This is a good opportunity to take a look at the Delta Chinese of Mississippi, which I haven't seen mentioned before. The following is primarily based on the work of James Loewen and John Jung. A recap of other sources and further reading is at the end.
The year is 1870. You are a white planter living on the floodplain between the Yazoo and Mississippi rivers known as the Delta. A generation or two ago at most, your family headed west to this virgin land much like California's pioneers, only you leveraged slave labor and economies of scale to exploit King Cotton instead of seeking physical gold.[1] The Civil War has forced you to recognize that Mississippi is majority black and will remain so until mechanization and outmigration take their toll in the mid-20th century. It is around this time that Hiram Revels, Mississippi's first black Senator, resigns to head Alcorn A&M College, a vocational school for blacks named after Mississippi's Reconstruction-era governor. Alcorn is a stone's throw from the Windsor Ruins, a massive five-story mansion that will itself burn down in 1890, the year of Mississippi's Jim Crow constitution. The symbolism writes itself.
How do the Chinese fit into all of this? The Delta is being tamed during this period, and our planter needs someone to do the backbreaking work of picking cotton. He uses land grants and generous-seeming terms to entice laborers before turning the situation into de facto servitude via the system known as sharecropping. It's often forgotten that, while the total black population decreases during Reconstruction, some migrate to Mississippi by choice. The “Mississippi Negro” of Coming of Age in Mississippi becomes a reality later. For now, Jewish, Italian, Lebanese, and Chinese immigrants make their way to the region in varying numbers. At a conference in Memphis in 1869, delegates have debated the merits of importing Chinese laborers. The Vicksburg Times captures the moment when it opines, “Emancipation has spoiled the Negro and carried him away from the fields of agriculture. We therefore say let the Coolies come.”[3]
Few Chinese make it to our planter's area and fewer still engage in agricultural labor in the long term. Most are drawn instead to railroad work in Texas or Tennessee, where small ethnic enclaves develop. The Delta Chinese are such a great case study in part because of how unusual they are: John Jung puts their population at less than 1200 in 1960. As Mississippi intensifies rather than weakens its dependence on staple crops following the Civil War, those Chinese who do come find a stratified biracial system where they, more than Jews, Catholics, or even Lebanese Christians, do not fit in. Meanwhile, growing anti-Chinese sentiment on the West Coast leads to the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, which gives us another important part of the Delta Chinese story. The anti-Chinese legislation leaves room for merchants while preventing the mass importation of cheap labor or wives. What develops is known as the Chinese grocer, cf. Indian doctor stereotypes today.
Early Chinese immigrants live among blacks or poor whites; a section of Greenville includes most of the Italian, Jewish, and Chinese residents. White merchants prefer to have nothing to do with the blacks who make up most of the population. Chinese capitalize on this, opening stores in black neighborhoods and filling a role comparable to the better-known Chinese laundries found elsewhere. (Conceptions of Chinese masculinity and the Chinese laundries are another post.) Living in the backs of their stores, the initial, almost exclusively male sojourners form a network of chain migration as the 20th century dawns. Some have relations with black women and become pariahs in both the Chinese and white communities. All benefit from the fact that they are never a sizable enough presence to be a threat. They adopt deferential attitudes towards whites while working their way towards acceptance. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroys many of the documents required under the Chinese Exclusion Act, leading to so-called “paper sons” who claim relation to an existing immigrant. This contributes to higher migration rates.
While most Chinese stores remain in majority black areas, the more prosperous also open stores that cater to whites. They present a paradox to white supremacists, who on the one hand do not want their children educated with the Chinese and on the other accept them into churches. For their part, the Chinese embrace Christianity to advance themselves. Jung casts some doubt on how genuine early converts were in their conviction while noting that later generations he interviewed seemed devout. The important part for our purposes is that, in the words of David L. Cohn, “The public-school superintendent views them with a fishy eye but the Sunday school leader welcomes them warmly. They stand before God in equality with white children on Sunday, but on Monday they cannot stand together before the blackboard.” The Chinese presence is strong enough by the 1920s for Mississippi's segregation laws to become an issue. To simplify because this post is becoming longer than intended: from the late 1920s until after World War II, the Chinese in Mississippi either send their children away to school or congregate in Chinese schools mostly taught by white teachers. Wikipedia has details on the segregation case. Segregation of Asians is not universal though. Mississippi is unusual both in how extreme its segregation is, codified in the 1890 constitution as well as statute, and the size of its Chinese population for the region.
Other aspects of Delta Chinese life under Jim Crow become a daily adventure of negotiating their whiteness. They remain separate in everything from where they live to where they get their hair cut and where they are buried, yet at a segregated movie theater, they might dare to sit in the white section. Indicative of their elevated status over blacks is the fact that they are allowed to attend Mississippi's universities without incident. Bus drivers also let most East Asians sit in front. Other minorities, especially ones who aren't local to the area, might fare differently. The Chinese continue to involve themselves in philanthropic efforts and such social events as they are able while being denied admittance to the white hospitals they help fund. Employment discrimination is rampant.
The big change comes after World War II, when new attitudes towards China and larger societal shifts cause the Chinese schools to be shut down. Those Chinese who don't migrate out of Mississippi start to attend white schools ahead of the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. In contrast to previous generations, who harbored thoughts of one day returning to China, this generation starts to consider themselves as American as anyone else. Their biggest fear by the time of the Civil Rights Movement is that their acquired “whiteness” will adversely affect their relationship with blacks. They do make some gains, being admitted to white hospitals by the 1970s for instance. Perhaps one last quote from Jung on the post-1960s generation to wrap things up: “The majority of us feel like we are part of the South. We speak the same language—i.e. dialect—and we hold the same likes, dislikes, and values that so many southerners hold.”
Literature-wise, James Loewen of Lies My Teacher Told Me fame wrote the classic treatment, called The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White. It's still used in sociology and ethnic studies classes. Lotus Among the Magnolias is another one that's still in print, taking an Asian American tack. (I went to double check and the publisher has a blurb from Maxine Hong Kingston, for those familiar with her work.) John Jung's Chopsticks in the Land of Cotton relies on anecdotes and pictures over words like interstitiality to tell its story. This is the one to pick up for chunks of text that cite unpublished family histories and personal interviews. It is a bit choppy as a narrative read and it should be noted Jung is not a professional historian. Ethnic Heritage in Mississippi and its companion, Ethnic Heritage in Mississippi: The Twentieth Century, cover the Chinese alongside groups like the Italians and Lebanese. David L. Cohn's reflections from the 1940s are published as The Mississippi Delta and the World, worth picking up to learn more about the region.
The Mississippi Department of Archives and History's article Chinese in Mississippi: An Ethnic People in a Biracial Society is a good starting point.
[1] The dark brown at the bottom left of this map is the Natchez district, settled by the French in the early 18th century. The areas above it opened to American settlement beginning in the 1820s, with the Treaty of Pontotoc finalizing Indial removal in 1832.
[2] Quoted in several sources. Credit for the original research seems to go to James Loewen. See the Encyclopedia of Arkansas entry on the Chinese for more background.
Edited for formatting.
Edit 2: Some more primary sources on John Chinaman and pictures.
