Asian American Movement

The Asian American movement is a pan-Asian American civil rights and social justice movement that grew out of the social movements of the 1960s. While the African American civil rights movement had developed as a response to the common lot of African Americans, the Asian American movement developed more slowly because of the more heterogeneous nature of the community. Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, Filipino Americans, and others had very different histories and had faced different challenges, but all had faced unusually high levels of discrimination as well as being lumped together both by laws (especially immigration and miscegenation laws) and popular thought, which perpetuated stereotypes about “inscrutable Orientals” and Asian passivity.

The development of a pan–Asian American civil rights movement was inevitable, but its growth in the 1980s was precipitated by the violent death of Vincent Chin, a Chinese American whose killing was motivated by anti-Japanese sentiment.

Asian immigrants faced an unusually high level of discrimination as their numbers grew in the 19th century. Asian laborers, mostly Chinese, were imported for major works of manual labor, including the work of the California Gold Rush, the building of the railroads, and numerous mining operations in the Pacific Northwest. Employers typically paid Chinese workers significantly less than white workers, and white workers in turn were displaced from work, or perceived that they were. This fueled resentments, leading to waves of anti-Chinese violence throughout the west from roughly the 1870s to the turn of the century, including several infamous massacres.

Anti-Chinese sentiment—the so-called Yellow Peril, the specter of Asian immigration transforming through sheer numbers the culture of the United States—was also instrumental in the formation of 19th-century labor unions and workingmen's political parties. Labor unions sought to stabilize wages and prevent employers from being able to hire Chinese workers at lower wages than white workers. Workingmen's political parties sought the passage of laws requiring the same thing. Both also supported legislation like the Chinese Exclusion Act, which suspended Chinese immigration to the United States in 1882. The Scott Act in 1888 went further, preventing Chinese immigrants who had previously immigrated to the United States from reentering the country once they left—effectively requiring them to choose between countries.

This sign reading “I am an American” appeared in the window of an Oakland, California, store owned by a Japanese American on December 8, 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor. The store was closed and the owner interned with other Japanese Americans.

Exclusion was repealed in 1943, though many immigration restrictions were not lifted until 1965, and other race restrictions remained in force—like state laws preventing Chinese from marrying whites—many of which remained in force until the Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia that all anti-miscegenation laws were unconstitutional.