Excluded, Segregated and Forgotten: A Historical View of the Discrimination of Chinese Americans in Public Schools

"Separate but equal" public schooling is less often identified with the Asian American struggle for equality, but as Ms. Kuo documents, the Chinese American community in San Francisco was engaged in a protracted struggle for access to educational facilities from which they were legally excluded. In an environment hostile to "Orientals," attempts to gain access through the courts subsequently by applying political pressure proved to be largely unsuccessful and compelled pragmatic but unsatisfactory alternatives for educating Chinese American children. But as the Chinese American population in San Francisco expanded and the segregationist sentiment eroded, de jure segregation slowly became defacto segregation.