan to get an education in the United States. Most congregated in cities like San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle. Often known as "school boys," they attended school while performing domestic work in exchange for room and board from white families. Meanwhile, there were many common laborers who entered along the Pacific Coast, both in the United States and Canada.

In 1906, 93 Japanese children were forced to attend the Oriental school in Chinatown.

Except for a temporary suspension of immigration to Hawaii in 1900, the flow of immigration from Japan remained relatively unaffected until 1907-08, when agitation from white supremacist organizations, labor unions, and politicians resulted in the "Gentlemen's Agreement," curtailing further immigration of laborers from Japan. A provision in the Gentlemen's Agreement, however, permitted wives and children of laborers, as well as laborers who had already been in the United States, to continue to enter the country. Until that time, Japanese immigrants had been primarily male. The 1900 Census indicates that only 410 of 24,326 Japanese were female. From 1908 to 1924, Japanese women continued to immigrate to the United States, some as "picture brides."

Japanese Picture Brides
http://www.angelisland.org/is_photos.htm

In 1913 the passage of the Webb-Hartley Law (known more commonly as the Alien Land Law of 1913):

limited land leases by "aliens ineligible to citizenship" to three years, and barred further land purchases. Amendments to this law in 1919 and 1920 further restricted land leasing agreements. Although the law contains no mention of Asians by name, it is clear that "aliens ineligible to citizenship" included, among others, Japanese, a group without access to U.S. citizenship and the target of anti-Asian groups during this period. http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/ 5views/5views4d.htm

Vincent Parillo cites Sanford Lyman's (1972) comments on anti-Japanese sentiment :

The anti-Japanese stereotype was so widespread that it affected the judgments of sociologists about the possibilities of Japanese assimilation. Thus, in 1913 Robert E. Park was sufficiently depressed by anti-Japanese legislation and popular prejudice to predict:

"The Japanese . . . is condemned to remain among us an abstraction, a symbol, and a symbol not merely of his own race, but of the Orient and of that vague, ill-defined menace we sometimes refer to as the 'yellow-peril' " . . . (p. 287).

By 1920, 111,010 Japanese immigrants were living and working in the United States. Japanese immigration to the United States became a political problem during the 1900s. Anti-Japanese agitation on the West Coast eventually led to severe restrictions on Japanese entry to Canada in 1923 and the termination of Japanese immigration to the United States in the following year as a part of the Immigration Act of 1924.

Unlike the Chinese, however, considerably more Japanese women comprised the Japanese population. In 1908, in a so-called "Gentleman's Agreement" to limit Japanese immigration secured by President Theodore Roosevelt, Japanese "wives" were allowed to immigrate. By 1920, 46% of the Japanese in California and 35% of those in Hawaii were women (Takaki, p.247).

Denied employment and entrepreneurial opportunity in virtually every economic sector other than agriculture, their industriousness and expertise in cultivation soon put them at odds with organized labor, vegetable growers and shippers, particularly in California.

The ultimate expression of anti-Japanese sentiment and institutional racism occurred in February of 1941, two months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor when more than

. . . 110,000 Japanese, many of them second- and third generation Americans with as little as one-eighth Japanese ancestry, were removed from their homes and placed in what were euphemistically called relocation centers in Arkansas, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Utah and Wyoming (Parillo, p. 288).

gateway.library.uiuc.edu/.../ japan.htm

Although reasons of national security were invoked by the champions of Japanese "removal" it is no small irony that J. Edgar Hoover, the much maligned director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (F.B.I.), said at the time that the so-called military reasons for the evacuation of Japanese citizens were "based primarily on public and political pressure rather than factual data" (Takaki, p. 380). He stopped short of saying racism.

Japanese Internment Camps
http://www.owensvalleyhistory.com/manzanar3/map_transparent.gif

Earl Warren, then California Attorney General, and later in his illustrious career, Governor of California and Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, led the chorus of California politicians pressuring the Federal Government to "do something" about the Japanese. Who was putting the pressure on these local politicians?

Takaki, citing Broek, Barnhardt and Matson (1970), points an accusing finger at the Grower-Shipper Vegetable Association, the Western Growers Protective Association, and the California Farm Bureau Federation:

"We've been charged with wanting to get rid of the Japs for selfish reasons," the Grower-Shipper Vegetable Association stated in the Saturday Evening Post. "We might as well be honest. We do. It's a question of whether the white man lives on the west coast or the brown man. They came into this valley to work, and they stayed to take over . . . If all the Japs were removed tomorrow, we'd never miss them in two weeks, because the white farmers can take over and produce everything the Jap grows " ( p. 381).

On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt in clear violation of the U. S. Constitution, signed an executive order to place all Japanese on the West Coast into internment camps.

http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/aasc/ex9066/

RACISM AND THE MEXICAN AMERICAN

As an instrument of institutional racism, immigration laws figure prominently in the victimization of the Mexican American. Like the Native American, the Mexican American, too, became, in the words of Ronald Takaki, a "foreigner in his native land." These two groups were victimized even more profoundly by (to paraphrase Victor Hugo) " an idea whose time had come..." America in the 1840s, less than sixty years old as a nation, was in the throes of westward expansion. The politicians were telling the people, "Go west!" They were telling the American people and the European nations that it was their "manifest destiny" to dominate, even rule the western hemisphere. Manifest Destiny was an idea whose time had come. But what is Manifest Destiny? The pbs.org website's commentary on the U.S.- Mexican War explains:

The people of the United States felt it was their mission to extend the "boundaries of freedom" to others by imparting their idealism and belief in democratic institutions to those who were capable of self-government. It excluded those people who were perceived as being incapable of self-government, such as...[Africans...writer's insert], Native American people and those of non-European origin.

But there were other forces and political agendas at work as well. As the population of the original 13 Colonies grew and the U.S. economy developed, the desire and attempts to expand into new land increased. For many colonists, land represented potential income, wealth, self-sufficiency and freedom. Expansion into the western frontiers offered opportunities for self-advancement.
http://www.pbs.org/kera/usmexicanwar/dialogues/prelude/manifest/d2aeng.html

This meant expansion "from sea to shining sea!" According to Sam W. Haynes:

During a four year period, the national domain increased by 1.2 million square miles, a gain of more than sixty percent. So rapid and dramatic was the process of territorial expansion, that it came to be seen as an inexorable process, prompting many Americans to insist that their nation had a "manifest destiny" to dominate the continent.

Yet, the expansionist agenda was never a clearly defined movement, or one that enjoyed broad, bipartisan support. Whig party leaders vigorously opposed territorial growth, and even expansionist Democrats argued about how much new land should be acquired, and by what means. Some supporters of Manifest Destiny favored rapid expansion and bold pursuit of American territorial claims, even at the risk of war with other nations. Others, no less committed to the long-term goal of an American empire, opposed to the use of force to achieve these ends, believing that contiguous land would voluntarily join the Union in order to obtain the benefits of republican rule. In an often-used metaphor of the day, these regions would ripen like fruit and fall into the lap of the United States. Thus the champions of Manifest Destiny were at best a motley collection of interest groups, motivated by a number of divergent objectives, and articulating a broad range of uniquely American concerns. http://www.pbs.org/kera/usmexicanwar/dialogues/prelude/manifest/d2heng.html

Manifest Destiny made war with Mexico inevitable. The acquisition of California and Texas would in fact "flesh out" the national boundaries and give the government the important sea ports and shipping harbors. In 1835, the Mexican colony of Texas, populated by thousands of Europeans, their African slaves and a minority of Mexicans, revolted. After several bloody battles, the Mexican President, Santa Anna, was forced to sign the Treaty of Velasco in 1836. This treaty gave Texas its independence. At the heart of the Texas revolt was Mexico's decision to outlaw slavery and prevent any more immigration of Americans into Texas. Stephen Austin, the nominal leader of the Teja colony, had a vision of Texas as the have of the "Anglo-American race." Sam Houston, the first elected president of the Texas republic claim the Texas reflected "glory on the Anglo-Saxon race." (Takaki, p. 174)

Stephen Austin the "Father of Texas and Sam Houston, it first elected president
http://www.cah.utexas.edu/exhibits/Pena/english/exhibit1.html
http://www.lsjunction.com/people/houston.jpg

On July 4th 1845, Texas decided to join the United States. Its annexation was quickly ratified by Congress. After a series of an-going border skirmishes, war broke out on April 25th, 1946. The HistoryGuy.com web site provides us with this summary description of the conflict:

Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, President of Mexico 1833-1848
http://www.rootsweb.com/~iltcghs/photos/santa-anna.jpg

The Mexican-American War was largely a conventional conflict fought by traditional armies consisting of infantry, cavalry and artillery using established European-style tactics. As American forces penetrated into the Mexican heartland, some of the defending forces resorted to guerrilla tactics to harass the invaders, but these irregular forces did not greatly influence the outcome of the war.

After the beginning of hostilities, the U.S. military embarked on a three-pronged strategy designed to seize control of northern Mexico and force an early peace. Two American armies moved south from Texas, while a third force under Colonel Stephen Kearny traveled west to Sante Fe, New Mexico and then to California. In a series of battles at Palo Alto and Resaca de Palma (near current-day Brownsville, Texas), the army of General Zachary Taylor defeated the Mexican forces and began to move south after inflicting over a thousand casualties.

General Zachary Taylor and President James Polk
http://www.army.mil/cmh-pg/books/mexico/topo/photos/pg107a.jpg
http://www.americanpresidents.org/images/11_150.gif

In July and August of 1846, the United States Navy seized Monterey and Los Angeles in California. In September, 1846, Taylor's army fought General Ampudia's forces for control of the northern Mexican city of Monterey in a bloody three-day battle.

The Capitulation of Monterrey
http://www.philaprintshop.com/images/cur2231.jpg

Following the capture of the city by the Americans, a temporary truce ensued which enabled both armies to recover from the exhausting Battle of Monterey. During this time, former President Santa Anna returned to Mexico from exile and raised and trained a new army of over 20,000 men to oppose the invaders. Despite the losses of huge tracts of land, and defeat in several major battles, the Mexican government refused to make peace.

It became apparent to the Polk Administration that only a complete battlefield victory would end the war. Continued fighting in the dry deserts of northern Mexico convinced the United States that an overland expedition to capture of the enemy capital, Mexico City, would be hazardous and difficult. To this end, General Winfield Scott proposed what would become the largest amphibious landing in history, (at that time), and a campaign to seize the capital of Mexico.

On March 9, 1847, General Scott landed with an army of 12,000 men on the beaches near Veracruz, Mexico's most important eastern port city. From this point, from March to August, Scott and Santa Anna fought a series of bloody, hard-fought battles from the coast inland toward Mexico City. The more important battles of this campaign include the Battles of : Cerro Gordo (April 18), Contreras (August 20), Churubusco (August 20), Molino del Rey (September 8) and Chapultepec (September 13). Finally, on September 14, the American army entered Mexico City.

General Winfield Scott and President/General Santa Anna
http://www.scottcountyiowa.com/history/images/genscott.gif
http://www.cegs.itesm.mx/hdem/definicion/imagenes/santa_anna.jpg

The city's populace offered some resistance to the occupiers, but by mid-October, the disturbances had been quelled and the U.S. Army enjoyed full control. Following the city's occupation, Santa Anna resigned the presidency but retained command of his army. He attempted to continue military operations against the Americans, but his troops, beaten and disheartened, refused to fight. His government soon asked for his military resignation. Guerrilla operations continued against Scott's lines of supply back to Veracruz, but this resistance proved ineffective.

On February 2, 1848, The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, later to be ratified by both the U.S. and Mexican Congresses. ... The bravery of the individual Mexican soldier goes a long way in explaining the difficulty the U.S. had in prosecuting the war. Mexican military leadership was often lacking, at least when compared to the American leadership. And in many of the battles, the superior cannon of the U.S. artillery divisions and the innovative tactics of their officers turned the tide against the Mexicans. The war cost the United States over $100 million, and ended the lives of 13,780 U.S. military personnel. America had defeated its weaker and somewhat disorganized southern neighbor, but not without paying a terrible price.

The Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo ended the Mexican War. Under the terms of the treaty, the U.S.-Mexican border would be set at the Rio Grande River. The US acquired most of California, New Mexico, Nevada, Wyoming, Colorado and Texas. The US paid Mexico $15 million for these territories and assumed some $3,250,000 more in claims against the Mexican government by American citizens. Having been a part of New Spain as Mexico was called before its independence from Spain in 1821, the acquisition of these territories allowed the Continental United States to extend from east coast to west coast.

The price of its independence from Spain was high for Mexico. The country suffered terribly from the war. Its economy was in shambles, its body politic rife with internal struggles between the various political factions and protecting and colonizing its northern territories proved to be nearly impossible.

Mexico desperately needed the income that could be generated from colonies, but constant warfare with Native Americans discouraged people from settling into the territories. Concluding the war with the United States enabled Mexico to divest itself of territories it could neither support, govern nor protect. In the not so charitable words of David Saville Muzzey:

Considering the facts that California was scarcely under Mexican control at all and might have been taken at any moment by Great Britain, France, or Russia; that New Mexico was still the almost undisturbed home of Indian tribes; that the land from the Nueces to the Rio Grande was almost a desert; and that the American troops were in possession of the Mexican capital, the terms offered Mexico were very generous. http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist6/muzzey.html

The discovery of gold in California at about the same time as the signing of the treaty of Hildalgo brought the first major post-war influx of of European Americans. According to the online book web site:

The 10,000 Californios (pre-conquest Mexican Californians) soon found the territory swamped by Anglo-American migrants and foreign immigrants. The latter included Chileans, Peruvians, Basques, and Mexicans, particularly miners from the Mexican province of Sonora. However, despite this Latino immigration, the Spanish-speaking population of California fell to 15 percent by 1850, and to four percent by 1870.

Northern California received the major thrust of the Anglo gold rush migration, while southern California remained heavily Mexican. This ethnic contrast was one factor in the debate over the possibility of dividing California into two states, as happened in the case of New Mexico and Arizona. However, the coming of the transcontinental railroad to southern California in the 1870s spurred a land boom and the state's second major population explosion. By the 1880s, Anglo settlers were also numerically dominant in the southern part of the state. http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/5views/5views5b.htm

The establishment of a statewide European-American majority robbed the Mexican American political power and made them powerless against the enactment of inequitable and discriminatory laws. The California legislature responding to complaints that miners from Mexico, South America, Canada, Australia and other parts of the world were taking gold that belonged to American citizens enacted the infamous Foreign Miners' Tax. This legislation required all miners who were not native or naturalized citizens of the United States to obtain a license at the cost of $20 per month. The tax was was applied not only to foreign immigrants but also to California-born Mexicans, who had automatically become U.S. citizens under the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. According to Ken Chavez:

Not only that, the Gold Rush precipitated an era of unprecedented animosity toward Mexican people living in the state, a xenophobia that trained its stare not only on Californios and newer arrivals from Mexico, but on other Latinos, such as the Chileans and Peruvians, as well...Most of the trouble began around 1850, in the so-called "southern mines" of Calaveras and Tuolumne counties. Many Mexicans from the rich mining state of Sonora had come to the area east of Stockton -- where the foothill town of Sonora, not coincidentally, now sits -- to try their luck in the mines.

At first, they staked their claims and mined in relative peace alongside all of the other gold-seekers arriving daily in California. They were admired for the well-honed "dry digging" skills they had developed in their native land, techniques that brought them a modicum of early success.

But it wasn't long before Anglo miners and eastern politicians, their own numbers growing in California, launched a campaign to force the Sonorans from the mines.

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican War, had given the United States official possession of California just nine days after James Marshall had discovered gold in Coloma on Jan. 28, 1848.

In a little over two years, Americans came to resent the fact that foreigners -- particularly those from a country the United States had just defeated in war -- were making it rich off land that they now considered exclusively theirs. ..

"They bring with them animosities that are related, in part, to the recent war with Mexico. They regard Mexicans as unwanted foreigners and drive them out of the mines as much as possible."

This was done by brute force -- and by force of legislation. http://www.calgoldrush.com/part3/03mexicans.html

Like the slave revolts, there was Mexican resistance to injustice. Several dispossessed miners turned to banditry. The most famous being the man/myth Joaquin Murieta:

Joaquin the legend grew from a novel written by John Rollin Ridge in 1854, The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta. In his book, Ridge portrays Murieta as a folk hero, a man of “generous and noble nature...gracefully built and active as a young tiger ...beloved by all with whom he came in contact.” He only turned to a life of crime after American miners (choose one): beat him, tied him up, hanged his half-brother and ravished his sister. After these atrocities he declared that he would henceforth “live for revenge, and that his path should be marked with blood.” Ridge then goes on to relate of Joaquin’s daring deeds, his fearsome companions such as the notorious Three-Fingered Jack, the public outcry, the formation of Harry Love’s Mounted Rangers to hunt him down, and of Joaquin’s gruesome, bloody fate.

But Joaquin the man was not the dashing, romantic figure that years of retelling Ridge’s story has made him out to be. When the Foreign Miners Tax was imposed in the early 1850’s, Joaquin was forced off his claim, as were most of the Mexican and Chinese miners in the Southern Mines. Soon afterwards, several groups of Mexican bandits, presumably miners dispossessed by their American counterparts, began preying upon those who had forced them from the mines. Cattle and horses were stolen, travelers and lone miners were robbed, beaten, and even killed. Stores and saloons were broken into...

Joachin Murieta
http://malakoff.com/joaq.jpg

By piecing together various reports, it was determined that the most notable banditos among these groups all seemed to be named Joaquin, with surnames such as Botilleras, Ocomorenia, Valenzuela, Carrillo, and Murieta. The State Legislature passed an act authorizing one Harry Love to raise a company of mounted rangers in an attempt to capture the “gang of robbers commanded by the five Joaquins.” Governor Bigler approved the act on May 11 of 1853, and then personally posted a $1,000 reward for any Joaquin captured or killed.

Two months later, the rangers ran across a group of Mexicans near Panoche Pass, to the west of Tulare Lake and about one hundred miles from the Southern Mines. Words were exchanged and rapid gunplay ensued, resulting in the death of two Mexicans. The rangers lopped off the head of one and stuck it in a jar of alcohol for preservation, claiming it to be the head of Joaquin Murieta. The other body gave up a hand, similarly preserved, which was said to have belonged to the nefarious Three-Fingered Jack. The detached appendages were then presented to the authorities, who despite no positive identification being possible, proclaimed the matter settled and paid the reward. The severed “Head of Murieta” and “Hand of Jack” then hit the road, becoming a main attraction for many years at different locations throughout the western states. http://malakoff.com/grpjomu.htm

And then there was Tiburicio Vasquez. According to Will F. Thrall:

...The bandit career of Murietta lasted only 3 1/2 years but it was fast, furious and spectacular while it lasted and has come down to us as the most prominent and colorful of the two. That of Vasquez and his band lasted for 23 years, but there were spells of inactivity, some of several months, when the officers of the law and those who might be prospective victims wondered when and where he would strike next...

Tiburcio Vasquez was keen, resourceful, a born leader. He hated the Americano with good reason and always in his mind was a thought, which had activated many of his race before him, that he could help get the Americans out and in some way regain California for Mexico.

At the age of 15 he lived in the town of Sonora [California], in the heart of the gold country; he had made himself a leader of the younger Mexicans and, feeling capable of taking care of himself under any circumstances, had grown bold and arrogant. He had a sister, beautiful and vivacious as young Mexican girls can be, and one night at a dance with him she resented the remarks of an American at the party. Vasquez, claiming that she had been insulted, demanded an apology and in the ensuing brawl stabbed the American.

Fearing the wrath of the Americans and certain retaliation, Vasquez and some of his young Mexican followers fled the town. Soon after this a robbery and murder at a mining camp nearby was laid to him and as he was no longer seen about Sonora it was said that he had joined the band of Joaquin Murrietta, then at the height of his career ..

Tiburicio Vasquez
http://www.pbagalleries.com/search/item.php?anr=116243&

The last three years of Vasquez operations were, with two notable exceptions, almost entirely in Southern California. In the Los Angeles area he had many places, strategically located, to which he could retire when hard pressed, among them Chilao and the great boulders of Mt. Hillyer; the gorge of Big Tujunga Canyon; the rough and wild area of Pico Canyon, west of Newhall; the famous Vasquez Rocks north of Soledad Canyon; and the rock-strewn mountainside north of Chatsworth, dominated by the famous Castle Rock.

East Chilao, now the site of Newcombs Ranch Inn, but then deep in the wilderness and little known, made an ideal hideout; the long, narrow valley of West Chilao and Horse Flat with its secret trail, both were excellent pasture for stolen horses, and the great rocks of Mt. Hillyer above Horse Flat furnished an impregnable fortress if hard pressed by the law. Vasquez made this his mountain headquarters for many years and through Chilao went a steady stream of horses, stolen in the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys, brands changed or blotted out at Chilao, and then on to Yuma and the mining areas to the east and north.

Members of his band frequently stole horses from the United States government at Yuma, re-branded them at Chilao and sold them in the San Fernando Valley. It is told that one of his men once stole a pair of enormous mules, so well known for their size and strength that they dared not offer them for sale. That, after keeping them in the mountains for a time, they were finally taken into a secluded canyon and shot. The best and fastest of these stolen horses were always kept for the use of the bandits themselves.

At 1:30 on the morning of May 15, 1874, Sheriff Rowland's specially chosen posse was gathering at the Jones Corral on Spring Street and proved to be Under Sheriff Albert Johnson, in command, Major H.M. Mitchell, W. E. Rogers, J. S. Bryant, Emil Harris, B. F. Hartley, D. K. Smith and George A. Beers, special correspondent of the San Francisco Chronicle. Soon they were in the saddle and on their way, following a route along the hills to Nichols Canyon and a little up the canyon to a Bee Ranch belonging to Mitchell, where they arrived about 4 a.m. in a fog so thick that visibility was practically zero.

From a ridge on the west, as the fog cleared, they had a clear view of the Greek George place and, near the spring, could see two gray horses, one of which they were quite certain was the speedy gray on which Vasquez had made previous escapes. A horseman was seen to leave the house and Mitchell and Smith were detailed to follow him, but the two grays still remained, and it seemed almost a certainty that Vasquez and one of his band were there, possibly more of them hidden nearby.

While planning the attack, and as they were about ready to start, two Mexicans with an empty wood-wagon drove into the canyon from the direction of Greek George's. The deep, high sided wagon box was ideal for their purpose and the driver and his outfit were familiar figures on the road, so threatening the two with death at the first false move, the six climbed in, lay down on the floor, and ordered them to drive back on the road passing in back of the house.

On reaching it they jumped out and surrounded the place without an alarm being raised, burst in the door and found Vasquez at breakfast. Attempting to escape, he jumped through the kitchen window and ran for his horse but was stopped before reaching it by a rifle ball through his shoulder and a charge of buckshot. Wounded in many places and thought to be dying, he was loaded into a wagon borrowed from the nearest ranch and with the other bandit, a young Mexican who had lately joined the band, was taken into the city.

It was found that he was not in a serious condition for all of his many wounds and in due time he was returned to Monterey County where he was tried, convicted, and hanged at San Jose on March 19, 1875. And the Judge who sentenced him to death stated that he did not believe him guilty of the crime for which he was to be hanged.http://www.scvhistory.com/scvhistory/vasquez-thrall.htm

Juan Nepomuceno Cortina, 1824-1892
http://www.texasranger.org/history/images/Cortina1.jpg

Juan Nepomuceno Cortina, the Robin Hood of the Rio Grande, is one of the lasting symbols of militant resistance to European American racism. Born at Camargo, Tamaupilas (Mexico), just south of the Rio Grande, into a wealthy cattle-ranching family, he moved north of the river into territory claimed by both Texas and Mexico in the late 1840s:

By the late 1850's, after the United States had annexed all lands north of the Rio Grande, Cortina had become an important political boss for the South Texas Democratic Party, and though the United States had invalidated many of his land claims, he still remained a large rancher.

On July 13, 1859, in Brownsville, Cortina witnessed an Anglo city marshal pistol-whipping one of his former family employees. Outraged, Cortina demanded that the marshal stop abusing the Mexican, and when the marshal refused, Cortina shot him in the shoulder, took his former servant up onto his horse, and fled with him to safety. With this classic blow struck for social justice, Cortina's career as a legend and an outlaw had begun.

Two months later, on September 28, Cortina led an armed force back into Brownsville, released Mexicans whom he felt had been unfairly imprisoned, and executed four Anglos who had killed Mexicans but hadn't been punished. Here he proclaimed the Republic of the Rio Grande as his followers raised the Mexican flag and shouted, "Death to the gringos!" But Cortina did not pillage or terrorize the city. Instead, he soon withdrew to a nearby ranch, where he issued a proclamation invoking the "sacred right of self-preservation" and condemning the fact that so many were "prosecut[ed] and rob[bed] for no other cause than that of being of Mexican origin."

The six months following the Brownsville raid have been called "Cortina's War." The Texas Rangers struck back furiously, often indiscriminately punishing any Hispanic in the south Rio Grande Valley. Cortina, who soon had five or six hundred armed men under his command, resumed his raids when the Rangers executed one of his lieutenants in Brownsville. The Mexican government, fearing that Cortina's actions would embroil them in another war with the United States, sent a joint Mexican-Anglo force against Cortina, which he quickly defeated.

Although some elite Mexican residents of Texas opposed Cortina and quietly aided his opponents, the bulk of the tejano population supported him, often sending his troops supplies and refusing to help U.S. officials. But this support proved to be no match for the U.S. Army, which dealt Cortina a sharp defeat in Rio Grande City on December 27, 1859. Sporadic raiding and fighting continued for several months; observers reported settlements deserted, property destroyed and normal business activities cancelled along the 100-mile stretch of the border from Brownsville to Rio Grande City.

   Forced to dissolve his army and retreat to Mexico, Cortina continued his military activities there, fighting with Benito Juarez and other Mexican nationalists against French intervention in the 1860s, and aiding Union partisans in Texas during the American Civil War. In 1863 he was made a general in the Mexican Army, and later became the acting governor of Tamaupilas. In 1876, Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz imprisoned Cortina in Mexico City, where he was held until 1890. He died in Tamaupilas in 1892. http://www.theoldwestwebride.com/txt5/cortin.html

Perhaps the most famous of all the so-called Mexican desperados was Francisco "Pancho" Villa. Himilce Novas tells us that the word desperado means desperate one. (Novas, 1994, p. 86. Certainly many Mexicans were driven to desperation as a result of their treatment by the European American. Whether or not he was an outlaw or not was in the eyes of the Anglo or Mexican beholder:

Pancho Villa
http://www.panchovilladays.com/mrvilla.gif

Pancho Villa was a hero of the Mexican Revoltion of 1910 in which Mexicans fought to depose dictator Porfirio Diaz (Who held power since 1884) and institute a pluralistic democracy that would return the land to the peasants and food to the people.

Like Juan Nepomuceno and Joachin Murieta to the North, Pancho Villa became disgusted with the establishment and decided to take law into his own hands. As a young man, he took to the hills and launched a career as both a guerilla fighter for democracy and a bandit who terrorized northern Mexico, robbing banks and trains and ransacking mining towns.

When the United States recognized Venustiano Carranza as president of mexico, while several mexican leaders literally battled each other for the post during the mexican Revolution, Villa became enraged over U.S. intervention in the affairs of his country. In retaliation, he killed sixteen American engineers on board a train that had entered Mexico from the United states, and in 1916 he attacked Columbus, new mexico, slaughtering seventeen Americans. In a matter of days, U.S. General John J. Pershing and his large army was given the order to capture Pancho Villa and bring him to trial. The clever guerilla fighter who knew the difficult Mexican terrain like the back of his hand, slipped into hiding and Pershing's army came up empty--handed. Pancho Villa became a hero overnight. (Novas, 1994, p.88) (Pancho Villa was assassinated under suspicious circumstance on July 20, 1923. JM)

Mexican resistance provoked more racist legislation, especially in California. California's anti-vagrancy act of 1855 was so obviously anti-Mexican that it became known popularly as the Greaser Law. According to Takaki, this act:

defined vagrants as "all persons who [were] commonly known as 'Greasers' or the issue of Spanish or Indian blood ... and who [went] armed and [were] not peaceable and quiet persons." (Takaki, p.178)

Stephen W. Bender (2003) in his book, Greasers and Gringos: Latinos, Law, and the American Imagination explores the origins of the derogatory term, Greaser.

Originating in the mid-1800s, the term greaser first came to be used against those of Mexican appearance in California and the Southwest. Although some suggest the derogatory description came from the practice of Mexican laborers in the Southwest greasing their backs to facilitate the unloading of hides and cargo, others suppose it stemmed from a similarity between Mexican skin color and grease. Its origin may be more disparaging still—the “greasers” label may derive from longstanding conceptions of Mexicans as unkempt and unclean, with unwashed, greasy black hair. “Greasers” was a popular reference by U.S. troops in the U.S.-Mexico war of 1846–1848, as well as by settlers in gold rush California. Its original usage appears to have been sexualized, a way to describe a “treacherous Mexican male who was sexually threatening to and desirous of white women.” Although the term continued to be associated with Mexican men in its Hollywood usage, “greasers” came to refer to Mexicans generally, encompassing both sexes as well as both Mexicans and Mexican Americans. Further, the term originated as a derogatory reference toward those of Mexican origin, but its use expanded over time to encompass Peruvian and Chilean miners during the California gold rush and, more broadly, to describe anyone of Spanish origin. http://www.nyupress.org/webchapters/081479887Xpref.pdf.

Bender also makes an interesting observation about the Greaser Law suggesting that its passage in California in the late nineteen century has contextual implications for modern law enforcement:

Targeting the supposed “idle Mexican,” this anti-loitering law was the precursor to modern laws directed at loitering, gang activity, and other apparently race-neutral offenses that in practice are often used to justify interrogatory stops of persons
of color. http://www.nyupress.org/webchapters/081479887Xpref.pdf.

Also in 1855, the California Assembly passed " the most blatantly anti-Mexican law was the 1855 act negating the constitutional requirement that laws be translated into Spanish." http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/5views/5views5b.htm

By 1885 in California, the European was in control. California's history of institutional racism against the non-white, particularly the Chinese and the Mexican, is as grim as any state in the American South. Not to be out done, Texas, the place founding father Stephen Austin wished to "redeem from the wilderness" and from the "mongrel Spanish-Indian and negro race, was even more direct in proscribing the rights of Mexicans. According to Takaki:

[In Texas]... , Mexicans were granted suffrage, but only in principle. A merchant in Corpus Christi reported that the practice in several counties was to withhold the franchise from Mexicans. A traveler observed that the Mexicans in San Antonio could elect a government of their own if they voted but added: "Such a step would be followed, however, by a summary revolution." In 1863, after a closely contested election, the Fort Brown Flag editorialized: "We are opposed to allowing an ignorant crowd of Mexicans to determine the political questions in this country, where a man is supposed to vote knowingly and thoughtfully." During the 1800's, many counties established "white primaries" to disfranchise Mexicans as well as blacks, and the legislature instituted additional measures like the poll tax to reduce Mexican political participation.

Political restrictions lessened the ability of Mexicans not only to claim their rights as citizens, but also to protect their rights as landowners. The original version of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo had contained a provision, Article X, which guaranteed protection of "all prior and pending titles to property of every description." In ratifying the treaty, however, the U.S. Senate omitted this article. Instead, American emissaries offered the Mexican government a "Statement of Protocol" to reassure Mexicans that "the American government by suppressing the Xth article ... did not in any way intend to annul the grants of lands made by Mexico in the ceded territories." Grantees would be allowed to have their legitimate tides acknowledged in American courts .

But whether the courts would in fact confirm their land titles was another matter. In New Mexico, the state surveyor general handled conflicts over land claims until 18gi, when a Court of Private Land Claims was established. Dominated by Anglo legal officials, the court confirmed the grants of only z,051,5z6 acres, turning down claims for 33,439,493 acres. The court's actions led to Anglo ownership of four-fifths of the Mexican land grants. (Takaki, p.180)

During the second half of the 19th century, harassment against Mexicans by European-Americans was so severe that many were forced to abandon their homes in Texas and return to Mexico:

In the 1850s a number of Mexicans were driven from their homes in Central Texas, and in 1856 the entire Mexican population of Colorado County was reportedly ordered to leave the county. Conflict between Anglo Americans and Mexicans in the 1870s reportedly resulted in the expulsion of Mexicans from various locations in South Texas. Nevertheless, the number of repatriates was minuscule compared to those who returned to Mexico during the Great Depression. With the deterioration of the United States economy after 1929, between 400,000 and 500,000 Mexicans and their American-born children returned to Mexico. More than half of these departed from Texas. (The term Mexican is used in this article to refer to all Mexican-heritage repatriates, although a significant number of them were Mexican Americans since they had been born in Texas. For Mexican Americans, the term repatriate is actually inaccurate, for one cannot be repatriated to a foreign country.) Depression-era Mexican repatriation from Texas began in 1929, gained momentum in 1930, and peaked in 1931. In the last quarter of 1931 repatriation reached massive proportions; the roads leading to the Texas-Mexico border became congested with returning repatriates. Mexican border towns were also crowded as thousands of returning Mexicans awaited transportation to the interior of Mexico. The number of repatriates declined in 1932 and again in 1933. During the middle years of the depression - 1934 to 1938 - only occasional groups of repatriates left Texas. Then in 1939 and continuing into 1940, a significant number of Mexicans were repatriated from the state by the Mexican government. http://www.pbs.org/itvs/thecity/resources1_5.html

With the key objective of annexation of California and Texas achieved, the the process of overspreading " the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions..."was in its advanced stages. (Takaki, p.176) And "Manifest Destiny", that doctrine steeped in white supremacy, which declared that the American continent was "intended by Providence as a vast theater on which to work out the grand experiment of Republican government under the auspices of the Anglo-Saxon race," became enshrined itself as a most effective instrument of institutional racism

In addition to having their lands taken, the new Mexican American faced in the American workforce the kinds of hardships and inequities brought about by individual and institutional racism. While the vaquero, contrary to popular belief, was the original cowboy and an important part of the early Mexican American workforce, most Mexican workers, including the proud vaqueros, especially after the turn of the century were employed as farm workers, in the mines and on the railroads. According to Takaki:

... the vaqueros taught the Anglos their time-tested techniques of roping, branding, and handling cattle. Rancher C. C. Cox described the work of the vaqueros at a roundup: "Once a week or oftener we would make a rodeo or round up the cattle. The plan is to have one herding ground on the Ranch -the cattle soon learn to run together at that place when they see the vaqueros on the wing -and when those on the outskirts of the range are started, the movement becomes general, and no prettier or more interesting sight can be imagined than a rodeo in full progress -every cow catches the alarm and starts off at a brisk trot headed for the herding ground.

But the vaqueros soon began to vanish. The extension of rail lines into Texas eliminated the cattle drives, and agriculture in the state shifted from grazing to tillage. Mexican cowboys had looked down on farm laborers with "mingled contempt and pity," rancher J. Frank Dobie observed in the 1920S, but "more and more of the vaqueros" were turning to "cotton picking each fall."

Mexican farm laborers had been in the cotton fields even before Texan independence. As cotton cultivation expanded during the second half of the nineteenth century, they became the mainstay of agricultural labor. "Soil and climate are suitable and cheap labor is at hand," announced the Corpus Christi Weekly Caller in 1885. "Mexican farm labor can be utilized in the culture of cotton as well during the picking season." (Takaki, p.184)

Mexicans were hired in droves by the railroads because they would work for $1.50 a day while paying $5.00 a week board. As the Mexican laborer moved into the American workforce, 75 % of these workers were employed in low-paying, "blue-collar" occupations. less than 10% were in "white collar" jobs. Were they compensated equitably? Takaki say no:

Even where Mexicans did the same work as Anglos, they were paid less than their counterparts. In the silver-mining industry of Arizona, for example, Mexican workers received between $12 and $30 a month plus a weekly ration of flour, while" American" miners got between $30 and $70 a month plus board. In the copper industry, companies listed their Mexican employees on their payrolls under the special heading of "Mexican labor," paying them at lower rates than Anglo laborers for the same job classifications. "The differences in the wages paid Mexicans and the native-born and north Europeans employed as general laborers," a congressional investigation reported, ". ..are largely accounted for by discrimination against the Mexicans in payment of wages." Trapped in this dual wage system, Mexican miners were especially vulnerable to debt peonage. Forced to live in company towns, they had no choice but to buy necessities from the company store, where they had to use their low wages to pay high prices for food and clothing. Allowed to make purchases on credit, these miners frequently found themselves financially chained to the company.

Justifying this racial hierarchy, mine owner Sylvester Mowry invoked the images as well as language used earlier by slavemasters to describe the affection and loyalty of their slaves. "My own experience has taught me that the lower class of Mexicans. ..," Mowry declared, "are docile, faithful, good servants, capable of strong attachments when firmly and kindly treated. They have been 'peons' for generations. They will always remain so, as it is their natural condition." (p.187)

But the Mexican workers soon bared their teeth. In 1901, Takaki reports that two hundred Mexican construction workers went on strike against the EI Paso Electric Street Car Company . They demanded a wage increase. They also demanded that management' stop replacing them with lower-paid workers recruited from Juarez, Mexico. They didn't get the raise, but they did protect their jobs against imported laborers. In 1903, Mexican members of the United Mine Workers went on strike and won a pay increase and an eight-hour day from the Texas and Pacific Coal Company in Thurber, Texas. Also in 1903, two hundred Mexican farm workers joined Japanese laborers in a 1903 strike at Oxnard, California:

Together the two groups organized the Japanese-Mexican Labor Association (JMLA). The strikers elected Kosaburo Baba as president, Y. Yamaguchi as secretary of the Japanese branch, and J.M. Lizarras as secretary of the Mexican branch. At their union meetings, discussions were conducted in both Japanese and Spanish, with English serving as the common language or both groups. For the first time in the history of California, two minority groups, feeling a solidarity based on class, had come together to form a union... (Takaki, p.188)

The Mexican Revolution from 1910 to 1917 was the cause of great suffering for the Mexican people. Few of the lofty goals like land for the peasant and food for the people was realized. It is estimated that more than one million Mexicans died and millions more lost their homes, their possessions and their financial security. The Mexican revolution is cited as the cause of the first wave of Mexican immigration (Novas, p.90). Nearly 700,000 refugees fled Mexico between 1910 and 1930. The Mexonline web site gives this account of the revolution:

For most of Mexico's developing history, a small minority of the people were in control of most of the country's power and wealth, while the majority of the population worked in poverty. As the rift between the poor and rich grew under the leadership of General Díaz, the political voice of the lower classes was also declining. Opposition of Díaz did surface, when Francisco I. Madero, educated in Europe and at the University of California, led a series of strikes throughout the country.

Porfirio Diaz and Francisco I. Madero
http://sololiteratura.com/porfirio.diaz.jpg
http://redescolar.ilce.edu.mx/redescolar/act_permanentes/historia/histdeltiempo/mexicana/sigloxx/img/x_de_i1.jpg

Díaz was pressured into holding an election in 1910, in which Madero was able to gather a significant number of the votes. Although Díaz was at one time a strong supporter of the one-term limit, he seemed to have changed his mind and had Madero imprisoned, feeling that the people of Mexico just weren't ready for democracy.

Once Madero was released from prison, he continued his battle against Díaz in an attempt to have him overthrown. During this time, several other Mexican folk heroes began to emerge, including the well known Pancho Villa in the north, and the peasant Emiliano Zapata in the south, who were able to harass the Mexican army and wrest control of their respective regions. Díaz was unable to control the spread of the insurgence and resigned in May, 1911, with the signing of the Treaty of Ciudad Juárez, after which he fled to France

Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa
http://www.bbc.co.uk/spanish/images/seriemilenio01foto1g.jpg
http://ldhp715.immt.pwr.wroc.pl/~michal/tequila/pancho.jpg

Madero was elected president, but received opposition from Emiliano Zapata who didn't wish to wait for the orderly implementation of Madero's desired land reforms. In November of the same year Zapata denounced Madero as president and took the position for himself. He controlled the state of Morelos, where he chased out the estate owners and divided their lands to the peasants. Later, in 1919, Zapata was assassinated by Jesus Guajardo acting under orders from General Pablo Gonzalez.
It was during this time that the country broke into many different factions, and guerilla units roamed across the country destroying and burning down many large haciendas and ranchos. Madero was later taken prisoner and executed and the entire country existed in a state of disorder for several years, while Pancho Villa rampaged through the north, and different factions fought for presidential control.

Venustiano Carranza
http://www.mexonline.com/revolution.htm
Eventually, Venustiano Carranza rose to the presidency, and organized an important convention whose outcome was the Constitution of 1917, which is still in effect today. Carranza made land reform an important part of that constitution. This resulted in the ejido, or farm cooperative program that redistributed much of the country's land from the wealthy land holders to the peasants. The ejidos are still in place today and comprise nearly half of all the farmland in Mexico.

Carranza was followed by others who would fight for political control, and who would eventually continue with the reforms, both in education and land distribution. During this period the PRI political party was established, which was the dominant political power for 71 years until Vicente Fox of the conservative PAN party was elected. The holiday itself commemorates the day, November 20th of 1910, when Madero denounced President Díaz, declared himself president of Mexico and called for a national insurrection. http://www.mexonline.com/revolution.htm

Then came the 1920's the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. Himilce Novas paints this bleak picture of conditions for the Mexican and the Mexican American worker:

As the 1920s came to a close, the Great Depression was looming over the United States. Between 1930 and 1933, the number of unemployed Americans skyrocketed from four million to over thirteen million. Wages dropped from thirty-five cents an hour to fifteen cents an hour. Stockbrokers and financiers were leaping out of windows in New York City and college graduates were selling apples in the streets.

Mexican nationals and Mexican Americans, like most considered both Mexicans Americans, found themselves out of work as the railroads, automobile manufacturing plants, meat-packing plants, and steel mills in America came to a screeching halt. All across country, they were fired from their jobs. In New Mexico, cattle ranchers laid off Mexican American ranch hands indefinitely, and many New Mexican Hispanos lost their land because they could not afford to pay the taxes or the assessments of the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy Project.

Thousands of Mexican Americans joined other Americans in roaming the country in search of whatever work they could get. Anglo immigrants from the Dust Bowl and other regions headed west, where they competed for the few jobs that had been traditionally filled by Mexicans and Mexican Americans. For instance, by 1937 over half the cotton pickers' in Arizona came from out of state. The Mexican Americans, who were at the bottom of the opportunity ladder, had nowhere to turn. In Texas alone the number of jobless Mexican Americans hit 400,000 during the Great Depression. (Novas,1994, p.95)

During the 1930s, almost 500,000 people of Mexican descent were deported to Mexico. This number included 132,00 from the state of Texas alone. These deportees had to live in resettlement camps in such Mexican states as Oaxaca, Chiapas, Guerrero and Michoacan. Ironically, the Government of Mexico was so strapped economically that it could not provide permanent settlements for the deportees. Many of these smuggled themselves back in to the U.S. at every opportunity.

In the 1940's during World War II, the American government initiated the Bracero program. This program brought in thousands of workers from Mexico on temporary status, because so many American workers had joined the war effort. The first incarnation of the Bracero program began in April 1942 and lasted until December 1947. Mexican workers were given one year contracts and no more that 250,000 worker per year were admitted. The Mexican government, who was a party to the agreement to allow Mexican nationals take temporary employment in the U.S., took steps to protect its workers from American mistreatment. According to Novas:

While ironing out the details of the Bracero program, the Mexican government stipulated that the United States had to ensure that the itinerant Mexican workers would receive no less than the minimum wage, that their health and well-being would be protected, that labor practices would be fair, and that the workers would have the right to take legal action against American employers refusing to comply with the above stipulations. The labor shortage during World War II, coupled with the hue and cry over the illegal deportation of Mexican Americans during the Depression, prompted the U.S. government to agree to abide by mutual treaties that ensured basic rights for the Mexican workers.

Braceros
http://www.washington.edu/uwired/outreach/cspn/hstaa432/lesson_20/bracero75.jpg
http://www.ccrh.org/comm/moses/image/mosel/braceros.jpg
Even with the laws on the books, many prejudiced American employers treated the braceros poorly. Mexican workers complained of bad food (their provisions often consisted exclusively of such things as tripe, chitterlings, pig's feet, chicken necks, and leftovers from earlier meals); excessive wage deductions, which left them with very little money to support themselves or send to their families back in Mexico; physical mistreatment; miserable housing that often amounted to nothing more than enlarged chicken coops; rampant prejudice; and exposure to deadly pesticides. Conditions for Mexican workers, braceros or not, were so bad in Texas, that the Mexican government at one point barred its citizens from working in that state.

Congress saw fit to extend the Bracero program to 1954. More than 4.5 million came to the United States on temporary contracts. 25% of all the farmer workers during that period were Braceros. An interesting irony of the period was that the state of Texas in order to give Mexican workers the rights and privileges enjoyed by European American workers declared in the Caucasian Race Resolution of 1944(Texas State Legislature) that all people of Mexican descent were white.

One other set of incidents, in passing, is worthy of mention. It exemplifies the common racist sentiment toward Mexican Americans in the 1940's This was known as the Sleepy Lagoon Case. Ethnomusicologist Charles Sharp reports:

In August 1942, José Díaz, a young Mexican-American, was found comatose at an open reservoir at Slauson and Atlantic Boulevards in Los Angeles. He died later at the hospital. The case, known as the "Sleepy Lagoon Murder," was featured in the press for months where it was referred to as a gangland slaying. The police rounded up 300 Mexican-American youths and arrested 23 of them on murder charges, without any physical evidence. During the trial, Los Angeles police Lieutenant Edward Duran Ayres testified as an expert witness for the prosecution, claiming that people of Mexican descent were biologically prone to violence and crime due to their "oriental" Aztec ancestry (Ayres 1942). Twelve of the youth were found guilty based on this racist testimony and by the time the ruling was overturned by the U.S. District Court of Appeals in 1944, eight of the youths had spent two years in the federal penitentiary.

The racism surrounding the Sleepy Lagoon case fueled rumors of rampant crime-waves perpetrated by Mexican-American zoot-suited youth. From 3 June to 13 June 1943 hundreds of American service men in the Los Angeles area went downtown and attacked these youth, initially targeting those wearing zoot suits, but eventually beating and stripping anyone of color they could find. Chicana women were assaulted as well. The police broke up the disturbance by arresting the victims. To add further insult to injury, the Los Angeles Times featured pictures of the victims' stripped and beaten bodies on the front page. Several sources insist that such reports, which portrayed the zoot-suited victims as members of a dangerous gang who perpetuated the riots, were strictly conjectural (see Hinojos 1975, Mazon 1984, McWilliams 1943, Pitt and Pitt 1997). Writing in the New Republic magazine, shortly after the riots, Carey McWilliams, the head of the Sleepy Lagoon defense committee, portrayed zoot-suiters, known as Pachucos, not as members of organized criminal gangs but as "loosely organized neighborhood or geographical groups. . . . Many of them are, in effect, nothing more than boys clubs without a clubhouse" (McWilliams 1943). Pachucos represent a rebellious youth culture among Chicanos. Arturo Madrid-Barela describes how the Pachuco has become a symbol of resistance against the homogenizing effects of assimilation (Madrid Barela 1973). He notes that the Pachucos' style is derived from elements of urban black culture, such as their suits and the music they listened to, but elements of Mexican culture are maintained, in essence enacting their difference through style. Francisco J. Hinojos writes that the Pachucos emphasized their difference as urban Mexican-Americans through the use of their own dialect, Caló, a mix of English and Spanish slang with Náhuatl and archaic Spanish words (Hinojos 1975. See also Gonzales 1967). http://www.ethnomusic.ucla.edu/estudent/csharp/pachucos.html

It was the opposition of organized labor to the hiring of Mexican aliens along with the growth of mechanized farming that brought the Bracero program to an end. It was the plight of the Mexican worker that fueled the resistance of Mexican Americans to the oppression of racism. Ironically, it was through organized labor under Mexican leadership that those conditions were addressed and improved. No two people better exemplify that resistance than Cesar Estrada Chavez and Delores Huerta. The lives and legacy of these two activists bring into sharp focus the impact of individual and institutional racism on Mexican Americans.

http://www.americaslibrary.gov/assets/aa/chavez/aa_chavez_subj_m.jpg

Cesar Chavez was born in Yuma Arizona. His family was prosperous during the first ten years of his life until the onset of the Great Depression. In 1938, the Chavez family joined 300,000 farm workers who worked the fields of California. Chavez worked the fields while going to school [he had an eighth grade education] and in 1944 escaped for a time into the United States Navy.

Chavez and wife Helen
http://www.americaslibrary.gov/cgi-bin/page.cgi/aa/activists/chavez/growup_3

Soon, he was back in the fields. In 1948 he married Helen Fabela and embarked upon the path of social activism that would transform him into a union organizer:

By 1962, [Cesar Chavez] could no longer stand to see the workers being taken advantage of, watching as they worked long hours for low pay. At the age of thirty-five, he left his own well paid job to devote all his time to organizing the farm workers into a union. His wife had to become a fruit picker in the fields to feed their children. Chavez traveled from camp to camp organizing the workers. In each camp, he recruited a few followers. By this time he had also gotten many other members of his family involved in the movement. At the end of six months, 300 members of the National Farm Workers Union, as the group was first called, met in Fresno, California. At that first meeting, they approved their flag, a red background with a black eagle in a white circle in the center. "La Causa" (The Cause) was born!

With a strong leader to represent them, the workers began to demand their rights for fair pay and better working conditions. Without these rights, no one would work in the fields. A major confrontation occurred in 1965. The grape growers didn't listen to the union's demands, and the farmhands wanted a strike. At first, Chavez wanted to avoid a strike, but he was finally convinced that there was no other way. The workers left the fields, and the unharvested grapes began to rot on the vines. The growers hired illegal workers and brought in strikebreakers and thugs to beat up the strikers.

The dispute was bitter. Union members-Chavez included- were jailed repeatedly. But public officials, religious leaders, and ordinary citizens from all across the United States flocked to California to march in support of the farm workers. Then, in 1970, some grape growers signed agreements with the union. The union lifted the grape boycott, and its members began to pick grapes again. That same year, Chavez thought that even people who could not travel to California could show their support for his cause. Thus he appealed for a nationwide boycott of lettuce. People from all parts of the United States who sympathized with the cause of the farm workers refused to buy lettuce. Some even picketed in front of supermarkets.

By 1973, the union had changed its name to the United Farm Workers of America. Relations with the grape growers had once again deteriorated, so a grape boycott was added to the boycott of lettuce. On several occasions, Chavez fasted to protest the violence that arose. Finally, by 1978, some of the workers' conditions were met, and the United Farm Workers lifted the boycotts on lettuce and grapes.

In 1985, after several changes in the California labor laws, the unionized farm workers began to march again for better wages and improved working conditions. http://www.sfsu.edu/~cecipp/cesar_chavez/cesarbio5-12.htm

Cesar Chavez died peacefully in his sleep in San Luis, Arizona in 1993. An estimated 50,000 mourners attended his funeral service. In recognition of his importance as an American leader and a champion of social justice, President Bill Clinton awarded the Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, to his widow, Helen Chavez, in 1994.

Dolores Huerta
http://www.fwjustice.org/huerta1.gif

Dolores C. Huerta is the co-founder and First Vice President Emeritus of the United Farm Workers of America, AFL-CIO ("UFW"). The mother of 11 children, 14 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren, Huerta, along Cesar Chavez, has played a major roll in the American civil rights movement. the following is excerpted from the United Farm Workers web site:

Dolores Huerta was born on April 10, 1930 in a mining town in northern New Mexico, where her father, Juan Fernandez, was a miner, field worker, union activist and State Assemblyman. Her parents divorced when she was three years old. Her mother, Alicia Chavez, raised Dolores, along with her two brothers, and two sisters, in the central San Joaquin Valley farm worker community of Stockton, California. Her mother was a businesswoman who owned a restaurant and a 70-room hotel, which often put up farm worker families for free...

In 1955, she was a founding member of the Stockton chapter of the Community Service Organization ("CSO"), a grass roots organization started by Fred Ross, Sr. The CSO battled segregation and police brutality, led voter registration drives, pushed for improved public services and fought to enact new legislation.

Recognizing the needs of farm workers, while working for the CSO, Dolores organized and founded the Agricultural Workers Association in 1960. She became a fearless lobbyist in Sacramento, and in 1961 succeeded in obtaining the citizenship requirements removed from pension, and public assistance programs. She also was instrumental in passage of legislation allowing voters the right to vote in Spanish, and the right of individuals to take the driver’s license examination in their native language. In 1962 she lobbied in and Washington DC for an end to the "captive labor" Bracero Program.

It was through her work with the CSO that Dolores met Cesar Chavez. They both realized the need to organize farm workers. In 1962, after the CSO turned down Cesar’s request, as their president, to organize farm workers, Cesar and Dolores resigned from the CSO. Dolores, single with seven children, joining Cesar and his family in Delano, California. There they formed the National Farm Workers Association ("NFWA"), the predecessor to the UFW. In addition to organizing, Dolores continued to lobby.. In 1963 she was instrumental in securing Aid For Dependent Families ("AFDC"), for the unemployed and underemployed, and disability insurance for farm workers in the State of California.

By 1965 Dolores and Cesar had recruited farm workers, and their families, throughout the San Joaquin Valley. On September 8th of that year, Filipino members of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee ("AWOC") demanded higher wages and struck Delano area grape growers. Although Dolores and Cesar had planned to organize farm workers for several more years before confronting the large corporate grape industry, they could not ignore their Filipino brothers request.

On September 16, 1965 the NFWA voted to join in the strike. Over 5,000 grape workers walked off their jobs in what is now known as the famous "Delano Grape Strike." The two organizations merged in 1966 to form the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee ("UFWOC"). The strike would last five years.

In 1966, Dolores negotiated the first UFWOC contract with the Schenley Wine Company. This was the first time in the history of the United States that a negotiating committee comprised of farm workers negotiated a collective bargaining agreement with an agricultural corporation. The grape strike continued and Dolores, as the main UFWOC negotiator, not only successfully negotiated more contracts for farm workers..These contracts established the first health and benefit plans for farm workers

Dolores directed the UFW’s national grape boycott taking the plight of the farm workers to the consumers. The boycott resulted in the entire California table grape industry signing a three-year collective bargaining agreement with the United Farm Workers.

In 1973 the grape contracts expired and the grape growers signed sweetheart contracts with the Teamsters Union. Dolores organized picket lines and continued to lobby. In 1974 she was instrumental in securing unemployment benefits for farm workers. The UFW continued to organize not only the grape workers but the workers in the vegetable industry as well until violence erupted and farm workers were being killed. Once again the UFW turned to the consumer boycott. Dolores directed the east coast boycott of grapes, lettuce, and Gallo wines. The boycott resulted in the enactment of the Agricultural Labor Relations Act, the first law of its kind in the United States, which granted farm workers the right to collectively organize and bargain for better wages and working conditions.

In 1975 Dolores lobbied against federal guest worker programs and spearheaded legislation granting amnesty for farm workers that had lived, worked, and paid taxes in the United States for many years but were unable to enjoy the privileges of citizenship. This resulted in the Immigration Act of 1985.

As an advocate for farm worker rights Dolores has been arrested twenty-two times for non-violent peaceful union activities.

In 1984 the California State Senate bestowed upon her the Outstanding Labor Leader Award. In 1993 Dolores was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. That same year she received the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Roger Baldwin Medal of Liberty Award; and the Eugene V. Debs Foundation Outstanding American Award, and the Ellis Island Medal of Freedom Award. She is also the recipient of the Consumers’ Union Trumpeter’s Award. In 1998 she was one of three Ms. Magazine’s, "Women of the Year", and the Ladies Home Journal’s, "100 Most Important Women of the 20th Century". http://www.ufw.org/dh.htm

Thomas R. O'Connor summarizes aptly the Mexican -American experience with racism, individual and institutional:

Mexicanos, Hispanos, Chicanos, and Tejanos have been the target of most discrimination and prejudice, and are the poorest of all Hispanic/Latino groups. They are the most rapidly-growing minority group in America. A significant event in Mexican American history was the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, which ended the war between Mexico and the U.S. According to terms of the treaty, Mexicans remaining on U.S. land became U.S. citizens and would receive a parcel of land to live on and Spanish would be recognized as a legitimate language. These terms of the treaty were never honored, and about 500,000 Mexicans who chose to convert found themselves in the unusual situation of renting their own land from the U.S. government. The next wave of immigration came between 1890 and 1900, when about 500,000 Mexicans crossed the border in response to U.S. corporations who advertised for cheap labor. Many more escaped to the U.S. during the 1910-1917 Mexican revolution. U.S. policy allowed unrestricted immigration until 1930 when our special "open door" relationship with Mexico came under heavy criticism. Since then, there have been various repatriation efforts to get Mexicans back to Mexico, such as Operation Wetback in 1954 and the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). Operation Wetback gave the Border Patrol extraordinary powers, and IRCA fined employers $3000 for each illegal alien they hired but set up a green card lottery. It's estimated that the Border Patrol and the INS return back at least 1 million Mexicans a year under these programs, but an estimated 3 million a year slip through. http://faculty.ncwc.edu/toconnor/soc/355lect13.htm

It is beyond the scope of this essay to treat in detail the experiences of all Latino, Caribbean, Asian and Pacific Island groups who have borne the brunt of American racism. Truly Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans and other Central and South American immigrants have their own stories to tell. The same is true for Viet Namese, Cambodians, Indians and Malaysians. Jamaicans, Bahamians, Trinidadians and Haitians because they are primarily of African descent have perhaps felt this racism more acutely than others. The case of the Haitian and immigration laws is a primary example. Tasia Cereza writing for the Miami Herald contrasts the differential treatment afforded Cuban immigrants and Haitian immigrants:

You have family in both Haiti and Cuba that escaped their countries in hope of a better life in America. Half way here, they are spotted by the coast guard. They successfully out maneuver the guards and make it, but the coast guard has contacted police to pick them up.

The police officers take both ethnics to a holding place. Soon, your Cuban family members are let free. Your Haitian family members, however, spends the next several weeks in prison waiting to be deported back.

What do you do now? You are happy to have your Cuban family home with you, but you want your Haitian family too. You don't want to argue that it is not fair because you don't want the policy to prohibit both Cubans and Haitians from coming to America. Like most families, your first thoughts are to fight for your family, but rules are rules.

And the rules are that Cubans who touch American land can stay, but Haitians have to go home.

The policy originates from the Cold War years, when anyone fleeing from a Communist regime could seek asylum. But the Cold War is over. Haitians die because of their beliefs just like Cubans. Haitians are economically deprived, just like Cubans. Police shoot children in Haiti who violate curfew. For the children, don't we want to give Haitian families the opportunity for a better life?

While Miami is already crowded, I feel fair is fair. If you send one back, the other should go back. If you allow one to stay, both should stay. Both Cubans and Haitians come here for a better life, why are we stopping one and not the other? I think we need to fight to have the rules changed. If America is the land of opportunity, why aren't Haitians given the opportunity?

What reasoning can be clearer than that? What except vestigial American racism would perpetuate this kind of differential treatment?

Robert Solorzano, 1994, provides an instructive table chronicling the anti-immigration laws passed by the United States and the state of California. This is a graphic representation of how immigration beginning with the Naturalization Act of 1790 has been used as an instrument of institutional racism.

Date

Act

Effect

By Whom

1790

Naturalization Act

Forbade granting citizenship to 'non-whites.'

U.S. Congress

1852

Foreign Miner's License Tax

Levied $3.00 tax on non-citizens. Directed at Chinese, who were forbidden citizenship by 1790 Naturalization Act. Tax was voided in 1870 by federal Civil Rights Act.

California Assembly

1854

People v. Hall

State laws' terms for race ruled generic; therefore testimony of Chinese witnesses to a murder disallowed. The state law in question provided that "no black or mulatto person, or Indian, shall be permitted to give evidence in favor of, or against, any white person."

California Supreme Court

1855

An Act to Discourage the Immigration to this State of Persons Who Cannot Become Citizens Thereof

Imposed on the master or owner of a ship a landing tax of fifty dollars for each passenger ineligible to naturalized citizenship.

California Assembly

1859

California Schools Segregated

"The great mass of our citizens will not associate on terms of equality with these inferior races; nor will they consent that their children should do so."

California State Superintendent of Schools

1860

Fishing Tax

Fishing tax levied on Chinese.

California Assembly

1862

An Act to Protect Free White Labor Against Competition with Chinese Coolie Labor and Discourage the Immigration of the Chinese into the State of California

Levied a capitation tax of $2.50 per month on all Chinese residing in the state, excepting Chinese operating businesses, licensed to work in the mines, or engaged in the production of sugar.

"Clearly all of this legislation was seeking not revenue but Chinese exclusion." -Ronald Takaki, Strangers From a Different Shore

California Assembly

1864

An Act to Encourage Immigration

First federal immigration law. Bureau of Immigration created; located in Treasury Department. Primary function was to encourage emigration from Europe and arrange for transportation and distribution of immigrant workers. Due to war-time labor shortage, "Employers applauded the ever-increasing influx of immigrants. Andrew Carnegie referred to immigration as 'a golden stream which flows into the country' and valued each adult immigrant at $1500, 'for in former days an efficient slave sold for that sum.' " -Kitty Calavitas, Inside the state: the bracero program, immigration, and the INS.

U.S. Congress

1875

Page Law

First federal immigration restriction. Forbade entry of Chinese prostitutes and convicts. The law's effect was to forbid entry of virtually all Chinese females.

U.S. Congress

1880

California Anti-Miscegenation Law

Prohibited the issuance of a marriage license authorizing the marriage of a white person with a "negro, mulatto, or Mongolian."

California Assembly

1881

Proclamation of Legal Holiday

March 4th proclaimed legal holiday for anti-Chinese demonstrations.

California Governor

1882

Chinese Exclusion Act

Forbade entry of Chinese "laborers." Those with "predisposition" to poverty, the insane and convicts were forbidden entrance.

U.S. Congress

1884

In Re. Ah Moy, on Habeas Corpus

Forbade entry of Ah Moy, Too Cheong's wife, on the basis that through marriage she had taken the "class" of her husband, and was therefore forbidden entry because she was a "laborer" (see above).

California Circuit Court

1885

Anti-Alien Contract Labor Law

Barred importation of foreign labor on contract; intent was to "prevent pauper-wage prices." Response to organized labor and depression of 1870s. Had little effect because whereas earlier in 19th century employers often had contracted workers with special skills directly from Europe, by 1885 vast majority of immigrants were unskilled and were arriving independently. "It was precisely because the immigrants provided abundant cheap labor that employers welcomed the new immigration and workers demanded its restriction." -Kitty Calavitas, Inside the state: the bracero program, immigration, and the INS.

U.S. Congress

1888

Scott Act

Unlawful for "any Chinese person" (except for merchants) to enter the U.S. Prohibited Chinese "laborer" from leaving U.S. and then returning.

U.S. Congress

1891

Act of Congress

Permitted the expulsion of any aliens who had entered the country illegally.

U.S. Congress

1892

Geary Act

Chinese Exclusion Act extended for another 10 years.

U.S. Congress

1902

Geary Act-Extended Indefinitely

Geary Act and other exclusionist acts extended indefinitely.

U.S. Congress

1906

U.S Attorney General's Order

Ordered the federal courts to deny naturalized citizenship to Japanese aliens.

U.S Attorney General

1908

Gentleman's Agreement

Japan agreed not to allow the emigration of laborers. Roosevelt also issued an executive order prohibiting re-migration of Japanese aliens.

U.S. Attorney General

1909

Halladjian Ruling

"During a revealing moment in the history of American citizenship, the line between white and non-white blurred briefly. Fleeing from genocide in their homelands, 50,000 Armenians had come to America in the early twentieth century. In 1909 federal authorities classified Armenians as 'Asiatics' and denied naturalized citizenship to Armenian immigrants. But shortly afterward, in the Halladjian decision, a U.S. circuit court of appeals ruled that Armenians were Caucasian because of their ethnography, history, and appearance. Four years later California passed its alien land law, but the restriction did not apply to Armenians. By 1930, some 18,000 Armenians lived in the state; their access to land ownership enabled many Armenians to become farmers in Fresno County. They became wealthy farmers-owners of vast acreage and leading producers of raisins. 'The Armenians, they like the Japanese,' recalled a Japanese farmer of Fresno. 'Lots speak only Armenian-just like Issei immigrant Japanese. They came about the same time too. But I think they learned a little bit more English than the Japanese did and they looked more American and I think it helped them a lot.' The experience of the Armenians illustrated the immense difference it made to be Caucasian and not 'Asiatic.'"-R. Takaki, Strangers From a Different Shore

U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals

1913

Anti-Alien Land Act

Declared unlawful the ownership of "real property" by "aliens ineligible to citizenship" in the state of California. Directed at Japanese because of their "race undesirability," in the words of State Attorney General Ulysses S. Webb. Senator James Phelan's campaign slogan a few years later was "Keep California White."

California Assembly

1917

Immigration Act

English literacy test imposed despite veto by three presidents. "Barred zone" in Asia established from which immigration virtually forbidden. Southwest growers convinced policy makers to exempt Mexicans. "The temporary nature of Mexican immigration and the marginal status of the migrants were periodically reinforced by formal and informal policies. For example, during the 1920s, in order to ensure the departure of Mexican immigrant workers, the Department of labor instructed employers to withhold 20% of their pay to be deposited with immigration officials and returned to them on their way back to Mexico. The debates surrounding the Quota laws of the 1920s attest to the Congressional intention to use Mexican immigrants as a malleable supply of labor. The massive repatriation of Mexicans during the depression of the 1930s-many of whom were in the U.S. legally and some of whom were U.S. citizens-left little doubt of policy makers' willingness to act on those intentions." -Kitty Calavitas, Inside the state: the bracero program, immigration, and the INS.

U.S. Congress

1918

Anarchists Act

Provided for deportation of alien 'radicals'.

U.S. Congress

1918

Passport Act

Prevented arrival and departure without documentation.

U.S. Congress

1919

Deportation Act

Provided for deportation of those convicted of espionage and other war-time offenses.

U.S. Congress

1920

Anti-Alien Land Act

Aliens ineligible for citizenship were prohibited the leasing of agricultural land, or to lease land under the names of native-born minors, or to hold stock in any corporation owning real property. Directed at Japanese-Americans.

California Assembly

1921

Ladies Agreement

Japan agreed to bar the emigration of picture brides. Virtually ended Japanese immigration to America.

Japanese Government; U.S. Executive Branch

1921

Emergency Quota Act

First numeric restrictions imposed. Established quota system based on "national origins." Each European nation was assigned a quota based on 3% of the number of its nationals resident in the U.S. in 1910. Most 'non-whites' were already barred; law was intended to restrict immigration of 'unassimilable' Southern Europeans.

U.S. Congress

1922

Cable Act

Forbade marriage of any American woman to an alien ineligible for citizenship (see 1790 Naturalization Act). A woman who did so could be stripped of citizenship.

U.S. Congress

1922

Ozawa Ruling

Takao Ozawa ruled ineligible for citizenship-despite being "in every way eminently qualified under the statutes to become an American citizen...except" one; for, to continue in the Supreme Court's words (to which the case had been appealed), he was "not Caucasian."

U.S. Supreme Court

1923

Amendment to Anti-Alien Land Law of 1920

It became illegal for aliens ineligible to citizenship to "acquire, possess, enjoy, use, cultivate, occupy, and transfer real property."

California Assembly

1923

U.S. v. Bhagat Singh Thind

Ruling questioned ability of non-europeans to assimilate. 1910 U.S. v. Balsara and Ajkoykumar decisions held Asian Indians to be "Caucasian" and hence entitled to be considered "white persons" eligible to citizenship under 1790 naturalization law. However, in U.S. v. Bhagat Singh Thind U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Indians, although "Caucasian," were not "white" and therefore barred from citizenship.

U.S. Supreme Court

1924

National Origins Act

Quota (originally set by 1921 Immigration Restriction Act) became 2%; base year became 1890. Intent was to restore the "Nordic" balance to U.S. population by excluding Southern Europeans. Forbade entry of 'aliens ineligible for citizenship' (see 1790 Naturalization Law) thereby barring 'non-whites'. This provision was directed mainly at Japanese-Chinese were already excluded by 1882 Act. "Waves of anger and despair swept through Japanese immigrant communities...over thirty years of hard work were 'ending darkly'...the Issei could see they had been doomed to be foreigners forever, their dreams destroyed and their sweat soaked up in an expanse called America. Denied land ownership 'only one hope left' in their American-born children. 'Hope for my children/Helps me endure much from it,/This alien land.'" It was a national humiliation for Japan, which warned that the action would have "grave" consequences. Quote from R. Takaki, Strangers From a Different Shore.

U.S. Congress

1929

National Origins Act (Amended)

It became a felony to cross U.S. - Mexican border without permission and Border Patrol created to enforce. "The effects of this legislation were as far-reaching as those of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo 81 years earlier. As Mirande notes, 'During the decade Mexican migrants were transformed from being migratory workers who crossed an arbitrary demarcation with impunity to becoming criminal or illegal entrants into an area that was previously Mexican land.' While the law did not stop immigration, it created a new kind of entrepreneur, the 'coyote,' who transported undocumented workers across the border for profit...
But making immigration illegal was not enough to stem the tide of anti-Mexican hysteria which spread across the United States as unemployment continued to rise. White nativists organized to deport Mexicans living and working in the United States. Los Angeles county argued, for example, that it would be far cheaper to deport a trainload of Mexicans ($77,800) than keep them on welfare ($271,000). Social workers and caseworkers at relief agencies harassed and coerced both Chicanas/os and Mexicans to 'return' to Mexico with their families. By the mid-1930s, the government had deported as many as one-third to one-half million persons of Mexican origin, including tens of thousands who were actually U.S. citizens, rounding them up like cattle and shipping them by trainload or truckload across the border. The deportations opened up jobs at the bottom of the hierarchy for Anglos. By the end of the decade, Anglo workers and their families had replaced many Mexican and Chicana/o field workers in California." -From "The Soul of Tierra Madre", Race, Gender and Work, by Teresa L. Amott and Julie A. Matthaei

U.S. Congress

1934

Tydings-McDuffie Act

Limited Filipino immigration to 50 per year. Filipinos in U.S. were reclassified as "aliens," and thus became ineligible for assistance from New Deal programs. Also, they could not become citizens because they were "non-white."

U.S. Congress

1935

Repatriation Act

Offered Filipinos transportation to Philippines on the condition that they forfeit their right of re-entry to the U.S.

U.S. Congress

1940

Alien Registration Act

Required registration and finger printing of aliens and increased grounds for deportation by adding "subversives" to the list of excludable aliens.

U.S. Congress

1942

Executive Order 9066

Allowed military governors to restrict activities and movement of suspect aliens. Directed at Japanese on U.S. Pacific coast (see below). "Setting aside the Constitution of the United States, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which targeted Japanese Americans for special persecution and deprived them of their rights of due process and equal protection of the law. Unlike German Americans and Italian Americans, Japanese Americans were incarcerated in internment camps by the federal government. Even possession of U.S. citizenship did not protect rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution: two-thirds of the 120,000 internees were American citizens by birth."
-Ronald Takaki, Strangers From a Different Shore

President Franklin D. Roosevelt

1942

Civilian Exclusion Order No. 27

Ordered evacuation of all persons of Japanese ancestry, both "alien and non-alien." "Dillon S. Meyer [in 1950] was named commissioner of Indian affairs. During WW II Meyer directed the detention program for Japanese-Americans in the U.S....When Meyer put to some native leaders the rhetorical question 'What can we do to Americanize the Indian,' an elder responded...'how can we Americanize you. We have been working at that for a long time...and the first thing we want to teach you is that, in the American way of life, to have respect for his brother's vision.'" -Native American Testimony, Peter Nabokov, editor.

General John DeWitt

1942

Letter to Secretary of War Henry Stimson

Executive Order 9066 failed to specify race as a criterion for internment. On hearing of discussions in the War Department calling for evacuation of Germans and Italians on the East Coast, Roosevelt clarified that he had intended the order to apply to the Japanese, and not other groups.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt

1942

Bracero Program (1942-1964)

Ordered evacuation of all persons of Japanese ancestry, both "alien and non-alien." "Dillon S. Meyer [in 1950] was named commissioner of Indian affairs. During WW II Meyer directed the detention program for Japanese-Americans in the U.S....When Meyer put to some native leaders the rhetorical question 'What can we do to Americanize the Indian,' an elder responded...'how can we Americanize you. We have been working at that for a long time...and the first thing we want to teach you is that, in the American way of life, to have respect for his brother's vision.'" -Native American Testimony, Peter Nabokov, editor.

U.S. Department of Labor, INS

1946

Filipino Immigration and Naturalization Act

Although Congress lifted exclusion, it imposed limits: China was given quota of 105, India 100. Poland alone, by contrast, was given quota of 6524. Immigration from Japan and Korea was still forbidden. Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce argued in support of the bill, but with low quotas: "We are utterly justified in controlling and keeping low Oriental immigration in terms of numbers, because of the fact that they in too great numbers may undermine our way of life, our living standards."

U.S. Congress

1950

Internal Security Act

Increased grounds for exclusion and deportation of 'subversives' and 'aliens;' reinforced 1940 Act; allowed exclusion of people who were or had been members of Communist party and those who favored totalitarian government. Also bans their naturalization.

U.S. Congress

1952

Immigration and Nationality Act

(Summary below)

U.S. Congress

Remains the basic law governing U.S. immigration policy. Reaffirmed the national-origins system and established a preference system for skilled workers and for relatives of U.S. citizens and permanent resident aliens. Nullified 1790 Naturalization Act's racial restriction to citizenship. "While ending exclusion, this new law was still racially discriminatory in intent and design: countries within the triangle were allowed only one hundred immigrants each. Immigration from European countries, on the other hand, was determined by the national origins quotas of the 1924 immigration law." Quote from Ronald Takaki, Strangers From a Different Shore

Stipulated penalties for persons found guilty of "harboring" illegal aliens; however, "Texas Proviso" exempts those employing illegal aliens from penalty. Not until 1986 would it be unlawful for undocumented immigrants to work in the U.S. and for U.S. employers to hire them knowingly.

1954

Operation Wetback

Post-war recession combines with anti-Communist terror to invoke wave of mass deportations similar to 1930s. Over one million Mexican and Mexican-Americans deported.

U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service

1965

Immigration Act (Hart-Celler)

Abolished national origins quotas and provided for annual admission of 170,000 Eastern Hemisphere immigrants and 120,000 from Western Hemisphere. Eastern Hemisphere countries limited to 20,000 per country per year. Non-quota immigrants (i.e., immediate relatives of U.S. citizens) admitted without limit.
While it marked beginning of the first period in U.S. history of juridically sanctioned non-white and non-european immigration, its authors predicted that the act, to use the words of the Wall Street Journal, "insured that the new immigration pattern would not stray radically from the old one." Representative Emanuel Celler assured Congress that "Since the people of...Asia have very few relatives here, comparatively few could immigrate from those countries because they have no family ties in the U.S."

U.S. Congress

1968

U.N. Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees

U.S. signs; promises refuge to any person fleeing due to fear of persecution. U.S. refugee allocations plagued by ideological bias, however. See 1980 Refugee Act.

Date	Act	Effect	By Whom
1790	Naturalization Act	Forbade granting citizenship to 'non-whites.'	U.S. Congress
1852	Foreign Miner's License Tax	Levied $3.00 tax on non-citizens. Directed at Chinese, who were forbidden citizenship by 1790 Naturalization Act. Tax was voided in 1870 by federal Civil Rights Act.	California Assembly
1854	People v. Hall	State laws' terms for race ruled generic; therefore testimony of Chinese witnesses to a murder disallowed. The state law in question provided that "no black or mulatto person, or Indian, shall be permitted to give evidence in favor of, or against, any white person."	California Supreme Court
1855	An Act to Discourage the Immigration to this State of Persons Who Cannot Become Citizens Thereof	Imposed on the master or owner of a ship a landing tax of fifty dollars for each passenger ineligible to naturalized citizenship.	California Assembly
1859	California Schools Segregated	"The great mass of our citizens will not associate on terms of equality with these inferior races; nor will they consent that their children should do so."	California State Superintendent of Schools
1860	Fishing Tax	Fishing tax levied on Chinese.	California Assembly
1862	An Act to Protect Free White Labor Against Competition with Chinese Coolie Labor and Discourage the Immigration of the Chinese into the State of California	Levied a capitation tax of $2.50 per month on all Chinese residing in the state, excepting Chinese operating businesses, licensed to work in the mines, or engaged in the production of sugar. "Clearly all of this legislation was seeking not revenue but Chinese exclusion." -Ronald Takaki, Strangers From a Different Shore	California Assembly
1864	An Act to Encourage Immigration	First federal immigration law. Bureau of Immigration created; located in Treasury Department. Primary function was to encourage emigration from Europe and arrange for transportation and distribution of immigrant workers. Due to war-time labor shortage, "Employers applauded the ever-increasing influx of immigrants. Andrew Carnegie referred to immigration as 'a golden stream which flows into the country' and valued each adult immigrant at $1500, 'for in former days an efficient slave sold for that sum.' " -Kitty Calavitas, Inside the state: the bracero program, immigration, and the INS.	U.S. Congress
1875	Page Law	First federal immigration restriction. Forbade entry of Chinese prostitutes and convicts. The law's effect was to forbid entry of virtually all Chinese females.	U.S. Congress
1880	California Anti-Miscegenation Law	Prohibited the issuance of a marriage license authorizing the marriage of a white person with a "negro, mulatto, or Mongolian."	California Assembly
1881	Proclamation of Legal Holiday	March 4th proclaimed legal holiday for anti-Chinese demonstrations.	California Governor
1882	Chinese Exclusion Act	Forbade entry of Chinese "laborers." Those with "predisposition" to poverty, the insane and convicts were forbidden entrance.	U.S. Congress
1884	In Re. Ah Moy, on Habeas Corpus	Forbade entry of Ah Moy, Too Cheong's wife, on the basis that through marriage she had taken the "class" of her husband, and was therefore forbidden entry because she was a "laborer" (see above).	California Circuit Court
1885	Anti-Alien Contract Labor Law	Barred importation of foreign labor on contract; intent was to "prevent pauper-wage prices." Response to organized labor and depression of 1870s. Had little effect because whereas earlier in 19th century employers often had contracted workers with special skills directly from Europe, by 1885 vast majority of immigrants were unskilled and were arriving independently. "It was precisely because the immigrants provided abundant cheap labor that employers welcomed the new immigration and workers demanded its restriction." -Kitty Calavitas, Inside the state: the bracero program, immigration, and the INS.	U.S. Congress
1888	Scott Act	Unlawful for "any Chinese person" (except for merchants) to enter the U.S. Prohibited Chinese "laborer" from leaving U.S. and then returning.	U.S. Congress
1891	Act of Congress	Permitted the expulsion of any aliens who had entered the country illegally.	U.S. Congress
1892	Geary Act	Chinese Exclusion Act extended for another 10 years.	U.S. Congress
1902	Geary Act-Extended Indefinitely	Geary Act and other exclusionist acts extended indefinitely.	U.S. Congress
1906	U.S Attorney General's Order	Ordered the federal courts to deny naturalized citizenship to Japanese aliens.	U.S Attorney General
1908	Gentleman's Agreement	Japan agreed not to allow the emigration of laborers. Roosevelt also issued an executive order prohibiting re-migration of Japanese aliens.	U.S. Attorney General
1909	Halladjian Ruling	"During a revealing moment in the history of American citizenship, the line between white and non-white blurred briefly. Fleeing from genocide in their homelands, 50,000 Armenians had come to America in the early twentieth century. In 1909 federal authorities classified Armenians as 'Asiatics' and denied naturalized citizenship to Armenian immigrants. But shortly afterward, in the Halladjian decision, a U.S. circuit court of appeals ruled that Armenians were Caucasian because of their ethnography, history, and appearance. Four years later California passed its alien land law, but the restriction did not apply to Armenians. By 1930, some 18,000 Armenians lived in the state; their access to land ownership enabled many Armenians to become farmers in Fresno County. They became wealthy farmers-owners of vast acreage and leading producers of raisins. 'The Armenians, they like the Japanese,' recalled a Japanese farmer of Fresno. 'Lots speak only Armenian-just like Issei immigrant Japanese. They came about the same time too. But I think they learned a little bit more English than the Japanese did and they looked more American and I think it helped them a lot.' The experience of the Armenians illustrated the immense difference it made to be Caucasian and not 'Asiatic.'"-R. Takaki, Strangers From a Different Shore	U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals
1913	Anti-Alien Land Act	Declared unlawful the ownership of "real property" by "aliens ineligible to citizenship" in the state of California. Directed at Japanese because of their "race undesirability," in the words of State Attorney General Ulysses S. Webb. Senator James Phelan's campaign slogan a few years later was "Keep California White."	California Assembly
1917	Immigration Act	English literacy test imposed despite veto by three presidents. "Barred zone" in Asia established from which immigration virtually forbidden. Southwest growers convinced policy makers to exempt Mexicans. "The temporary nature of Mexican immigration and the marginal status of the migrants were periodically reinforced by formal and informal policies. For example, during the 1920s, in order to ensure the departure of Mexican immigrant workers, the Department of labor instructed employers to withhold 20% of their pay to be deposited with immigration officials and returned to them on their way back to Mexico. The debates surrounding the Quota laws of the 1920s attest to the Congressional intention to use Mexican immigrants as a malleable supply of labor. The massive repatriation of Mexicans during the depression of the 1930s-many of whom were in the U.S. legally and some of whom were U.S. citizens-left little doubt of policy makers' willingness to act on those intentions." -Kitty Calavitas, Inside the state: the bracero program, immigration, and the INS.	U.S. Congress
1918	Anarchists Act	Provided for deportation of alien 'radicals'.	U.S. Congress
1918	Passport Act	Prevented arrival and departure without documentation.	U.S. Congress
1919	Deportation Act	Provided for deportation of those convicted of espionage and other war-time offenses.	U.S. Congress
1920	Anti-Alien Land Act	Aliens ineligible for citizenship were prohibited the leasing of agricultural land, or to lease land under the names of native-born minors, or to hold stock in any corporation owning real property. Directed at Japanese-Americans.	California Assembly
1921	Ladies Agreement	Japan agreed to bar the emigration of picture brides. Virtually ended Japanese immigration to America.	Japanese Government; U.S. Executive Branch
1921	Emergency Quota Act	First numeric restrictions imposed. Established quota system based on "national origins." Each European nation was assigned a quota based on 3% of the number of its nationals resident in the U.S. in 1910. Most 'non-whites' were already barred; law was intended to restrict immigration of 'unassimilable' Southern Europeans.	U.S. Congress
1922	Cable Act	Forbade marriage of any American woman to an alien ineligible for citizenship (see 1790 Naturalization Act). A woman who did so could be stripped of citizenship.	U.S. Congress
1922	Ozawa Ruling	Takao Ozawa ruled ineligible for citizenship-despite being "in every way eminently qualified under the statutes to become an American citizen...except" one; for, to continue in the Supreme Court's words (to which the case had been appealed), he was "not Caucasian."	U.S. Supreme Court
1923	Amendment to Anti-Alien Land Law of 1920	It became illegal for aliens ineligible to citizenship to "acquire, possess, enjoy, use, cultivate, occupy, and transfer real property."	California Assembly
1923	U.S. v. Bhagat Singh Thind	Ruling questioned ability of non-europeans to assimilate. 1910 U.S. v. Balsara and Ajkoykumar decisions held Asian Indians to be "Caucasian" and hence entitled to be considered "white persons" eligible to citizenship under 1790 naturalization law. However, in U.S. v. Bhagat Singh Thind U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Indians, although "Caucasian," were not "white" and therefore barred from citizenship.	U.S. Supreme Court
1924	National Origins Act	Quota (originally set by 1921 Immigration Restriction Act) became 2%; base year became 1890. Intent was to restore the "Nordic" balance to U.S. population by excluding Southern Europeans. Forbade entry of 'aliens ineligible for citizenship' (see 1790 Naturalization Law) thereby barring 'non-whites'. This provision was directed mainly at Japanese-Chinese were already excluded by 1882 Act. "Waves of anger and despair swept through Japanese immigrant communities...over thirty years of hard work were 'ending darkly'...the Issei could see they had been doomed to be foreigners forever, their dreams destroyed and their sweat soaked up in an expanse called America. Denied land ownership 'only one hope left' in their American-born children. 'Hope for my children/Helps me endure much from it,/This alien land.'" It was a national humiliation for Japan, which warned that the action would have "grave" consequences. Quote from R. Takaki, Strangers From a Different Shore.	U.S. Congress
1929	National Origins Act (Amended)	It became a felony to cross U.S. - Mexican border without permission and Border Patrol created to enforce. "The effects of this legislation were as far-reaching as those of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo 81 years earlier. As Mirande notes, 'During the decade Mexican migrants were transformed from being migratory workers who crossed an arbitrary demarcation with impunity to becoming criminal or illegal entrants into an area that was previously Mexican land.' While the law did not stop immigration, it created a new kind of entrepreneur, the 'coyote,' who transported undocumented workers across the border for profit... But making immigration illegal was not enough to stem the tide of anti-Mexican hysteria which spread across the United States as unemployment continued to rise. White nativists organized to deport Mexicans living and working in the United States. Los Angeles county argued, for example, that it would be far cheaper to deport a trainload of Mexicans ($77,800) than keep them on welfare ($271,000). Social workers and caseworkers at relief agencies harassed and coerced both Chicanas/os and Mexicans to 'return' to Mexico with their families. By the mid-1930s, the government had deported as many as one-third to one-half million persons of Mexican origin, including tens of thousands who were actually U.S. citizens, rounding them up like cattle and shipping them by trainload or truckload across the border. The deportations opened up jobs at the bottom of the hierarchy for Anglos. By the end of the decade, Anglo workers and their families had replaced many Mexican and Chicana/o field workers in California." -From "The Soul of Tierra Madre", Race, Gender and Work, by Teresa L. Amott and Julie A. Matthaei	U.S. Congress
1934	Tydings-McDuffie Act	Limited Filipino immigration to 50 per year. Filipinos in U.S. were reclassified as "aliens," and thus became ineligible for assistance from New Deal programs. Also, they could not become citizens because they were "non-white."	U.S. Congress
1935	Repatriation Act	Offered Filipinos transportation to Philippines on the condition that they forfeit their right of re-entry to the U.S.	U.S. Congress
1940	Alien Registration Act	Required registration and finger printing of aliens and increased grounds for deportation by adding "subversives" to the list of excludable aliens.	U.S. Congress
1942	Executive Order 9066	Allowed military governors to restrict activities and movement of suspect aliens. Directed at Japanese on U.S. Pacific coast (see below). "Setting aside the Constitution of the United States, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which targeted Japanese Americans for special persecution and deprived them of their rights of due process and equal protection of the law. Unlike German Americans and Italian Americans, Japanese Americans were incarcerated in internment camps by the federal government. Even possession of U.S. citizenship did not protect rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution: two-thirds of the 120,000 internees were American citizens by birth." -Ronald Takaki, Strangers From a Different Shore	President Franklin D. Roosevelt
1942	Civilian Exclusion Order No. 27	Ordered evacuation of all persons of Japanese ancestry, both "alien and non-alien." "Dillon S. Meyer [in 1950] was named commissioner of Indian affairs. During WW II Meyer directed the detention program for Japanese-Americans in the U.S....When Meyer put to some native leaders the rhetorical question 'What can we do to Americanize the Indian,' an elder responded...'how can we Americanize you. We have been working at that for a long time...and the first thing we want to teach you is that, in the American way of life, to have respect for his brother's vision.'" -Native American Testimony, Peter Nabokov, editor.	General John DeWitt

1942	Letter to Secretary of War Henry Stimson	Executive Order 9066 failed to specify race as a criterion for internment. On hearing of discussions in the War Department calling for evacuation of Germans and Italians on the East Coast, Roosevelt clarified that he had intended the order to apply to the Japanese, and not other groups.	President Franklin D. Roosevelt
1942	Bracero Program (1942-1964)	Ordered evacuation of all persons of Japanese ancestry, both "alien and non-alien." "Dillon S. Meyer [in 1950] was named commissioner of Indian affairs. During WW II Meyer directed the detention program for Japanese-Americans in the U.S....When Meyer put to some native leaders the rhetorical question 'What can we do to Americanize the Indian,' an elder responded...'how can we Americanize you. We have been working at that for a long time...and the first thing we want to teach you is that, in the American way of life, to have respect for his brother's vision.'" -Native American Testimony, Peter Nabokov, editor.	U.S. Department of Labor, INS

1946	Filipino Immigration and Naturalization Act	Although Congress lifted exclusion, it imposed limits: China was given quota of 105, India 100. Poland alone, by contrast, was given quota of 6524. Immigration from Japan and Korea was still forbidden. Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce argued in support of the bill, but with low quotas: "We are utterly justified in controlling and keeping low Oriental immigration in terms of numbers, because of the fact that they in too great numbers may undermine our way of life, our living standards."	U.S. Congress
1950	Internal Security Act	Increased grounds for exclusion and deportation of 'subversives' and 'aliens;' reinforced 1940 Act; allowed exclusion of people who were or had been members of Communist party and those who favored totalitarian government. Also bans their naturalization.	U.S. Congress
1952	Immigration and Nationality Act	(Summary below)	U.S. Congress
		Remains the basic law governing U.S. immigration policy. Reaffirmed the national-origins system and established a preference system for skilled workers and for relatives of U.S. citizens and permanent resident aliens. Nullified 1790 Naturalization Act's racial restriction to citizenship. "While ending exclusion, this new law was still racially discriminatory in intent and design: countries within the triangle were allowed only one hundred immigrants each. Immigration from European countries, on the other hand, was determined by the national origins quotas of the 1924 immigration law." Quote from Ronald Takaki, Strangers From a Different Shore Stipulated penalties for persons found guilty of "harboring" illegal aliens; however, "Texas Proviso" exempts those employing illegal aliens from penalty. Not until 1986 would it be unlawful for undocumented immigrants to work in the U.S. and for U.S. employers to hire them knowingly.
1954	Operation Wetback	Post-war recession combines with anti-Communist terror to invoke wave of mass deportations similar to 1930s. Over one million Mexican and Mexican-Americans deported.	U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service
1965	Immigration Act (Hart-Celler)	Abolished national origins quotas and provided for annual admission of 170,000 Eastern Hemisphere immigrants and 120,000 from Western Hemisphere. Eastern Hemisphere countries limited to 20,000 per country per year. Non-quota immigrants (i.e., immediate relatives of U.S. citizens) admitted without limit. While it marked beginning of the first period in U.S. history of juridically sanctioned non-white and non-european immigration, its authors predicted that the act, to use the words of the Wall Street Journal, "insured that the new immigration pattern would not stray radically from the old one." Representative Emanuel Celler assured Congress that "Since the people of...Asia have very few relatives here, comparatively few could immigrate from those countries because they have no family ties in the U.S."	U.S. Congress
1968	U.N. Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees	U.S. signs; promises refuge to any person fleeing due to fear of persecution. U.S. refugee allocations plagued by ideological bias, however. See 1980 Refugee Act.