LuLu’s history curriculum through Georgia Virtual Academy never ceases to amaze me. It is rather detailed and heavy stuff! We work on it together, reading the textbook and doing the online enrichment work.

Today’s lesson was a continuation on people immigrating to America in the late 1800s. Today’s lesson centered on how some were against immigration and the prejudice and racism that sprang up during that time period. There was information on the Ku Klux Klan, the increase of crime in the cities, and cultural neighborhoods that formed in New York and other major cities. And there was information about Lee Yick.

Now, I’m not the world’s best history student, but I did not know who Lee Yick was. He was the owner of a Chinese laundry in San Francisco. The municipal law there prohibited laundries from being housed in wooden buildings, due to an increase risk in fires. The Yick Wo Laundry was in a wooden building, as were most of the other Chinese laundries in town, and the laundries owned by white men as well. Yet, the sheriff’s office decided only to take up this matter of law with Mr. Yick. He was tried; found guilty; and fined.

But Yick didn’t take that lying down. Instead he organized a group of laundry owners, pooled their money to hire a lawyer, and appealed the case…all the way to the U.S. Supreme court. (This is the part of the story that sucked in my interest.)

And, the Supreme Court sided unanimously with Lee Yick, saying that the 14th amendment protects the rights and freedoms of all people, not just citizens. It found that the San Francisco law enforcement had applied the law "with an evil eye and an unequal hand."

It was a huge, precedence-setting case that ruled that laws are race-neutral

Interestingly enough, 11 years after the Yick Wo case, Wong Kim Ark, a US-born Chinese man, whose parents had moved back to China, went to visit them, and then was denied re-entry into the country as a citizen. Ark petitioned the Supreme Court saying that because he was born in the U.S. he was a “born citizen” and subject to all writes of a citizen. The Supreme Court agreeds.

LuLu says she learned two lessons in History today. The first is that some people didn’t like the Chinese people because they looked so different. The other is that the Supreme Court protects the rights of those who are discriminated against.

I hope she always finds that latter thought to be true.

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