Guest post by commenter Jefe:
Note: Some of the analysis in this post came from the book “The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White” (1971, 1988) by James W. Loewen.
Chinese labourers were imported into the American South after the Civil War to replace emancipated black slaves. The plan failed. Chinese importation halted after the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) and by the late 1880s, all had left the plantations.
Some Chinese left the South, mainly moving to the growing Chinatowns in the North. The Chinese-American population plummeted by 60% in the 1880s and 1890s, but New York City’s Chinatown actually grew from 200 in 1880 to over 7,000 by 1900 and continued growing afterwards.
Of those who stayed in the South, some migrated to larger cities, such as New Orleans and found work there. Some ran businesses (e.g., laundries) across the South. And some became grocers to black sharecroppers, a new niche of the post-Reconstruction South.
Sharecroppers bought food and daily necessities from plantation commissaries. The prices were inflated to keep them in debt. By 1880 in Mississippi a few Chinese opened makeshift grocery stores with very basic items, charging less than the plantation commissary. The commissaries began to disappear.
By the early 1900s over 95% of Chinese men in the Mississippi Delta were grocers.
Several factors caused this:
- Blacks could not get credit or capital to open their own stores.
- Whites would not open stores in black neighborhoods.
- Most of the Chinese came from the same region of Guangdong province, speaking similar rural dialects and often sharing kinship ties. They could provide each other with training, credit, and access to distribution networks. Once one of them set up a store, another, perhaps a relative, could work in it, gain experience, save some money, and then open up his own store in a nearby town.
- Chinese did not share close kinship ties with their most of their customers. They did not feel obligated to extend credit or loans to their customers (unlike a potential black storeowner, who would have many sharecropper relatives in debt).
- Most did not have family and could live at their store.
By the early 1900s, a third of Chinese men in Mississippi had taken black wives, though most remained single. The Chinese Exclusion Act left Chinese males little prospect of bringing over wives from China, while anti-miscegenation laws put white and Mexican women out of reach (except for those who got themselves classified as “White”).
Mixed Chinese-black children were categorized as “Chinese” in the 1880 census; in the 1900 census, most had been reclassified as “colored”, a few as “white” (especially if their mother was part white), but none as “Chinese”.
In 1906 the San Francisco Earthquake destroyed city records, making it hard to strictly enforce the Chinese Exclusion Act. “Paper sons” and daughters began arriving from China on forged documents.
By 1910, Chinese men in the Mississippi Delta had begun taking Chinese wives and formed families. These families would later challenge the Jim Crow laws popping up across the South.
By the 1960s, mechanization had replaced hand labour. Many towns lost over half their black population in the Great Migration. Their niche livelihood was drying up, and most grocery stores shut down in the 1970s. Few remain today.
See also:
- James W. Loewen: Lies My Teacher Told Me – James Loewen wrote several books about the history of race relations in the USA, some which focus on the Deep South.
- Jim Crow
- Some numbers on Black Americans
- Interracial relationships
- Settlement of Asians in the Deep South (1763 – 1882)
- Chinese Exclusion Act
- US v Wong Kim Ark
- Paper Son
- Asian Men, Black Women
- sharecropping
- The Great Migration
- Other references:
- “The Chinese in Mississippi: An Ethnic People in a Biracial Society“
- Chinese in Mississippi: An Ethnic People in a Biracial Society””
- “The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White” (1988, 1971) by James W. Loewen (Amazon page)
- Interview of 3rd generation Chinese-American grocer in his 60s in Arkansas (2010)
Another interesting post by Abagond. Thank you.
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@ Michael Cooper
That is a guest post by Jefe. Thank him!
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Great Post. Very informative!
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Thanks to Abagond to let me share these posts.
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This series was great Abagond. I’m wondering if you’re also planning to do a piece on the history of South Asians in the Americas? You touched on it briefly in your piece about Coolies.
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This is a very informative post and nice supporting pics. The story of Chinese in the South is not something I remember studying, even though I took a course devoted to Asian American history in college. I will just say that Jefe’s list of reasons why the Chinese made better grocery store owners than blacks seems to be limited to those that would be perceived as politically correct…
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Except that Jeffe did not say that Chinese made better grocery store owners than blacks at all, you did! What Jeffe did was to give reasons why it was possible for Chinese to open stores and fill the niche.
Was it untrue that blacks had a hard time getting credit from banks in the early 1900s?
Was it untrue that Chinese men did not share close kinship ties with their customers, and therefore didn’t feel obligated to extend credit or loans?
Was it untrue that most Chinese laborers were men who did not have family and could therefore live at their stores?
So what exactly is “politically correct” about what he said? Or is that just a code phrase for anything that fractures your own concepts of ‘Racist Realism?’
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There are several books that analyzed the reasons, including Loewen’s. That part of the post is based on the historians that researched it.
The reasons are not why they made “better” grocery store owners per se, but why they all concentrated into a single industry (when none of them originally had that background) and why many of them succeeded in that work where whites and blacks could not. They also look at the black store owners who tried to open stores, but failed and the couple of black stores that were able to survive (not too many). The historians attributed it to a multitude of reasons, including the ones listed (simplified and selected from the original analysis).
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@King,
There are other reasons not listed above for space reasons:
– the region was 80-90% black, and were NEW consumers post reconstruction. At that time, there historically had not been stores that targeted the black market.
– Whites did open up stores in areas that had majority white sharecroppers (as in Tennessee or Kentucky).
– Most blacks could only spend money on food and necessities, hence grocery stores.
In the early 1900s, the banks did not extend credit or loans to the Chinese either. Chinese, as “colored” persons, were refused bank services just as blacks.
BUT, one of the key elements is the kinship and cultural ties that they had among each other and speaking similar dialects. The historians found many pieces of evidence where one store would help another store open up and share the distribution network and vouch for a new storeowner’s credit. They even operated services (like a credit union) where they would pool money and make loans among each other.
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and never heard of Lum v. Rice (1927)? What kind of course was that? Even a cursory study of Asian American history would have included the key Supreme court cases, especially the ones which ruled against the Asian-American plaintiffs.
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@ Jefe
Yes, I thought there must have been other unlisted factors, and was aware of the communal funding that was possible among Chinese businesses. But of course, by comparison, successful White store owners were able to get loans from the banks.
Also there is a good case to be made that Chinese store owners were much more likely to have been born in China and have been first generation immigrants. The importation of slaves to the U.S. ended in 1807, yet Slavery itself did not end until 1865. Therefore the Black postbellum population were not immigrants but rather, a population of displaced persons exposed to at least several generations of abuse and notions of their own inferiority. Many Blacks themselves would have felt unsure about taking on such an entreprenurial undertaking. And many Black customers would still regard their fellow Blacks with the mistrust which they had been indoctrinated on the plantation. The psychology of Black inferiority and self doubt did not end with slavery. This too would have played into the economics of where Black dollars were spent and what businesses would have survived.
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Vert informative information. I never knew the Chinese dwelled in the south during those times. I always thought just the west. Even more reason why schools need to include more information on Asian American history.
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To say that people “have to learn something in school” is always easy. But something else always has to be cut for that. But that of course doesn’t mean US schools schouldn’t extend the curriculum on “non-white history”.
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Kartoffel
I personally can thing of a few things that can be cut to include history on Asian Americans and other non-white groups. Frankly the courses should not be called American history when it does not have clear and all information on American history. “Selective History in America” is a more fitting title.
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No history will ever have all facts, you always have to focus on some and omit other parts. Unless you actually want to forge history, you omit the parts you deem unimportant. In the case of the US I guess it’s the latter, the (presumably white) people who determined the curriculum will just have thought of asian american history as less important than that of white people. I expect that to change in the future, because we already made some great progress in the last decades to rewrite the (pro-western and anti-western) eurocentric history (not just of US history, but also of global history) to a more comprehensive tale. It hasen’t trickled down to the classrooms yet, but it generally will, unless the deeply disturbing trends to teach “patriotic history” in some states prevail.
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Kartoffel
I get that, but I would think that those that write the books or make the decisions would see the great injustice it does to those being educated by it. Non-whites did make important contributions and yet you still have a lot of whites that believe the country was only build by whites and non-whites just came along believing they “deserve” something.
“I expect that to change in the future, because we already made some great progress in the last decades to rewrite the (pro-western and anti-western) eurocentric history (not just of US history, but also of global history) to a more comprehensive tale.”—I look forward to that change though I have a feeling that the south will likely fight that tooth and nail.
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@King
This is called white communal funding. But what bank would lend to a white person who wanted to open a store in a black community?
You know, you seem some of the same forces operating 120-130 years later.
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@Kartoffel
In what state is this not prevailing?
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[…] Guest post by commenter Jefe: Note: Some of the analysis in this post came from the book “The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White” (1971, 1988) by James W. Loewen.Chinese labourers were imported into the American South after the Civil War to replace emancipated black slaves. The plan failed. Chinese importation halted after the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) and by the late 1880s, all had left the plantations.Some Chinese left the South, mainly moving to the growing Chinatowns in the North. The Chinese-American population plummeted by 60% in the 1880s and 1890s, but New York City’s Chinatown actually grew from 200 in 1880 to over 7,000 by 1900 and continued growing afterwards.Of those who stayed in the South, some migrated to larger cities, such as New Orleans and found work there. Some ran businesses (e.g., laundries) across the South. And some became grocers to black sharecroppers, a new niche of the post-Reconstruction South. Joe Gow Nue Grocery Store in Greenville, Mississippi, 1930sSharecroppers bought food and daily necessities from plantation commissaries. The prices were inflated to keep them in debt. By 1880 in Mississippi a few Chinese opened makeshift grocery stores with very basic items, charging less than the plantation commissary. The commissaries began to disappear.By the early 1900s over 95% of Chinese men in the Mississippi Delta were grocers.Click through to read more […]
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@ Jefe
I have limited knowledge how the US decides on the content of their curricula and school books, but my understanding was that most orientate themself at the sicentific historical research, while some recently have pushed to teach history in a way that shows the US history deliberatly in a positive light, even if it obviously contradicts the current stand of historical knowledge. The difference is one of intent.
@ I agree. To change a nations perspective on it’s history is always painfull and never unfought.
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@ Kartoffel
In the US, universities teach what is known about history, but only 20% of Americans have ever taken a university-level history course.
At nearly all American high schools, meanwhile, they teach the “patriotic” version, full of “noble lies” upon which American society is built, like the Bootstrap Myth. Everyone is pretty much forced to learn this. It is called “history”, but “White American mythology” would be a better name.
Most high-school history teachers are middle-class Whites. A huge number of them live in Texas. They are the “target demographic” that high-school “history” books are written for. So pretty much nothing is going to get taught nationwide that White Southerners would object to. Thus the whitewash.
I have several posts on this. This is the main one:
Here are some examples of how it plays out:
https://abagond.wordpress.com/2010/09/29/2010/05/24/what-can-be-taught-as-history-in-texas/
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@King,
Sorry, I meant “see some”.
My point was that we saw Asian-Americans leave the South after the Great Migration, at least in the occupation that they had been doing for some 80 years.
But since the 1970s, we see other Asian-Americans (e.g, Korean and Fujian Chinese) opening up shops in the very neighborhoods that those who left in the Great Migration went to.
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@Kartoffel,
That is not a recent thing. That is the way it was always taught, and not just putting the US in a positive historical light, but white Americans in particular.
You should read stuff from the 1950s.
What you are interpreting as “recent” is a pushback AGAINST any movement to teach history in a more realistic light, ie, to go back to the way it used to be.
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@ Jefe
Another great post! …and the lovely b&w photo of the Pang family!
(talk about a picture speaking a thousand words! 😀 )
Among other things, the explanation about why Chinese men found themselves as grocers was something I now better understand.
There’s so much in the post, I will need read, and re-read over and over. Thank you.
I’ve never heard of the “plantation commissary”, and didn’t find a comprehensive account of what it was, who ran them and how it worked.
I am also wondering about the history Chinatowns in the US.
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There you go! My family is from the Delta of Mississippi and I my mother’s great grandfather was Chinese. Thanks for this post.
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Ne-Yo’s mom is Michelle Obama?
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@Bulanik,
Well, found something for you.
(http://historicaltextarchive.com/sections.php?action=read&artid=657)
I hope we get some posts on the history of Sharecropping in the USA, especially post-Reconstruction. It is ALSO a topic which is often skipped over in US public education History classes.
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@King,
Millions of Chinese fled Southern China in the mid and late 19th century due to the Civil War from the Taiping Rebellion, and also the Punti-Hakka Clan wars, both of which wiped out many villages out and left families displaced. It is a partial explanation why so many millions “willingly” left or got sold into indentured servitude overseas.
They were also a displaced population who had no home to go back to. What is different is that they had a shared experience, and some retention of language, cultural and kinship ties which included being cut off from their families in China.
That is a whole complex topic in itself that probably deserves a whole month of posts.
But even in the 2010s, we find Asian-American stores and shops in lower income black neighborhoods. Did you ever wonder why?
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This seems to still be the case today, with a plethora of Asian owned businesses in majority black neighborhoods.
Why is this so?
Do Asian immigrants still have better access to more capital and loans from banks to start and operate businesses???
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I have. I assumed that the explanation had more to do with economics than race. Blacks statistically tend to live in poorer neighborhoods, where the real estate is less expensive. It costs less to buy a liquor store in South Los Angeles than it would to buy one in San Francisco. Thus was my reasoning, but if there is more to it, I’d be interested to know.
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@King
I think it has to do with BOTH economics and race.
Asian Americans also open stores in middle class neighborhoods and central business districts, but usually stores like dry cleaners, nail salons and restaurants. Whites also open stores in these neighborhoods. Asians don’t open stores in poorer black neighborhoods simply because the rent is cheaper. And this does not explain why fewer black stores open up in these neighborhoods.
Stores in black neighborhoods run by Asian-Americans include liquor stores, check cashing stores, convenience stores, small supermarkets, fast food catering establishment and also African-American hair care and beauty products. If you see any whites open any business in a black neighborhood, it is usually a recent non-Anglo immigrant.
Those Asian-American business owners are NOT of the brain drain variety and usually do not live in the black neighborhood. Most of them today are Korean or from Fujian province in China.
Korean-Americans have cornered the African-American hair care market – somewhere between 60-80% of the national market. At national exhibition fairs of African-American hair care products, the vast majority of the attendees are Korean-American.
I did know some of the black neighborhood business owners from Fujian in the 1980s-1990s. They were all members of the Eastern USA Fujian merchants association and many were relatives or friends from the same or neighboring villages and spoke the Northern Min dialect. They did provide each other stuff like credit, training, distribution networks, etc.
I wonder if anyone has done any analysis on why Asian-Americans operate many of the businesses in black neighborhoods, but I suspect that some of the reasons in 2014 might be similar to some of the reasons in 1914.
There has been some discussion here before why blacks to operate many businesses, even in black neighborhoods, but people did not really seem to target any of the analysis.
I will be off the radar for the next couple days, but if you find any information, please share it.
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Thank you Jefe for the interesting blog. Thanks for the correction, Abagond.
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Michael Cooper,
It is Abagond’s blog. I only offered to submit a few guest posts that he ultimately selects.
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@ Jefe
Additionally, South Asians (particularly Vietnamese) have been serviced the nail salons in predominantly Black neighborhoods for some time now. I’m not sure if they have followed the same practice in other communities as well, but I’ll have to check that out as well.
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From what I know of Korean grocery stores in New York (in the 1980s and 1990s, at least), it is almost exactly what is laid out in this post. The template is the same, only the names have been changed.
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Reblogged this on Lucy Sheen actor writer filmmaker adoptee and commented:
Just had to to reblog this one
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I don’t have Chinese DNA, but south west Asian (lower India) DNA. I tried looking up information but only got the wiki account on the history
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[…] Guest post by commenter Jefe: Note: Some of the analysis in this post came from the book “The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White” (1971, 1988) by James W. Loewen. Chinese labourers were i… […]
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@ Jefe. Thanks for that link about plantation commissaries…
And as regards this:
I trust that more can be written about this, too.
The word “sharecropping” pops up, old photos are shown, but frankly — I need to know MORE about it.
I’d love to have a better understanding of this type of serfdom in the context of US history.
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@Jefe
“But even in the 2010s, we find Asian-American stores and shops in lower income black neighborhoods. Did you ever wonder why?”—You have put out a very interesting question here. One I have not thought about much. I think I will research and see what it is I come up with.
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Abagond, hope you will someday do a post on India’s DALITS (the so-called untouchables) of India, who have been discriminated against for thousands of years.
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@King, Sharina,
If you notice, ever since Reconstruction, Institutionalized White racism and internalized black racism has created a niche opportunity in poorer black (and maybe brown) neighborhoods for certain groups of people that are perceived as neither white nor black (ie, “3rd race” people).
We can find evidence back to the early majority black sharecropping regions in the Deep South in the 1880s, but when mechanization ended the sharecropping system and blacks went North in the Great migrations in the 1950s-60s, soon afterwards (by the 1970s at least) we find stores opening up in the urban “black ghettos” outside the South. The goods and services offered by these stores are exactly the ones that low income black residents are willing to spend what little money they have left for, and their prices or fees generally are not less (and are often higher) than what can be found outside.
* White institutions have shunned lending and credit and insurance in these neighborhoods.
* White owned chains do not open there, or close up shop if a neighborhood has become poorer and blacker after white flight and black flight.
* The shop owners are not only neither black nor white, but are highly socially connected to other nearby shop owners, sharing language, social origins, etc. They have access to social networks that provide credit, training, insurance, security, access to distribution networks, etc. They are often fairly recent immigrants who are related to other shopowners who opened other shops previously.
* Persons who identify with mainstream white social culture are not attracted to open businesses in those neighborhoods, including the children and especially the grandchildren of those shopowners. They perceive a social stigma with operating businesses in lower income black neighborhoods serving blacks. In the early migrations (1910s-1930s) you might find more Jews or recently arrived eastern or Southern European or Middle Eastern immigrants operating such businesses. Nowadays, they have been largely replaced by persons from East and South Asia. Those that identify with mainstream white social culture are also dependent on those (white) institutions for services, institutions which have shunned the neighborhood.
* Brain drain immigrants and their children do not do this kind of business.
* Not having strong social or kinship ties to the community seems to be one of the factors to help success. In Loewen’s analysis of the Mississippi delta, he only found 2-3 black owned grocery businesses operating, and he deduced that one key element of success was their decision to provide loans or credit to customers based solely on business reasons, and they were still barely surviving. In every OTHER case where the black storeowner provided credit or loans to the customers, the store operation failed. Chinese-American shop owners in the MS delta did provide credit to some customers, but it was always based on a business decisions, not kinship or social ties.
* African (and possibly West Indian) immigrants, even non-brain drain, rarely do this business, despite having less social ties to the community. We can come out with many rationales for this, but one of these can be attributed to some level of internalized racism of blacks in lower income communities. There may be more resentment of blacks towards non-local blacks opening stores in their community compared to non-blacks opening stores. There is an expectation that blacks, even non-local ones, should “contribute” more to the community and not remain separate, as many Asian-owners do.
* It seems that it is important that whites don’t perceive the shopowner as black either. The shopowner might still have some non-financial reason to be perceived in such a way (from the white distribution networks he is dependent on or say, the police).
* Another factor of internalized racism causes some blacks to view “3rd race” people as some form of surrogate whites, especially those that distinguish level of service among different groups, eg, better service to customers perceived as being better educated or not as poor. It encourages customers, ones maybe who can afford to spend a little more, to come back and patronize their stores. Without this differentiation in service, the customer might perceive that the shopowner is simply prejudiced against all blacks and would be less inclined to shop there. However, being a surrogate white has its negative side, as we witnessed during the riots following the Rodney King incident. Blacks angry against white police brutality went and attacked or looted Korean-American stores.
This is just my thinking aloud, but in order to create an environment that will help black-owned businesses to flourish in black neighborhoods, we have to do something about both the white institutionalized racism and black internalized racism that keeps hurdles in place. Money alone (e.g, from reparations or other lending programs targeted for black communities) will not help these businesses survive. Otherwise, we will continue to have niche opportunities for entrepreneurs who are not dependent on white institutions for financing, credit or training and not connected socially to the communities that they serve and not perceived as white or black by either whites or blacks.
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Joe, this blog is not the appropriate place to explore discrimination in India among Indians, because the caste system was primarily created and enforced by non-whites (though there is a case for calling such persons “caucasians”). I would also like to see a post on the Pygmies and the persecutions they have faced at the hands of neighboring Bantus, who often eat them, but it’s not gonna happen.
jefe, a simpler explanation might consider work ethic as a function of (average) IQ and resultant future time orientation (for people who don’t have better options, e.g., native born with high IQ would generally go white collar route), but Occam’s razor apparently doesn’t apply to race relations. Why did Indians do so well in Africa and Chinese so well in South East Asia? Why it must be institutionalized racism and internalized racism–cue multiple page elaborate explanations.
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@The Pragmatist
This seems to still be the case today, with a plethora of Asian owned businesses in majority black neighborhoods.
Why is this so?
Do Asian immigrants still have better access to more capital and loans from banks to start and operate businesses??? Sorry for not replying earlier.
As I suggested, I suspect that Asian immigrants have better access to capital and credit OUTSIDE the white mainstream banking system, something that most whites and blacks do not tap into. The white mainstream banking system does not seem so keen about lending to businesses opening in poor black neighborhoods, regardless of the race or ethnicity of the borrower.
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[…] After the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, many Chinese immigrants and Chinese-American citizens survived by moving, of all places, to the American South.While there, a political and social alliance between the two ethnic groups based on a survival instinct was forged. Inter-racial marriages became common, reaching nearly one-third of all Chinese marriages in some areas. If you're like me, this is an aspect of U.S. history about which you know little, if anything. Being an immigration lawyer, this is an embarrassing yet revealing admission. It points out how little our society really knows about its rich immigrant roots. Perhaps if, as a country, we knew more about our past, the immigration reform debate would be less rancorous today. If you're a history buff, or an ardent immigrant rights supporter, this article is for you. […]
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Sam Chu-Lin, reporter for CBS News from 1960s-1990s, was born in Greenville, Mississippi in 1939 and grew up there. His grandfather opened a grocery store there around the turn of 20th century, and brought his father and father’s mother over some time later.
In the 1970s, he tells the story of his own family in the Mississippi Delta. (4:12)
(http://youtu.be/93OXSaGrwgw)
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@ Jefe, thank you very much for that clip. Fascinating stuff.
This must be a part of longer documentary.
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The name John Jung springs up. What do you know of him, his work?
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Hi Bulanik,
John Jung currently runs a blog
(http://chineseamericanhistorian.blogspot.com)
He used to be a professor of psychology, but after retirement, he focussed on doing historian work. He combs through stacks of old newspapers and photos and documents and posts them on his blog. Most of his stuff deals with the history of Chinese-Americans, but there is a lot of other interesting stuff too.
He also does talks around the country and has published several books.
What is interesting about him is that he was born and raised in Macon, Georgia. His parents operated a laundry there when he was growing up (1940s-1950s) that had previously been run by another family. He has done a lot of research on Asian American history in the US Deep South, and a couple of his books deal with that experience.
For example, he dug up newspaper articles about Soong Mei-ling, the wife of Generalissimo / President Chiang Kai-shek when she was sent to Macon, GA as a girl, and how she ended up going there. He also confirmed that she was prohibited to attend the local schools because of race. Ms. Chiang Kai-shek only died a few years ago, so I find this fascinating.
Also, I have long known about the Chinese in Mississippi because my relatives were there, my older cousins grew up there. I chose that topic to do a paper way back in university. When I was doing research in the past year on these topics, I ran into Mr. Jung’s blog. This Mr. Jung has amassed a treasure trove of information, esp. about the early years of Chinese settling the Deep South (19th century – early 20th century). He found dozens of newspaper notices of Chinese coolies arriving in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and Arkansas.
In the past, I only knew of one organization that specialized in Chinese history (Chinese Historical Society of America
http://chsa.org/ ). In my last visit to San Francisco, I stopped in there. But I had read about Mr. Him Mark Lai ever since the 1980s – he devoted his later life to Chinese American history and helped stock the knowledge and resources that were found there. However, the information I found there was almost entirely about the history in California. About half of Mr. Jung’s materials deal specifically with the US South.
Nowhere else have I found a collection of information which can help me learn about the history of Asian-black relations in the United States dating back to the 19th century.
There is a Chinatown History Museum in New York City in Chinatown. I think I stopped briefly in there maybe 20 years ago, but it looks like it moved and expanded. I will go there again if and when I go back to New York city again.
Do you know if someone formed a Jamaican Chinese Historical society. That would be interesting.
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Interesting find.
Wikipedia has this photo of the Chinese section at Elmwood cemetery in Memphis, Tennessee.
(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/af/Elmwood-Asian.JPG/1280px-Elmwood-Asian.JPG)
Looking at the headstones they are all Chinese men from the same region in Guangdong province and born in the 19th century. It seems that perhaps Chinese families possibly from surrounding Arkansas and Mississippi buried their dead here in the first half of the 20th century.
I wonder why they chose Memphis. Maybe it was convenient if relatives were spread out across the Arkansas and Mississippi Delta. Or maybe some of the local Delta towns didn’t allow them to be buried in their towns. I know there are Chinese cemeteries in other Delta towns (like Greenville).
I wonder what stories are buried at those cemeteries.
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@Kiwi,
First of all, I personally would not copy Biff in his sweeping general statements about overseas Indians and Chinese. Different groups had very different results so we can only talk about a select subset in each case.
Re:
I think that they are similar in that they were imported as cheap labour at about the same time and such labour became available in China due to certain social forces occurring at that time (eg, the Taiping Rebellion, the Opium Wars, the Punti-Hakka clan wars). But at some point, the similarity ends. In the Americas, they were generally imported as an alternative to slaves. In SE Asia, they could not coax as many natives to do their dirty labour for them, so they imported them.
I think the points that you did not italicize also applies to SE Asian ethnic Chinese to some extent. They did differentiate themselves by clan, dialect, and social and geographic origin in China and formed various social networks. It was probably more complicated than the US South as they came to SE Asia from different regions and under different categories.
I would hesitate to extrapolate any gleanings from what happened in the US South and apply it to SE Asia or vice versa.
I am almost certain that plantation owners in the US south did not import Chinese labour to become merchants to black sharecroppers. That was an occupation that emerged from the unique characteristics from the US South.
The Deep South has a subtropical climate, with a humid tropical like summer for 5 months of the year or more. Whites were not drawn to do menial work in that environment. In fact, whites who did work in that environment got labelled rednecks because the backs of their necks burned red in the sun. US Southerners reasoned that South China had a similar climate to the Deep South, so any labourers would be able to adapt to such a climate.
The Mississippi delta cotton kingdom was founded by running Native Americans off the land and bringing in slaves. Most of the Delta became 80-90% black. I don’t see how the rest of the US was any less of one of economic exploitation. Whites imported Chinese to work in the West and poor Europeans to work in the East and Midwest.
Whites did open up stores in the South, including many that served blacks. Outside the Mississippi and Arkansas deltas, many were “ethnic” whites (or not quite “white” groups) such as Jews, Syrians, Lebanese, etc. Their social networks also helped them operated stores in black neighborhoods too.
One similarity that might be drawn between SE Asia coolies and those to North America might be the orientation of making and saving money to send back home. They gravitated to certain occupations if they saw an opportunity to make money. If you studied about the resentment that whites had for Chinese in the Western states in the 1870s was how they would quickly move to another occupation to make money. During an economic slowdown, working class whites would wait around looking for employers whereas many of the Chinese, if they could not find an employer, would simply shift to a new occupation. This created resentment from Whites as they saw them busy working while they themselves could not find work.
In the Mississippi delta the shift to grocery stores serving black sharecroppers was less threatening to the white social system there, as whites were not interested in doing that work. Until the Chinese started getting Chinese wives and having children, they also did not challenge the white social system that much either.
I would not make the subsequent sweeping generalizations that Biff made, as different places and environments created different results.
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^ I had seen your comment already. I tried to explain that I did not fully agree with your analysis.
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reunion of Mississippi Delta Chinese in Cleveland, MS last week
http://mississippideltachinese.webs.com/apps/blog/show/42500939-ms-delta-chinese-heritage-reunion-oct-24-25-2014
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Abagond,
I sent you an email a few weeks ago requesting you to make some corrections / revisions to certain posts.
One of them regards this one.
It is Ne-yo’s FATHER who was half-Chinese, not his mother. Ne-yo said that his mother was was basically African-American (with some Native American) but his father was of Chinese descent (source: (Youtube posted 3 Nov 2014) http://youtu.be/HY-cVesjDnA (4:03 – 4:25)
Wikipedia was changed to reflect this, but not most of the other sources I found.
We must change the caption to the photo.
Maybe we can change it to something like
“Ne-Yo’s father was half-Chinese from Arkansas (Ne-yo pictured here with his mother). ”
or
“Ne-Yo (pictured with his mother) hails from Arkansas and had a father that was half-Chinese”
or something along those lines.
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The headline photo of this post is a family portrait of the Pang Family in Marks, Mississippi in the 1920s.
The following is a youtube of an Ole Miss football halftime event Honoring Lynn ‘Pap’ Pang, for his 100th birthday, during halftime at an Ole Miss Football game in 2012. The video mentions (0:39 – 0:48) that he was born in Marks, MS on November 6, 1912.
(http://youtu.be/hre6cnlKPPw)
I do wonder if he is one of the boys in the photo. He would be the right age, and from Marks, Mississippi. Trying to figure out which one is he.
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When the University of Mississippi held a forum discussion about desegregation in Mississippi at the 50 year anniversary (2012) of James Meredith’s entrance to the university, they interestingly held a forum about the Chinese connection in Mississippi at that time and about life growing up in Grocery stores serving blacks in the Mississippi Delta.
Parts 1, 2 of 5:
The Chinese Connection part 1 of 5
(http://youtu.be/ibhbIjWapDg)
The Chinese Connection part 2 of 5
(http://youtu.be/kUVLFlyxI88)
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[…] File Name : Chinese americans in the deep south after 1882 | abagond Source : abagond.wordpress.com Download : Chinese americans in the deep south after 1882 | abagond […]
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[…] source […]
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[…] The Pang family in Mississippi, early 1920s (taken from https://abagond.wordpress.com/2014/06/06/chinese-americans-in-the-deep-south-after-1882/) […]
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This Youtube video is a tribute to radio and TV journalist Sam Chu-Lin (1939-2006) on the 10th anniversary of his death this month.
He was a 3rd generation Chinese-American born and raised in the Mississippi delta to a grocer family.
Sam Chu Lin – Asian American Broadcast Pioneer
(https://youtu.be/1__8DaH-usg)
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A new 3-part documentary is being screen around the country (presumably during Asian Pacific American Heritage month, starting last week in Mississippi, but being taken on a road tour throughout the USA in May and June. The screening is free.
The nationwide tour will take it to San Francisco, Washington metro area (DC/MD/VA) and New York.
It chronicles the history of the Chinese in Mississippi from 1870 to the present day, with an emphasis on those who served in WWII. I have not seen it, but the trailer conveys a message which is consistent with all the posts related to this topic found on this blog.
The following link includes links to the trailer and the screening times.
(http://www.heritageseries.us/honor-and-duty/)
Trailer:
(https://vimeo.com/158699377)
Honor and Duty: The Mississippi Delta Chinese
Part One 1870 to 1940
How Chinese first came to Mississippi told in the context of the period. The what, where and why’s they came and stayed.
Part Two 1941-1945
Chinese WWII veterans and their families share stories of the war and its impact on their lives in the Mississippi Delta.
Part Three 1946 to Present
How Chinese have influenced the social and economic fabric, custom and culture of Mississippi.
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[…] replace slave labor, and those who stayed in the South after the Chinese Exclusion Act ended up opening grocery stores that served Black sharecroppers who were exploited by plantation […]
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Another interesting article that discusses the phenomenon of Black- Chinese relations, including relationships between Chinese men and Black women in the Mississippi delta, a phenomenon that was not uncommon 100-150 years ago.
Alas, this article admits that information is limited, and only two books (linked above) really addressed it.
Black Women’s History (Kissing the Asian Guy): Chinese and African American Marriages in the Mississippi Delta
(http://www.beyondblackwhite.com/36184/)
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[…] source […]
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[…] this country. There have been brief periods of when black women and Asian men married both in the Jim Crow South and the North before the Chinese Exclusion Act was lifted in […]
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Of the modern descendants of the Chinese-black families hailing from the Deep South, the majority I know about or whom I have read about tend to identify more with black.
But, there are some instances where some black-Chinese women married Chinese men in the South, or where Chinese fathers sent their Chinese-black kids back to China to get educated. So we will also find some Chinese-Americans who are part black and not from the Caribbean.
Lou Yuck Ming – ¾ Chinese, ¼ African-American, Coahoma, Mississippi
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@jefe
Thanks for the link to the Chinese Exclusion Files. Great resource. Fascinating real life stories.
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Interesting quote from a plantation owner in his memoirs.
A White Aristocrat’s Negative View of Delta Chinese in 1941
http://chineseamericanhistorian.blogspot.hk/2017/02/a-white-aristocrats-negative-view-of.html
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Another video about the Mississippi Delta Chinese, why they came in the first place and their experience during Jim Crow.
Interesting that people are finally telling these stories.
The Untold Story Of America’s Southern Chinese
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NMrqGHr5zE)
By the way, my elder cousins who grew up in the Mississippi Delta still have southern accents. 😛
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Perhaps the foremost current single authority on this topic:
Chopsticks in the Land of Cotton
https://chopsticksinthelandofcotton.weebly.com/
I did read James W. Loewen’s book “The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White” back when I was in university. But this website is kept current so that you can learn about then and now.
The NPR recording (link in the first link) states that Greenville, MS alone had over 50 Chinese grocery stores at one point. I know that the town my Aunts were in (Greenwood) had a couple dozen. Altogether, there were probably a couple hundred Chinese grocers in the Delta in its heyday.
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What happened to the Joe Gow Nue Co. grocery store in Greenville, MS?
Picture of the property in 2017:
https://scontent.fhkg4-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t31.0-8/27747934_10155572982278167_1954510729403221065_o.jpg?oh=d19a2eb4f0f4b5f15c4e427b520beec4&oe=5B1AEFA6
Ad from 1946 Greenville directory:
https://scontent.fhkg4-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t31.0-8/27369116_10155572983508167_6980488906268007545_o.jpg?oh=e2883ff01a2fea1d5e28adf55007418e&oe=5B160C35
The Joe Gow Nue store was the only one in the Delta that also sold Chinese products targeting other store owners for personal consumption.
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The story of the Mississippi Chinese has hit mainstream media again. The New York Times had a piece yesterday about a photographer team who did a montage of of the legacy of the Chinese who settled there.
Neither Black Nor White in the Mississippi Delta
Two photographers document a community of Chinese-Americans in the birthplace of the blues.
The NYT piece mentions Wong’s Foodland in Clarksdale, MS, as well as Taylor Pang, a 4th generation grocer in Marks, MS. The photo at the top of this blog post is of the Pang family in Marks, MS, so I assume that he is the great-grandson of the Patriarch in the photo (or the grandson of one of the boys).
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Joe Gow Nue Grocery Store in Greenville, Mississippi, 1970s:
https://scontent.fhkg3-2.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/1005374_10151912629060642_976408642_n.jpg?_nc_cat=103&_nc_ht=scontent.fhkg3-2.fna&oh=aeb71c683b694050238827db1c262388&oe=5CC5A577
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jefe glad to see you are continuing your research on Chinese in the Deep South, especially the MS Delta. btw, there were two Joe Gow Nue stores. The one you posted is Joe Gow Nue #2.
The first one on Washington Street down by the levee is in an iconic photo taken by a government photographer during the depression.
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btw, Augusta, Georgia, a larger city than those in Mississippi, had a large and more concentrated, geographically speaking, Chinese community. There were many grocery stores but also a few laundries, and eventually some restaurants. Augusta, in fact, is where my father worked in the mid 1920s for three years with relatives shortly after he came from China before eventually opening a laundry in Macon. But the main point of this comment is that I just discovered that the Augusta CCBA has collected 26 oral video histories posted on this archival site: https://dlg.usg.edu/collection/gaec_caoh
See also: https://kaltura.uga.edu/media/t/1_7hnkqmtx
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@John Jung
Thank you for the corrections to the photographs. I have never been to Greenville. I just met one of my Mississippi born cousins in Hong Kong last month in HK, and I really want to go there to research the place, see where my cousins grew up in Greenwood and visit the museum in Cleveland. Hope I can ask you more when that time comes.
I first learned about the Augusta Chinese community when they announced the 300th million American born in 2006. They profiled the 200th million American born in 1967 who happened to be Chinese American Bobby Woo born in Atlanta, but his father was born in Augusta, Georgia.
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/15302769/ns/us_news-life/t/millionth-american-passes-torch/
I went and looked up about the Augusta Chinese community and found it to be very interesting. Some are descended from the original laborers brought in the 19th century to work on cotton plantations and to build the levees on the Savannah River.
However, it seems that Bobby Woo’s father just died a few months ago.
Robert Ken Woo Sr., 72: Father of the 200 millionth American citizen
https://www.ajc.com/news/local/robert-ken-woo-father-the-200-millionth-american-citizen/DQzrx8G5kOcJ5J7LBThMvL/
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Another feature video about the history of Chinese run grocery stores in the Mississippi delta.
Mississippi China connection
(https://youtu.be/iR82yN6yr94)
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The family of the eldest granddaughter of the Pang partriarch in the photo at the top is featured in this docuvideo here. It is well done and worth a watch.
SouthWord: Exploring Southern Chinese Identity in Mississippi
The legacy of the Chow family, beginning with the immigration of Jone Sam Pang from China at the turn of the century, is a history of the Mississippi Delta as part of the changing South.
(https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=581703372398274)
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Apart from the Mississippi Delta region and New Orleans, the largest settlement of Chinese in the US Deep South in the late 19th century was in Augusta, Georgia.
The Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (CCBA) of Augusta, GA
(http://ccbaaugusta.com/about-us/history/)
It may be interesting to learn that the 200th million American born in the USA was Robert Ken Woo Jr., born in 1967 in Atlanta, GA. His father was a native of Augusta.
Time to forget Robert Woo
(https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2006-09-27-0609270061-story.html)
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