The Chan's Great Continent by Jonathan D. Spence

Author:Jonathan D. Spence
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2014-05-01T16:00:00+00:00

* In fact, though such discriminations were commonplace, appeals were possible, and successful ones can be tracked through to the Supreme Court of the United States, as in cases like Yick Wo v. Hopkins of 1886. In this case Yick Wo, a Chinese laundryman in San Francisco who had come to the United States in 1861, protested his fine of ten dollars, or one day in jail per dollar of the fine if he could not pay, for violating a new city ordinance against conducting a laundry business from a building not made of brick or stone. After careful review, the Supreme Court reversed Yick Wo’s conviction, on the grounds that the ordinances had been directed solely at Chinese rather than white laundries: In firm language, the justices told the San Francisco authorities that though the ordinance might “be fair on its face, and impartial in appliance, yet, if it is applied and administered by public authority with an evil eye and an unequal hand, so as practically to make unjust and illegal discriminations between persons in similar circumstances,” then there had been a denial of justice.

In the case of Yick Wo, and over two hundred other laundrymen who had petitioned with him, “the conclusion cannot be resisted that no reason for it exists except hostility to the race and nationality to which the petitioners belong”—Supreme Court Reporter, 1886: 118 U.S. 356, p. 1073.

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