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James Loewen wrote the definitive work on this subject for his Harvard doctoral thesis in 1971[1]. And although I've been an engineer for the last five years, I

James Loewen wrote the definitive work on this subject for his Harvard doctoral thesis in 1971[1]. And although I've been an engineer for the last five years, I wrote my undergraduate history thesis on Delta immigrants (including Chinese, but also Lebanese, Jewish, and Italian -- all viewed as shades of non-white when they arrived)[2]. It has been fun to watch this thread today! The journalist has made the same error I did as a young historian: I treated this diversity as a novelty, when anyone familiar with the history of the American South (or the American West) should find this unsurprising because these places developed in the 19th Century as part of an international economy. Fur traders in St. Louis had to know the price of pelts in faraway Paris to make profitable decisions; information (and people) circulated more widely than we usually appreciate. You will find strangers in strange lands around the world wherever there's money to be made. [1] https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Mississippi_Chinese.html?id=GMMrAAAAYAAJ https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Mississippi_Chinese... [2] https://www.dropbox.com/s/5b5leo4e41lqwul/Senior_Thesis.pdf?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/5b5leo4e41lqwul/Senior_Thesis.pdf?...

dluan 9y ago
I'm curious if you know if in the south there were tensions, or perhaps why there weren't as many, as say in the west coast like the 1886 Seattle Riot or the Rock Springs Massacre, beyond just the reaction from the exclusion act?
- eastbayjake 9y ago
  I believe Loewen's argument is that Chinese ran the grocery stores, and because whites viewed merchant labor as distasteful (they all wanted to be agrarian landowners, even poor whites) Chinese had extra leverage because they were the only group supplying necessary goods in these small rural towns. A case that established Chinese exclusion from white schools (Lum v. Rice, 1924) came out of Rosedale, just north of the town of Greenville mentioned in the article, when a white public school did not permit a Chinese grocer's daughter to enroll. Interestingly, the lower county court ruled against the school district and upheld the Chinese girl's right to attend the white school. The decision was subsequently overturned by the Mississippi Supreme Court and US Supreme Court in favor of the school district. It's telling that the court closest to the case ruled in favor of the Chinese: these merchant families had economic leverage in their communities because they filled a role that white planters needed but disdained for themselves. A town that treated its Chinese unfairly might soon find itself with no place to buy canned goods. There is a similar story for Jewish immigrants, who ran (and in some cases whose decedents still run) the general/department stores in these Delta towns. The oldest synagogue in Mississippi is in -- you guessed it -- Greenville. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lum_v._Rice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lum_v._Rice
signal11 9y ago
> You will find strangers in strange lands around the world wherever there's money to be made. I learned about Punjabi Mexican Americans[1,2] in the early 1900s recently. It's interesting to think that without the various Asian exclusion acts and jurisprudence[3,4,5], the US would be even more diverse today than it is now. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punjabi_Mexican_Americans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punjabi_Mexican_Americans [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-faith/punjabi-sikh-mexican-american-community-fading-into-history/2012/08/13/cc6b7b98-e26b-11e1-98e7-89d659f9c106_story.html?utm_term=.23394854ec43 https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-faith/punjabi-sik... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Exclusion_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Exclusion_Act [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1924 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1924 [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Bhagat_Singh_Thind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Bhagat_Singh_...

dluan 9y ago

I'm curious if you know if in the south there were tensions, or perhaps why there weren't as many, as say in the west coast like the 1886 Seattle Riot or the Rock Springs Massacre, beyond just the reaction from the exclusion act?

eastbayjake 9y ago
I believe Loewen's argument is that Chinese ran the grocery stores, and because whites viewed merchant labor as distasteful (they all wanted to be agrarian landowners, even poor whites) Chinese had extra leverage because they were the only group supplying necessary goods in these small rural towns. A case that established Chinese exclusion from white schools (Lum v. Rice, 1924) came out of Rosedale, just north of the town of Greenville mentioned in the article, when a white public school did not permit a Chinese grocer's daughter to enroll. Interestingly, the lower county court ruled against the school district and upheld the Chinese girl's right to attend the white school. The decision was subsequently overturned by the Mississippi Supreme Court and US Supreme Court in favor of the school district. It's telling that the court closest to the case ruled in favor of the Chinese: these merchant families had economic leverage in their communities because they filled a role that white planters needed but disdained for themselves. A town that treated its Chinese unfairly might soon find itself with no place to buy canned goods. There is a similar story for Jewish immigrants, who ran (and in some cases whose decedents still run) the general/department stores in these Delta towns. The oldest synagogue in Mississippi is in -- you guessed it -- Greenville. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lum_v._Rice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lum_v._Rice

signal11 9y ago

> You will find strangers in strange lands around the world wherever there's money to be made. I learned about Punjabi Mexican Americans[1,2] in the early 1900s recently. It's interesting to think that without the various Asian exclusion acts and jurisprudence[3,4,5], the US would be even more diverse today than it is now. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punjabi_Mexican_Americans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punjabi_Mexican_Americans [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-faith/punjabi-sikh-mexican-american-community-fading-into-history/2012/08/13/cc6b7b98-e26b-11e1-98e7-89d659f9c106_story.html?utm_term=.23394854ec43 https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-faith/punjabi-sik... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Exclusion_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Exclusion_Act [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1924 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1924 [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Bhagat_Singh_Thind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Bhagat_Singh_...