NPR Host
speaker
289 appearances
55 recordings
10 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 1 Jun
NPR Host’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
But that's not what would happen.
A U.S. customs agent declared that Wong Kim Ark was not allowed to step foot onto U.S. soil.
On the evening of October 24, 1871, in Los Angeles, an angry group of white men descended upon a neighborhood where some of the city's very small population of Chinese residents lived.
Many historians believe it's the biggest mass lynching event in American history.
And maybe they thought, this can't happen here. San Francisco was much bigger, more cosmopolitan, and had a much bigger Chinatown.
In what started as a labor strike, a group of angry men, driven by the idea that Chinese immigrants were taking their jobs by working for less, marched towards Chinatown and started setting buildings on fire. They killed four men that night.
Anti-Chinese violence had landed on the doorstep of Wong Kim Ark's family. Eventually,
When Wong Kim Ark's family left the United States after the 1877 anti-Chinese riots in San Francisco, they never came back.
Something that would have been really challenging in the U.S. because there were so few Chinese women and because Chinese men were legally barred or socially discouraged from marrying outside their race.
But he didn't stay long. After several months, he returned to the United States to work. And he repeated this process again a couple of years later, going back to China to visit his wife and his growing family. But in 1895, on what he must have expected to be another uneventful trip from China to San Francisco…
Coming up, Wong Kim Ark fights back in court.
In August of 1895, Wong Kim Ark was sitting on a steamship, detained and watched over by guards. He was there because, according to the government, he was not a U.S. citizen, even though he had documentation showing he was born in San Francisco. It must have been a lonely, bitter feeling to be just a few miles from his hometown, rejected by his own government. But he wasn't alone.
Almost immediately, a group of people started working to get him out.
The Chinese Six Companies, also known as the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association.
They frequently hired lawyers, white lawyers, to help Chinese laborers who were subject to deportation under the law.
So while Wong Kim Ark sat imprisoned on the steamship, his case headed to a California district court.
the district court was faced with a monumental decision, one that hinged on a single sentence in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.
The 14th Amendment was added to the Constitution after the Civil War to achieve, quote, equal protection of the laws. It was intended to make sure newly emancipated Black Americans had full, equal citizenship and rights. Some of the most impactful Supreme Court cases have hinged on this amendment. There's Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld the constitutionality of segregation.
Brown v. Board of Education, which reversed that. Even Roe v. Wade, which guaranteed the right to abortion. Wong Kim Ark's case focused on a specific part of the 14th Amendment, the Citizenship Clause.
That phrase, jurisdiction thereof, it's key because the court had to decide what makes a person a U.S. citizen. Do all people born on U.S. soil fall under its jurisdiction, its laws? Or is jurisdiction about where your loyalties lie? Are Chinese people living in the United States really subject to U.S. laws? Or should they be considered subjects of the emperor of China?
Showing 201–220 of 289 · page 11 of 15
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