We have all heard “the justice system is broken.” But in efforts to seek justice, litigants must participate in the system. Individual litigants endure many losses to get to a just result and to let the government know its action or inaction violates people’s constitutional rights. It takes participants willing to bring a personal issue into the public eye instead of quietly accepting and plodding along with the status quo.
Asian immigrants and Asian Americans have persistently shaped constitutional protections and rights through many legal losses but also valuable wins. For Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage month, I hope to showcase Asian and Asian American litigants whom painstakenly, through trial and error, help define the constitutional rights and protections for everyone within the United States–citizens and non-citizens. These cases evidence their dedication to improving the justice system.
Congress ratified the 14th Amendment in 1868, requiring state governments to extend equal protection and due process to all people in the United States, as the 5th Amendment requires the federal government. Before the Supreme Court utilized selective incorporation to prevent state infringement of constitutional rights in the 20th century, individual litigants fought for their right to due process through the 5th Amendment.
In 1874, not yet a decade after the ratification of the 14th Amendment, Chinese immigrant Chy Lung, along with twenty-one women abroad the steamer Japan, departed China and arrived in an unwelcoming San Francisco.1 The Commissioner of Immigration in San Francisco presumptively labeled Chy Lung and the other women as “lewd and debauched women.”2 As a so-called “lewd and debauched woman,” Chy Lung’s entry into California statutorily required the vessel owner to pay a bond of $500 (approximately $14,265 today3).4 The statute stated that the bond money would indemnify “every county, city, and town of the State against any expense incurred for the relief, support, or care of such person for two years thereafter.”5 Japan’s owner refused to pay the bond for all twenty-two women, so the local sheriff took them all into custody.6
Justice Field released the other women except Chy Lung by issuing writs of habeas corpus.7 Chy Lung contested the constitutionality of the statute requiring the vessel owner to pay bond for certain passengers. Justice Field characterized the statute as “skilfully framed” for it presented a win-win situation for the Immigration Commissioner, but not so for the vessel owner and passengers.8 Pursuant to the statute, if the vessel owner could not pay, then the passengers could not set foot in California, and the Commissioner kept out Chinese immigrants–the sole purpose of the statute.9 If the vessel owner paid the exorbitant bond amount and miscellaneous associated fees, then the Commissioner would collect twenty percent of the amount and the rest would go to the California Treasury.10 At no point could the passengers claim that the Commissioner mislabeled their status nor could the vessel owner make the assertion that the fees did not apply. California did not contemplate due process for the vessel owner and the passengers.
Justice Field reasoned that the State of California cannot legislate “the admission of citizens and subjects of foreign nations to our shores” and deemed the statute invalid.11 Chy Lung endured her unconstitutional detainment so no other traveler crossing the Pacific would suffer the same fate.12
Success did not come for all petitioners trudging their way through the legal system to plead their case to the highest court, even though their arguments appear commonsensical to us today. Before Brown v. Board of Education, two Supreme Court cases involving public education did not question the doctrine of “separate but equal” but adhered to the Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson.13 One of those cases, Gong Lum v. Rice, involved petitioners arguing that the school district denied the petitioners equal protection under the law by segregating non-white students from white students.14
Gong Lum, a resident of Mississippi within the Rosedale Consolidated High School District and local taxpayer, had a daughter, Martha Lum–a U.S. citizen–who attended the Rosedale Consolidated High School for one morning.15 By noon of that first day of school, the superintendent sent Martha home and notified her father that she could not attend.16
Mr. Lum argued that he helped support and maintain the Rosedale Consolidated High School as a taxpayer, and therefore, his daughter had the right to attend that school, the only school she could attend in the district.17 He argued that his daughter was “not a member of the colored race nor is she of mixed blood, but that [was] pure Chinese.”18 By denying Martha’s right to attend the only school in the district, the school authority denied Martha’s right as a student to attend the local school.
The Court reasoned that Martha was not of white or Caucasian descent, and therefore, she could not attend a school designated for white children.19 The denial of her attendance at the district school did not conflict with the 14th Amendment because Martha still had access to education through a school which “receive[d] only colored children of the brown, yellow, or black races” in the county.20 For 58 years, the Court deemed constitutional the “separate but equal” doctrine, a decision which may seem unfathomable today. Without the persistent petitioners fighting within our imperfect justice system, the “separate but equal” doctrine may still be legal today.
Many have understood birthright citizenship to be concretely defined in United States v. Wong Kim Ark.21 This year, the U.S. Supreme Court will either confirm or change our long-held understanding of the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause–that all individuals born in the United States have the right to citizenship. Birthright citizenship exists in the United States because Wong Kim Ark courageously argued his case till it reached the Supreme Court. Like Chy Lung and Gong Lum, Wong Kim Ark understood that enacting change in a broken system meant participating in it. That persistence and participation must continue to preserve our constitutional rights.
Endnotes
1 Chy Lung v. Freeman et al., 92 U.S. 275, 276 (1975).
2 Id.
3 Today’s value calculated using https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation.
4 Id.
5 Id. at 277.
6 Id. at 276.
7 Id. at 277.
8 Chy Lung, 92 U.S. at 278.
9 Id.
10 Id.
11 Id. at 280.
12 Justice Fields, includes in the opinion a curious note about the parties’ attendance at oral argument: “…while the Attorney-General of the United States has deemed the matter of such importance as to argue it in person, there has been no argument in behalf of the State of California, the Commissioner of Immigration, or the Sheriff of San Francisco, in support of the authority by which plaintiff is held a prisoner….” Chy Lung, 92 U.S. at 277.
13 See Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 485 (1954); see Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896); and see Cumming v. Richmond County Bd. of Ed., 175 U.S. 528 (1899).
14 Gong Lum v. Rice, 275 U.S. 78 (1927).
15 Id. at 80.
16 Id.
17 Id. at 81.
18 Id.
19 Id. at 84-5
20 Gong Lum, 275 U.S. at 85.
21 See United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898).