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SING SHEN VS. SOUTHWOOD Author(s): C. BROOKS Source: Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 73, No. 3 (August 2004), pp. 463-494 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/phr.2004.73.3.463 Accessed: 07-05-2018 21:32 UTC

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Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 73, No. 3, pages 463– 494. ISSN 0030-8684 ©2004 by the Pacific Coast Branch, American Historical Association. All rights reserved. Send requests for permission to reprint to: Rights and Permissions, University of California Press, 2000 Center St., Ste. 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223. 463

Sing Sheng vs. Southwood: Residential Integration in Cold War California

CHARLOTTE BROOKS

The author is a member of the history department at the State University of New York, Albany.

In 1952 Chinese immigrant Sing Sheng encountered racial discrimination when he tried to purchase a home in the all-white South San Francisco housing tract of South- wood. Sheng, believing that racism could not be the majority sentiment in a democ- racy, asked white Southwood residents to vote to accept or reject his family. The Shengs lost the unofficial referendum, but it became national news and created immense sym- pathy for the family. Many white Americans claimed that housing discrimination against Asian Americans could influence Asian nations to reject democracy and em- brace communism. The Sheng affair and similar incidents demonstrate that the Cold War improved housing opportunities for California’s Asian Americans, even though many whites perceived them as foreign and continued to discriminate against blacks and Mexican Americans.

On a Saturday afternoon in early 1952, residents of South San Francisco’s all-white Southwood housing tract voted on whether to accept or reject a Chinese American family that wanted to move to the neighborhood. After reading each homemade ballot aloud, volunteer counters working at a table in a neighbor’s garage an- nounced their final tally: The Shengs had lost by 174 votes to 28. “I congratulate those who voted against me, and I hope you will enjoy living here,” said Sing Sheng bitterly, as Grace, his crying wife, stood by his side. “May your property values go up every three days.” Sheng had proposed the poll himself, after putting a deposit on a West Or- ange Avenue home and receiving threats from white neighbors. But speaking to local reporters after the vote, he was more disappointed than angry. Those white residents who claimed that a Chinese

I am very grateful to Richard Sheng for making his family’s Southwood materials available to me. In addition, I would like to thank David K. Johnson, Wallace Best, Karen Leroux, Brett Gadsden, Michael S. Sherry, Josef Barton, the four anonymous PHR read- ers, and Nancy K. MacLean for their suggestions and comments on earlier drafts of this article.

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1. “Homeowners Ballot, Keep Chinese Out,” San Francisco Examiner, Feb. 17, 1952, p. 1; “Sing [sic] Family Gets Host of Offers,” San Mateo Times, Feb. 18, 1952, p. 1; “‘De- mocracy Vote’ Rejects Chinese,” New York Times, Feb. 17, 1952, p. 18; “Chinese Couple Ac- cepts Vote Barring New Home,” San Francisco News, Feb. 18, 1952, Richard Sheng collec- tion (in possession of author), hereafter referred to as Sheng Collection. As the Southwooders discovered later, their neighborhood was not as racially pure as they be- lieved; a mixed-race Hawaiian couple owned a house in the tract. In 1952 they were rent- ing the house to a white family, but they had lived in it themselves in the late 1940s. Bernard Taper, “Southwood Finds Out It Isn’t an ‘All White’ Community, After All,” San Francisco Chronicle, Feb. 22, 1952, p. 1.

2. Robert M. Blum, Drawing the Line: The Origins of American Containment Policy in East Asia (New York, 1982), 5; Andrew J. Rotter, The Path to Vietnam: Origins of the American Commitment to Southeast Asia (Ithaca, N.Y., 1987), 1–2, 75–79, 123, 171, 180; Michael H. Hunt and Steven I. Levine, “The Revolutionary Challenge to Early U.S. Cold War Policy in Asia,” in Warren I. Cohen and Akira Iriye, eds., The Great Powers in East Asia, 1953–1960 (New York, 1990), 15, 19–21; Gary Hess, “The American Search for Stability in Southeast Asia: The SEATO Structure for Containment,” in Cohen and Iriye, eds., The Great Powers, 288; Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Issei, Nisei, Warbride: Three Generations of Japanese American Women in Domestic Service (Philadelphia, 1986), 8; Yen Le Espiritu, Filipino American Lives

American family would lower property values, he declared, should “find out a little of what we’re fighting for in Korea.” Sing Sheng, who had come to the United States just a few years earlier, soon dis- covered that much of America agreed with him. After the story of an immigrant family that had lost its bet on democracy became na- tionwide news, white Americans from around the country con- demned the Southwood residents for the message their votes might send to Asia. Yet such outrage also revealed that, while the Cold War and domestic racial tensions were improving Asian American hous- ing opportunities, they were not lessening white support for resi- dential discrimination in general.1

By the early 1950s U.S. policymakers and citizens had become increasingly preoccupied with Asia. The U.S. government was trying to contain communism in the region through a combination of for- eign aid, diplomatic pressure, and, in the case of Korea, military force. Public interest in Asia reflected this foreign policy, as well as the growing presence of Asia in American cultural, social, and po- litical life. U.S. soldiers brought back thousands of “war brides” from Japan, China, the Philippines, and Korea. Publisher Henry Luce used his tremendously popular magazines Time and Life to create sympathy for Taiwan’s dictator, Chiang Kai-shek. American movies focused both on the recent war against Japan and contemporary struggles in Asia. And conservative Republicans attacked the Tru- man administration for being “soft” on communism in the region.2

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(Philadelphia, 1995), 18; Xiaojian Zhao, Remaking Chinese America: Immigration, Family, and Community, 1940 –1965 (New Brunswick, N.J., 2002), 1; Ji-Yeon Yuh, Beyond the Shadow of Camptown: Korean Military Brides in America (New York, 2002), 1; Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore, 1991), 160. Movies dealing with World War II in the Pacific and postwar American involvement in Asia include From Here to Eternity (Colum- bia Pictures Corporation, 1953); China Venture (ibid., 1953); The Bamboo Prison (ibid., 1954); Okinawa (ibid., 1952); Halls of Montezuma (Twentieth Century Fox, 1951); Hell and High Water (ibid., 1954); Blood Alley (Warner Brothers, 1955); and scores of others.

3. Mae M. Ngai, “The Architecture of Race in American Immigration Law: A Reex- amination of the Immigration Act of 1924,” Journal of American History, 86 (1999), 67–92, discusses the origins of the perception of all Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners. Ar- guably, attitudes about Asian American “foreignness” have not changed greatly since the 1950s. See, for example, Frank H. Wu, Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White (New York, 2002), 79–129; Neil T. Gotanda, “Citizenship Nullification: The Impossibility of Asian American Politics,” in Gordon H. Chang, ed., Asian Americans and Politics: Perspec- tives, Experiences, Prospects (Stanford, Calif., 2001), 91; Helen Zia, Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People (New York, 2000), 44.

4. Renqiu Yu, To Save China, To Save Ourselves: The Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance of New York (Philadelphia, 1992), 183 –194. Other studies of government harassment of Chinese Americans during the Cold War include Peter Kwong, Chinatown, U.S.A.: Labor and Politics, 1930 –1950 (New York, 2001); Mae M. Ngai, “Legacies of Exclusion: Chinese Illegal Immigration during the Cold War Years,” Journal of American Ethnic History, 18 (1998); and Him Mark Lai, “To Bring Forth a New China, to Build a Better America: The Chinese Marxist Left in America to the 1960s,” Chinese America: History and Perspectives, 6 (1992). For examples of official praise of Chinese Americans during the Korean War, see “California’s Gov. Warren Assures Chinese-Americans,” Chinese Press, Dec. 8, 1950, p. 1; “Mayor Talks on Chinese Contribution,” ibid., Feb. 9, 1951, p. 1.

Americans’ increasing interest in Asia during the 1950s had sig- nificant consequences for Asian Americans, who knew that many of their fellow citizens considered them foreigners— or at least not re- ally American.3 Only a few years earlier, at the beginning of World War II, the U.S. government had imprisoned the Japanese American population of the West Coast. When the People’s Republic of China (PRC) entered the Korean War, Chinese Americans worried that of- ficials would put them in concentration camps too. Although gov- ernment officials publicly voiced confidence in Chinese American loyalty, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Immigration and Naturalization Service harassed Chinese American leftists and monitored Chinatowns.4

Still, nationwide reaction to the Southwood incident demon- strated that “foreign” ties did not always have negative consequences for Asian Americans in the Cold War United States. Relationships between the United States and various Asian governments had long influenced white Americans’ treatment of Asian Americans. Before World War II, such relationships were usually unequal or inharmo-

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5. Two of the best examples of the impact of America’s relationships with various Asian nations are the World War II internment of Japanese Americans and the tacit of- ficial tolerance of anti-Chinese violence in the West between the 1850s and the turn of the twentieth century (due to the weakness of the faltering Chinese empire). See also Robert S. Chang, Disoriented: Asian Americans, Law, and the Nation-State (New York, 1999), 16 –38.

6. Hess, “The American Search for Stability,” 273. 7. Studies of the development of white Californians’ racial attitudes in the nine-

teenth and early twentieth centuries include Tomás Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The His- torical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley, 1994); Roger Daniels, The Anti- Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion (Berkeley, 1962); and Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in Califor- nia (Berkeley, 1971).

8. K. Scott Wong, “Cultural Defenders and Brokers: Chinese Responses to the Anti- Chinese Movement,” in K. Scott Wong and Sucheng Chan, eds., Claiming America: Con- structing Chinese American Identities During the Exclusion Era (Philadelphia, 1998), 5; John S. Chambers, “The Japanese Invasion,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 93 (1921), 28; back cover, Grizzly Bear, Aug. 1924. John Modell, The Economics and Politics of Racial Accommodation: The Japanese of Los Angeles, 1900 –1942 (Urbana, Ill., 1977), 181–188, discusses the evolution of public opinion against the Japanese Americans in California between 1941 and 1942.

nious.5 By the late 1940s, however, American officials attempting to counter Soviet influence in Asia were wooing governments in the re- gion. And as the United States started to treat Asian nations with growing respect, white Americans began viewing Asian Americans more favorably as well.6

Even so, Asian Americans had little reason to expect that white Californians’ attitudes would change in the same way. For decades before World War II, white Californians had singled out Asian Americans as the primary threats to white privilege in the state.7

Many prominent officials, including several governors, belonged to anti-Asian organizations that accused the Chinese of being im- moral, dirty, and unassimilable. Such groups also considered the Japanese to be racial inferiors and called on other whites to “hold California for the white race.” Unsurprisingly, a large majority of white Californians approved of the incarceration of Japanese Amer- icans in 1942.8

Yet support for the Sheng family was at least as strong in Cali- fornia as elsewhere in the nation, suggesting a remarkable shift in white opinion there. While many historians have noted that Asian Americans enjoyed a dramatic expansion of rights and opportuni- ties in the West after World War II, few have offered more than the most general reasons for this change. This essay argues that scholars of Asian American history must examine the effects of black migra-

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9. Scholars who argue that Asian American life improved and offer only general reasons for this change include Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (New York, 1990), 416 – 418; Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans: An Interpre- tive History (New York, 1991), 140–142; Gloria Heyung Chun, Of Orphans and Warriors: In- venting Chinese American Culture and Identity (New Brunswick, N.J., 2000), 70–96; and Zia, Asian American Dreams, 44 – 46. Recent works connecting international relations to do- mestic racial issues include Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, N.J., 2002); Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, Mass., 2001); Penny M. Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1927–1957 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1997); Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935–1960 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996); and Renee Romano, “No Diplomatic Immunity: Af- rican Diplomats, the State Department, and Civil Rights, 1961–1964,” Journal of American History, 87 (2000). Each of these works considers civil rights in the United States as an Af- rican American issue and does not examine the impact of foreign policy on Asian Amer- icans. One recent work that goes beyond a black-white view of this issue is Justin Hart, “Making Democracy Safe for the World: Race, Propaganda, and the Transformation of U.S. Foreign Policy during World War II,” Pacific Historical Review, 73 (2004), 49– 84.

10. Sing Sheng to the author, Dec. 20, 1999, p. 1; “The Sing Chengs [sic] Discover America,” The Clipper [Pan American Airways in-house magazine], March 6, 1952, p. 2.

tion on white opinion in postwar California. At the same time, they need to explore the connections between U.S. foreign policy and domestic civil rights debates, something historians of the Cold War and African American activism have recently begun to do. In order to understand the impact of such varied factors, this article uses or- ganizational and government records, private and official corre- spondence, contemporary studies, and English and Chinese lan- guage newspapers, which together bring a diversity of perspectives to a largely unstudied aspect of Asian American history.9

* * * Although most Chinese Americans in the 1950s were Ameri-

can-born, Sing Sheng had been born in China and had grown up in Shanghai. During China’s war against Japan, he served as a captain in the intelligence branch of the Chinese Nationalist forces. Sheng’s wife Grace, a Missouri-born Chinese American, had also grown up in Shanghai, but she returned to the United States after the war to attend Indiana’s Earlham College. Sing Sheng joined her there, studying international relations and dreaming of a career in China’s diplomatic corps. But when the Chinese Communists took over the Mainland, the newlywed Shengs decided to remain in America. To support his family, Sing Sheng accepted a job as an accountant with Greyhound Bus Lines and studied engine repair in his spare time.10

Their backgrounds aside, Sing and Grace Sheng had much in

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11. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York, 1988), 3 –5; “Democracy in Southwood,” Time, Feb. 25, 1952, p. 27.

12. Charlotte Brooks, “Ascending California’s Racial Hierarchy: Asian Americans, Housing, and Government, 1920–1955” (Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University, 2002), 19– 66. U.S. Census numbers in 1940 broke down California’s counties by race, counting people of Chinese, Japanese, and Native American ancestry separately. How- ever, census tracts were reported as “white” and “nonwhite.” Works Progress Administra- tion, 1939 Real Property Survey, San Francisco, California (San Francisco, 1940), includes the five census tracts with the most substandard housing— one of which was Chinatown— and reports forty Chinese American-occupied units outside of Chinatown and 4,652 within it.

common with many young white married couples in 1950s Califor- nia. Like numerous men his age, Sing Sheng was a war veteran and a union member, having gotten a job as an aircraft mechanic after completing his engine repair training. The Shengs had also started a family, and while Sing Sheng worked fulltime at Pan American Air- ways, Grace stayed home with the couple’s young son, Richard, in their small apartment in San Francisco’s Twin Peaks district. Once the Shengs learned that Grace was pregnant again, they decided to buy a home in the suburbs to accommodate their growing family. Southwood, a moderate blue- and white-collar neighborhood just ten minutes from the airport, seemed ideal. In fact, some of Sing Sheng’s Pan Am coworkers already lived there.11

Had Sing and Grace Sheng grown up in California, however, they would have known that what they did not share with young white couples was a wide choice of housing. In prewar California, residential discrimination against people of Asian ancestry was the rule rather than exception. In Los Angeles and the East Bay, Chi- nese Americans lived among other nonwhite residents and poorer whites in the most rundown districts. White San Franciscans limited the housing options of Chinese Americans even more drastically. Al- most none of the 20,000 Chinese American residents of San Fran- cisco in 1940 lived outside the Chinatown area.12 Across the country, and particularly in the urban Northeast and Midwest, other non- white Americans of the time faced persistent housing discrimination as well. Outside the Pacific Coast states, African Americans encoun- tered the most tenacious white resistance to integration. In cities such as St. Louis, Cleveland, and Boston, blacks of all backgrounds and social classes crowded out of necessity into the same rundown ghetto areas. Whites used not just violence but the law to keep them there; until the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1948 Shelley v. Kraemer deci-

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13. Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York, 1985), 241–242; Arnold R. Hirsch, “With or Without Jim Crow: Black Resi- dential Segregation in the United States,” in Arnold R. Hirsch and Raymond A. Mohl, eds., Urban Policy in Twentieth-Century America (New Brunswick, N.J., 1993), 73 –75.

14. John T. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twen- tieth-Century Urban North (Chicago, 1996), 88–98; William H. Wilson, Hamilton Park: A Planned Black Community in Dallas (Baltimore, 1998), 12–15; Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cam- bridge, Mass., 1993), 56; Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and In- equality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, N.J., 1996), 214; W. Edward Orser, Blockbusting in Bal- timore: The Edmondson Village Story (Lexington, Ky., 1994), 68; Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 227; Arnold Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940 –1960 (Chicago, 1998), 15; Marvin Dunn, Black Miami in the Twentieth Century (Gainesville, Fla., 1997), 208–209. Frequently the developers of subdivisions excluded nonwhites by in- structing their salespeople to refuse to sell homes to nonwhite buyers. Regardless of such discrimination, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) was often the institution in- suring the mortgages on such tracts.

15. Gerald D. Nash, The American West Transformed: The Impact of the Second World War (Lincoln, Nebr., 1985), 214 –215; Chris Friday, “‘In Due Time’: Narratives of Race and

sion, courts upheld devices such as racial restrictive covenants, which were contracts that white neighbors signed promising not to sell to nonwhites. While white homeowners unable to find white buyers sometimes broke the covenants, homeowners’ associations, realtors, builders, and lenders worked together to keep numerous inner-city neighborhoods all-white for many years.13

After 1948, with judges no longer enforcing restrictive cove- nants, whites and African Americans increasingly clashed over resi- dential and racial boundaries. Clerics in cities such as Philadelphia and Cicero, Illinois, reported that many of their white parishioners strongly opposed housing integration. In Dallas, white elites pushed for the creation of black subdivisions to avoid it altogether, but whites living near the planned sites fought these developments. Many white residents became active in homeowners’ associations, such as Detroit’s Northwest Civic Association, which struggled to keep blacks out. Some whites turned to vandalism and violence, as in Baltimore, where vigilantes broke the windows of a black family’s home and painted “KKK” on it. Most, however, simply abandoned their old neighborhoods in places like Miami, Los Angeles, Brook- lyn, and Chicago, and fled to suburbs that excluded nonwhites.14

As recent arrivals in America, Sing and Grace Sheng were not prepared for this. Even their lives in California—from their apart- ment in Twin Peaks to Sing Sheng’s job—reflected the gains non- whites had made in the state during the war.15 As a result, the couple

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Place in the Western United States,” in Paul Wong, ed., Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in the United States: Toward the Twenty-First Century (Boulder, Colo., 1999), 132–135.

16. Sing Sheng to the author, p. 1; “Democracy in Southwood,” 27; “Sing [sic] Fam- ily Gets Host of Offers,” 1–2; Sing and Grace Sheng to Southwood residents, Feb. 5, 1952, Sheng Collection.

17. “Zhongzu qishi zai jiujinshan!” [“Racial discrimination in San Francisco!”], circa March 1952, unidentified Chinese-language newspaper, Sheng Collection. I have translated into English all quotations from Chinese language sources. “A District Votes on ‘Restriction,’” San Francisco Chronicle, Feb. 16, 1952, Sheng Collection.

was surprised when white neighbors confronted them and warned them not to move to the neighborhood. Belligerent residents also phoned the Shengs, threatening to dump garbage on their lawn and harm their children. After some thought, Sing Sheng suggested that the neighborhood vote on his family, and he tied the poll directly to what he considered an important contemporary test of American principles—the ongoing Korean War. Speaking with reporters, he asserted that, “if the votes are not in my favor, it is a good indication that this war is being fought in vain.” In a letter to the Southwood homeowners, Sheng used even stronger language. “The present world conflict is not between individual nations, but between com- munism and Democracy,” he argued. “We think so highly of de- mocracy because it offers freedom and equality . . . . Do not make us the victims of false democracy.”16

While Sheng’s actions betrayed some naiveté, he did not sug- gest a referendum merely because of his anti-communist beliefs or faith in American democracy. According to a Chinese-language pa- per, the Southwooders’ comments about the Chinese had particu- larly irked him. “Truly it would be infuriating for any living member of the Chinese race!” declared Sheng. “It makes my head spin, to use us to oppose Chinese people with such a tone.” Sheng wanted to teach his opponents not just about democracy but about the desir- ability of the Chinese. “I was sure everybody really believed in de- mocracy, so I thought up this vote as a test,” he said to a reporter for an English-language paper. “Whichever way it turns out, I will have done my little share for this democracy.” But a Chinese-language paper noted that Sheng told his sister he also hoped to show South- wood that anti-Chinese discrimination “had to be given up.”17

Southwood refused to give it up. When Sing Sheng told the neighbors gathering to vote that “democracy is in a fight with com- munism and I believe that if I am defeated here it will be a defeat for democracy the world over,” the angry Southwooders shouted him

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18. “Community Opposes Letting Chinese Move In,” South Pasadena Record, Sheng collection; “‘Democracy Vote’ Rejects Chinese,” 18.

19. Douglas Henry Daniels, Pioneer Urbanites: A Social and Cultural History of Black San Francisco (Philadelphia, 1980), 102; Albert S. Broussard, Black San Francisco: The Struggle for Racial Equality in the West, 1900 –1954 (Lawrence, Kans., 1993), 44; Rick Moss, “Not Quite Paradise: The Development of the African American Community in Los Angeles through 1950,” California History, 75 (1996), 229; Lawrence Brooks de Graaf, “Negro Mi- gration to Los Angeles, 1930 to 1950” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1962), 88; Marilynn S. Johnson, The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II (Berkeley, 1993), 55; Brooks, “Ascending California’s Racial Hierarchy,” 39–51. Daniel Widener, “‘Perhaps the Japanese Are to Be Thanked?’ Asia, Asian Ameri- cans, and the Construction of Black California,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, 11 (2003), 145, also discusses “the Afro-Asian city” of Los Angeles.

20. Yuji Ichioka, Issei: The World of the First Generation Japanese Immigrants, 1885–1924 (New York, 1988), 91–145, details the history of Japanese laborers’ involvement in various unions throughout the West. Cletus E. Daniels, Bitter Harvest: A History of Califor- nia Farmworkers, 1871–1941 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1981), 72–74, analyzes the reasons many grow- ers considered the Chinese “docile” workers; most had to do with the workers’ relative powerlessness.

down.18 They had little patience for appeals to their patriotism. For them, the vote was purely local. It allowed them to show Sheng that he was not wanted. Perhaps the poll would encourage him to spread the word to other nonwhite home buyers he might know. Beyond that, they maintained, it had no significance.

* * * Thirty years earlier, they would have been right. As the major

focus of white supremacist activity in California for almost a century, Asian Americans faced greater discrimination in most areas of pre- war California than did other nonwhites, including African Ameri- cans. In the early twentieth century, the California legislature passed numerous laws to prevent Asian immigrants from owning land and entering certain professions. White homeowners in California’s cities used these statutes and the well-developed anti-Asian nativist networks to keep Asian Americans segregated. In prewar San Fran- cisco, African Americans enjoyed significant residential mobility even as Chinese Americans remained segregated in Chinatown.19

But by the late 1930s events overseas had begun to alter white perceptions of Chinese Americans, even in nativist California. In agricultural regions of the state, where growers competed with Jap- anese farmers and fought Japanese and Filipino strikers, many whites mourned the disappearance of the supposedly docile Chi- nese.20 This local nostalgia turned statewide after 1937, when Japan launched its brutal invasion of China proper. The Japanese govern-

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21. William Daugherty, “China’s Official Publicity in the United States,” Public Opin- ion Quarterly, 6 (1942), 72–73; Quincy Wright and Carl J. Nelson, “American Attitudes To- ward Japan and China, 1937–1938,” in ibid., 3 (1939), 48–50; Hadley Cantril, Donald Rugg, and Frederick Williams, “America Faces the War: Shifts in Opinion,” in ibid., 4 (1940), 655.

22. “Rice Bowl: Money by Sheaf and Handful Pours into Chronicle Office,” San Francisco Chronicle, Feb. 9, 1940, p. 7; Yu, To Save China, 82– 83; Arthur Caylor, “Behind the News,” San Francisco News, July 8, 1939, p. 13; Tad Uyeno, “Lancer’s Column,” Rafu Shimpo, Nov. 24, 1940, p. 4.

ment spent millions of dollars to tell its side of the story in the United States, while China’s impoverished government remained largely silent. But as State Department official William Daughtery noted, foreign reporters, missionaries, businesspeople, and other observers “gave to the outside world the shocking account that they had been forced to witness [in China].” In the process, they helped create a great deal of American sympathy for the occupied nation.21

Chinese Americans used concern for China and public disgust with Japan to achieve both charitable and political goals in Califor- nia. With the support of prominent citizens and thousands of white residents, San Francisco’s Chinese Americans held “Rice Bowl” ral- lies to raise money for Chinese refugees. Canny community activists also used growing American sympathy for China to advance a do- mestic agenda. After the passage of the 1937 U.S. Housing Act, the San Francisco Housing Authority ignored Chinese American re- quests for a Chinatown housing project until white civic organiza- tions pressed the Authority to reconsider the idea. And to counter Japanese American dominance of bazaars on Grant Avenue, the main tourist thoroughfare of San Francisco’s Chinatown, Chinese American merchants handed out literature and posted signs overtly comparing their rivals to the invading armies of Imperial Japan.22

America’s entry into World War II transformed China from an admirable underdog into an actual ally, reinforcing the connection many Americans made between Chinese Americans and China. Ironically, prominent California nativists helped strengthen this link by defending on racial grounds the U.S. government’s decision to intern the Japanese American population. Attorney General Earl Warren, who later became California’s governor, summed up the prevailing sentiment. “When we are dealing with the Caucasian race we have methods that will test [their] loyalty,” he claimed. “When we deal with the Japanese we are in an entirely different field and we cannot form any opinion that we believe to be sound.” Chinese

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23. Michi Nishiura Weglyn, Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America’s Concentration Camps (Seattle, 1996), 38; Yong Chen, Chinese San Francisco, 1850 –1943: A Transpacific Community (Stanford, Calif., 2000), 246; “How to Tell Your Friends from the Japs,” Time, Dec. 22, 1941, p. 33.

24. Chen, Chinese San Francisco, 246; Judy Yung, Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chi- nese Women in San Francisco (Berkeley, 1995), 251, 253. Chinese aliens were prohibited from becoming citizens before 1943, and American citizens could not bring Chinese alien wives into the country.

Americans at the time benefited from such racist, if ultimately double-edged, “logic” about Japanese Americans. Many even wore buttons identifying themselves as Chinese to ensure their own safety. Publications such as Time also printed pseudo-scientific articles in- tended to help other Americans tell the difference between Chinese and Japanese. For example, Time maintained that “the Chinese ex- pression tends to be more placid, kindly, open; the Japanese, more positive, dogmatic, arrogant.”23

During the war, Chinese Americans continued to use public as- sumptions about their foreign connections for decidedly domestic purposes. When Madame Chiang Kai-shek visited the United States in early 1943, Chinese Americans urged her to call for a repeal of the old law that barred virtually all Chinese immigration. Congress eventually passed a bill allowing token Chinese immigration and let- ting Chinese aliens become naturalized citizens; they could also bring their Chinese spouses and children into the country. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed it out of consideration for America’s ally China, but Chinese Americans were the bill’s main beneficiaries. Similarly, the federal government did not attempt to segregate Chi- nese Americans who enlisted in the armed forces; unlike African Americans and Japanese Americans, they served in white units.24

White citizens also singled out Chinese Americans for fairer treatment. During World War II, government officials and many civic leaders in California called for greater racial tolerance and formed local organizations to promote interracial harmony. The federal Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) also pressed companies to hire nonwhites and responded to workers’ discrimi- nation complaints. But even without such encouragement, employ- ers who had long shunned Chinese Americans turned to them first when the draft and the new war industries created a serious labor shortage in California. Chinese American communities responded enthusiastically; in 1943 San Francisco’s Chinese American leaders estimated that a third of Chinatown’s 20,000 residents worked in de-

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25. Dolly Rhee, “Chinese Home Front,” San Francisco Chronicle, Dec. 24, 1942, p. 6; Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 373 –374; Johnson, The Second Gold Rush, 63; Davis McEntire, Residence and Race: Final and Comprehensive Report to the Commission on Race and Housing (Berkeley, 1960), 46.

26. Marie Carey, “Chinese Girl to Christen Next Ship,” San Francisco Chronicle, Dec. 3, 1942, p. 10 (emphasis added); “Authority Starts Postwar Slum-Clearance Pro- gram,” San Francisco Housing Authority News, 2 (Aug.–Sept. 1945), 3; Grace Simons, “56th Street Whites Fight Chinese, Too,” Los Angeles Sentinel, May 30, 1946, p. 2.

fense industries. And Chinese Americans often found the kinds of skilled jobs that employers did not offer other nonwhite workers, es- pecially the thousands of African Americans migrating to Califor- nia’s cities. Despite severe wartime housing shortages and increased black segregation in California, Chinese Americans even began to find homes in all-white middle-class neighborhoods.25

By war’s end, Chinese Americans were enjoying more rights than ever before, but these rights often depended on perceptions of Chinese Americans as foreign. In numerous cases, they received better treatment because white Americans identified them as allies rather than as fellow citizens. At the Mare Island shipyards, supervi- sors chose one of the Chinese American workers to christen a ship. “China has done such a good job of keeping the Japanese on the move,” explained the employee who suggested the idea. “It would be a good way for our people to show their appreciation and reaffirm their faith in China.” Discussing the planned “Ping Yuen” housing project in Chinatown, San Francisco Housing Authority representa- tives promised that architects would “orientalize and embellish the exterior of the apartments [because] ‘Ping Yuen’ must be truly rep- resentative of our Chinese war ally.” When describing a Chinese American veteran who faced housing discrimination in southern Los Angeles, the black-owned Los Angeles Sentinel argued that “the Chinese were our noble allies during the war [but] the so-called white Americans who live [on West 56th Street] . . . don’t share these feelings.” The “noble ally” at the center of the controversy had been born and raised in the United States.26

Like these predecessors, numerous observers commented on Southwood as if it were as much a foreign policy issue as a matter of civil rights. A Life magazine editorial argued that, after South- wood, “in Asia they will . . . be asking whether American democ- racy is still worth betting on.” Former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt noted that “all those things do us harm. The Soviets circulate them

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27. “The Shengs and Democracy,” Life, March 3, 1952, p. 19; “Mrs. FDR Here, Says Truman News Isn’t Surprising,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 30, 1952, p. 7. See also Ellen Watamull to editor, in ibid., Feb. 19, 1952, p. 16; “A Dream Destroyed,” Pittsburgh Post- Gazette, Feb. 20, 1952, Sheng Collection; “Offers of Welcome Received by Excluded Chi- nese Family,” Milwaukee Journal, in ibid.; Mario J. Canabba (Grand Rapids, Mich.), to edi- tor, San Francisco Examiner, Feb. 23, 1952, p. 12.; Joan W. Snell (Rochester, Minn.), to Sing and Grace Sheng, March 3, 1952, Sheng Collection.; John Kenneth Hyatt, Jr. (Annapolis, Md.), to editor, Time, March 10, 1952, p. 8; R. M. Barnard (Seattle), to editor, San Fran- cisco Chronicle, Feb. 21, 1952, p. 13. The Sheng family received about 400 letters from sup- porters in California and across the United States.

28. “Southwood to the World,” San Francisco Chronicle, Feb. 19, 1952, p. 16; “Another Disservice Is Rendered to Democracy,” Sacramento Bee, Feb. 20, 1952, p. 42; Raymond Law- rence, “At Home and Abroad—The Vindication of Sing Sheng,” Oakland Tribune, Feb. 20, 1952, p. 60. For examples of pro-Asian American articles in the San Francisco Chronicle, see “Intermarriage of Chinese Is Still Banned,” San Francisco Chronicle, Jan. 22, 1944, p. 7; “Cit- izens’ Return,” in ibid., Dec. 14, 1944, p. 12; Tedd Thomey, “The Guerreros Only Want to Make S.F. Landlords Understand—That They, Too, Are Americans,” in ibid., June 23, 1943, p. 11.

widely [in Asia].” Across the nation, lesser-known Americans re- acted similarly.27

* * * In a sign of just how much public opinion had changed in a few

years, white Californians were louder than anyone in their criticism of the Southwood residents and the message they had supposedly sent to Asia. The morning after the vote, the San Francisco Chronicle editorialized that “Southwood has undone the long and tedious work of the Voice of America, of Radio Free Asia, and even of Amer- ican men who have been fighting in Korea.” The Chronicle had long supported Asian American rights, but even the once virulently anti- Asian Sacramento Bee asserted that the Southwood vote “will be re- ceived gleefully in Moscow and exploited for all it’s worth wherever the army of Red agents are seeking to arouse distrust, engender sus- picion, and create hate for the United States.” Similarly, columnist Raymond Lawrence of the Oakland Tribune contended that “no in- cident I can think of provides the reds in Asia more powerful am- munition than the Sing Sheng case.”28

California officials across the political spectrum agreed. Twain Michelsen, a San Francisco superior court judge, complained that the Southwooders’ vote “will, of course, be taken up and played upon by the evil forces that reside behind the Iron Curtain.” Sena- tor William Knowland believed that Southwood “will undoubtedly be put to the worst possible use by communist propaganda in Asia.”

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29. Twain Michelsen to Emmons McClurg, Feb. 17, 1952, Sheng Collection; “State’s Leaders Deplore Ban on Chinese Family,” Oakland Tribune, Feb. 20, 1952; Gov. Earl War- ren to Sing Sheng, Feb. 18, 1952, Sheng Collection.

30. Aside from those cited above, newer studies that examine the impact of black migration on Northern California include Shirley Ann Wilson Moore, To Place Our Deeds: The African American Community in Richmond, California, 1910–1963 (Berkeley, 2000); Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo, Abiding Courage: African American Migrant Women and the East Bay Community (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996); and Robert Owen Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, N.J., 2003). Fewer studies of Los An- geles and the black migration have been published in the past two decades, but Scott Kurashige, “Transforming Los Angeles: Black and Japanese American Struggles for Racial Equality in the Twentieth Century” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Los An- geles, 2000) deals with this period, as do Josh Sides, L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present (Berkeley, 2003), and Kevin Allen Leonard, “Years of Hope, Days of Fear: The Impact of World War II on Race Relations in Los An- geles” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Davis, 1992). An older source that deals specifically with the wartime migration is Keith Edison Collins, “Black Los Angeles: The Maturing of the Ghetto, 1940–1950” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, San Diego, 1975).

Governor Earl Warren personally apologized to the Shengs for the Southwood residents’ vote. “I agree with you that it is just such things that the Communists make much of in their efforts to dis- credit our system,” he noted. 29

If large numbers of white Californians sympathized with the Shengs, however, they were reacting not just to foreign policy con- cerns but also to broader racial shifts in the state. Until the 1940s Asian Americans had outnumbered blacks in most of California’s ur- ban areas. During the war, however, hundreds of thousands of Afri- can Americans came to California to work in its booming industries, and most stayed on after the conflict. Indeed, the mass migration of blacks into the state’s urban areas continued into the 1950s.30 With white Californians now considering African Americans the principal threat to their homes and neighborhoods, black-white tensions over housing soon became as common in Los Angeles and the San Fran- cisco Bay Area as they were in cities east of the Mississippi River. At the same time, white homeowners in California proved increasingly open to arguments about Asian American desirability.

The November 1946 election, in which voters considered two explicitly racial initiatives, suggested the shift taking place. One ini- tiative, Proposition 15, sought to make anti-Japanese American Alien Land Acts part of the California constitution. Prop. 15’s advo- cates used explicitly nativist arguments in an attempt to whip up the

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31. State of California, Nov. 1946 ballot. For more discussion of this period, see Kevin Allen Leonard, “‘Is That What We Fought For?’ Japanese Americans and Racism in California: The Impact of World War II,” Western Historical Quarterly, 21 (1990), 463 – 482, and Daniel Widener, “‘Perhaps the Japanese Are to Be Thanked?’” 167.

32. Nash, The American West Transformed, 94 –106; Friday, “‘In Due Time,’” 132; “Fact-Sheet #1: America Plus,” Jan. 21, 1952, pp. 1– 4, “Housing” file, carton 1, California Federation for Civic Unity Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (hereafter Civic Unity Papers); Earl C. Behrens, “‘America Plus’ Urges Haste on Peti- tions,” San Francisco Chronicle, Dec. 10, 1951, p. 1.

old anti-Japanese American hatred in California. The other race- based measure on the ballot was Proposition 11. Widely associated with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the initiative sought to create a permanent FEPC in California. Voters overwhelmingly rejected Proposition 11, but they also failed to endorse the anti-Japanese American Proposi- tion 15. The vote showed that the heroism of the all-Japanese Amer- ican 442nd battalion, the most decorated unit of its size during World War II, had created enough fair play sentiment in California to defeat the state’s traditional nativism. But it also suggested that, while Californians refused to sanction blatantly discriminatory laws aimed at a particular group, they also refused to support positive legislation that limited white “choice.”31

By 1951 a group calling itself “America Plus” formed to take ad- vantage of white Californians’ concerns about black ambitions in the state. America Plus’s primary organizer, a virulent anti-Semite named Aldrich Blake, claimed that African Americans could not reach “the high peak of equality with the whites.” But the group’s platform glossed over Blake’s racial views. Instead, America Plus lit- erature referred to “democratic liberties and property rights,” which the group equated with restrictive covenants and the repeal of civil rights legislation. And in December 1951 America Plus announced plans to gather signatures to place a “Freedom of Choice” initiative on the November 1952 California ballot. The initiative would have invalidated the state’s existing civil rights laws and guaranteed every citizen the right to discriminate against anyone else in employment, housing, and other areas.32

Civil rights groups worried that America Plus could win in Cali- fornia by fusing the ongoing red scare with issues such as “choice” and property values. Conservative politicians had already red-baited many of the racially progressive organizations active in wartime and

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33. Josh Sides, “‘You Understand My Condition’: The Civil Rights Congress in the Los Angeles African-American Community, 1946 –1952,” Pacific Historical Review, 67 (1998), 251–257. Edward L. Barrett, The Tenney Committee: Legislative Investigation of Sub- versive Activities in California (Ithaca, N.Y., 1951), offers a critical examination of Jack Ten- ney’s record.

34. Franklin H. Williams to Walter White, Roy Wilkins, Thurgood Marshall, Gloster Currant, Henry Lee Moon, and Clarence Mitchell, Dec. 31, 1951, “American [sic] Plus, 1951–1953” file, carton 43, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People- West Coast Branch Papers, Bancroft Library (hereafter NAACP-WC Papers). “Memo to Edward Howden,” March 21, 1952, ibid.; “Gongmin tuanjie hui huabu quanjuan shu” [“Civic Unity Council Chinatown letter urges donations”], Taiping Yang Zhoubao (Chi- nese-Pacific Weekly, San Francisco), March 1, 1952, p. 26.

postwar California. In addition, America Plus had secured the back- ing of State Senator Jack Tenney, a headline-craving white suprema- cist who was also the former leader of the State Committee on Un-American Activities.33 Franklin H. Williams of the West Coast NAACP asserted that “Freedom of Choice” could “undo every civil rights advantage that has been gained over the last 50 years . . . and just about completely destroy any hope of further civil rights ad- vances for many years to come.” Other organizations, including the Japanese American Citizens’ League ( JACL), the American Jewish Council, and the California Federation for Civic Unity, scrambled to raise money for an anti-America Plus campaign.34

In this context, the Southwood vote, which three decades ear- lier would have attracted little attention, became a de facto test of the popularity of “Freedom of Choice” in communist-fearing 1950s California. Indeed, what had begun as a rather common incident of housing segregation had quickly grown into something much larger. Within days of the referendum, the key issue was no longer whether Sing Sheng and his wife would move to the suburbs, but the meaning of democracy itself.

Echoing America Plus’s rhetoric about freedom of association and choice, Southwood’s defenders claimed that democracy equaled the right to select one’s own friends and neighbors. Jack Stockton, who lived on the street where the Shengs hoped to move, argued that “I, as an American, like to live with my own race of people.” According to William Grapengeter, Jr., another resident, “now that the world is criticizing Southwood for this election, I have come to feel that the world is trying to take away my vote and my right to say what I think.” Tenney, who praised Sing Sheng for sub- mitting the issue to a vote, felt similarly: “If people don’t have the

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35. Bernard Taper, “South S.F. City Council Deplores Exclusion Vote,” San Francisco Chronicle, Feb. 19. 1952, p. 1, and Taper, “New Action on ‘Test of Democracy,’” Feb. 22, 1952, Sheng Collection; “Council Disavows Ban on Chinese,” Oakland Tribune, Feb. 19, 1952, p. 1.

36. “Southwood is Exclusive—But Sing Sheng Haunts It,” San Francisco Chronicle, Feb. 25, 1952, Sheng Collection; “Southwood Residents Strike Back at Critics,” San Fran- cisco Examiner, Feb. 22, 1952, p. 3; “Homeowners Reaffirm Stand Against Sheng,” ibid., Feb. 24, 1952, p. 3.

right to vote on their neighbors, they don’t have the right to vote on their president,” he claimed.35

In a nation where residential segregation was pervasive—in- deed, where it was often official policy—the 178 families who had voted against Sing Sheng were surprised to find that they had few defenders. “Aren’t there other neighborhoods where Chinese, Ne- groes, and minorities are excluded?” a Southwood neighbor asked during a meeting convened several days after the vote. “Of course there are,” replied another. “Only nobody ever hears about it . . . it all happens very quietly.” San Francisco Chronicle reporter Bernard Taper observed that if the Southwooders could ask the nation one question, it would be: “How would you have voted if you had been in our position?” As Southwood resident Felix Surmont contended, “the true hypocrites and bigots [are] these smug people who have persecuted us from behind the flag or the church with bold and gra- tuitous statements while living in their own restricted homes.” Other residents agreed, and those attending the post-referendum meeting reaffirmed their original anti-Sheng stand.36

To bolster their arguments, Southwood residents used the kind of property values language they felt many other white Americans would understand. After all, white housing professionals had long insisted that nonwhites hurt prices, and realtors, bankers, and in- surance agents continued to claim this after the Shelley decision. So Southwood resident and spokesman Clinton Kenney asserted that “when one oriental or any one of a minority group comes into an area others follow. The property value then drops correspondingly.” The Southwooders even blamed their property value concerns and their votes not on personal prejudice, but on the sentiments of other white people. According to Kenney, the Shengs’ arrival would have left Southwood families with homes “materially depreciated through no fault of [our] own but through the racial prejudices of others.” Only after the furor over Southwood died down did neigh-

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37. “Southwood Residents Strike Back at Critics,” 3; Luigi Laurenti, Property Values and Race: Studies in Seven Cities (Berkeley, 1961), 18; “Community Opposes Letting Chi- nese Move In,” Sheng Collection; Robert Lee, “Community Exclusion: A Case Study,” Phy- lon, 15 (1954), 205.

38. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis, 216 –217; Becky M. Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920 –1965 (Chicago, 2002), 5.

bors confess their real feelings about the Shengs. A group of sociol- ogy students taking a survey in the area heard a common refrain:

Sheng would be paving the way for his own countrymen and for Negroes. Our children don’t know the difference and might marry one of them someday . . . . Chinamen can live on ten cents a day . . . . [T]hey would move three families into one house in order to finance it . . . . [T]hey don’t live as we do. No Chinamen have money, except the gamblers.

Apparently, many white Southwood neighbors shared the very prej- udices they disavowed.37

If the Southwooders’ property “values” involved much more than money, the tract’s residents were hardly alone. Like the South- wood neighbors, white segregationists across America considered home ownership symbolic not just of their financial stability, but of their morality, character, and social status. In his study of postwar Detroit, historian Thomas Sugrue describes this world view:

To white Detroiters, the wretched conditions in Paradise Valley and other poor African American neighborhoods were the fault of irresponsible blacks, not greedy landlords or neglectful city officials . . . .Many Detroit whites interpreted [these] poor housing conditions as a sign of personal failure and family breakdown.

In other words, the “values”— or lack of them—that many white De- troit residents ascribed to blacks contrasted markedly with the val- ues they saw themselves embodying. Similarly, as Becky Nicolaides has shown, postwar white working-class homeowners in Los Angeles County simultaneously “embraced self-reliance, independence, Americanism, familism, and racial separation.” The first four ideals depended to a significant extent on the fifth. White homeowners like the Southwooders feared that racial mixing—with interracial marriage the inevitable endpoint—threatened the rest. It certainly threatened their ability to claim these values as racially unique.38

By using arguments about property “values” against a Chinese

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39. Gayle B. Montgomery and James W. Johnson, One Step from the White House: The Rise and Fall of Senator William F. Knowland (Berkeley, 1998), 89; Raymond A. Mohl, “Shift- ing Patterns of American Urban Policy Since 1900,” in Hirsch and Mohl, eds., Urban Pol- icy in Twentieth-Century America, 15–17. As Andrew Rotter has shown, Asia eclipsed Africa in the minds of American policymakers not just because the latter was largely under Eu- ropean rule in the 1950s but also because the success of the communist revolution in China drew U.S. officials’ attention to the other underdeveloped nations in Asia. Rotter, The Path to Vietnam, 31.

40. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War, 71; May, Homeward Bound, 17–18.

American family, however, the Southwooders stumbled into a Cold War trap. President Harry S Truman had sent American troops to Korea, and many Republican politicians were now demanding that the United States protect Taiwan as well. In 1952 much of the black population of the South could not vote; in the North, many local of- ficials and community leaders fought residential integration. Yet at the same time, American policymakers were sacrificing white American lives for Asian freedom and democracy. This was a strong statement. If Asians did not share the very American “values”— independence, individualism, and self-reliance—that white Ameri- cans so often refused to see in blacks, then this sacrifice was point- less. Even American foreign policy priorities emphasized this dis- tinction: The U.S. government actively intervened in Asia but largely ignored Africa.39

Furthermore, many Americans identified the suburban good life as part of what soldiers were fighting and dying to defend in Asia. The Cold War was not just a competition between the U.S. and Soviet governments but between two kinds of economies—com- mand and capitalist. As historian Stephen Whitfield has shown, “do- mestic patterns of consumption [became] a manifestation of Amer- ican supremacy” in the minds of many citizens. No one expressed this view better than Vice President Richard Nixon. During Nixon’s 1959 “kitchen debate” with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, the vice president “insisted that American superiority in the cold war rested not on weapons, but on the secure, abundant family life of modern suburban homes.” By barring the Shengs from sharing this kind of life, the Southwooders were mocking the sacrifices Ameri- can troops were making in Korea.40

The Sheng supporters’ constant references to the family’s ori- gins reinforced this idea of shared values. Southwood critics fre- quently linked the family directly to the Chinese Nationalist struggle against communism. “The Chinese people have many many friends

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41. Harold Mansfield to Sing and Grace Sheng, Feb. 17, 1952, Sheng Collection; “Pulse of the Public: Southwood’s Treatment of Sing [sic] Family Brings Many Bitter Protests,” San Francisco News, Feb. 20, 1952, ibid.; “The Sheng Case,” People’s Daily World, Feb. 21, 1952, p. 3.

42. “Southwood Is Exclusive,” 1; “The Shengs and Democracy,” 19; “Democracy in Southwood,” 27; Louise R. Hewlett to editor, Life, March 10, 1952, p. 12; Bob Sturia, “So. S.F. ‘Apologizes’ to Voted-Out Chinese,” San Francisco News, Feb. 19, 1952, Sheng Collec- tion; Max G. Funke to Joan W. Snell, March 7, 1952, in ibid.

in America who value their qualities and appreciate their aid during World War Two and who want to see them again freed from domi- nation,” wrote Harold Mansfield of Seattle’s China Club in an open telegram to the Shengs. Columnist Karl Bennet Justus argued that the Shengs “believe in our democratic way of life . . . .[Sing Sheng] is still an ally of ours in the struggle against communism.” The com- munist newspaper People’s Daily World cracked that “one might think the Sheng case is a semi-military exercise in the cold war rather than a problem of discrimination in California.”41

Indeed, citizens, journalists, and officials branded the unre- pentant Southwood residents inadvertent communist collaborators. A local journalist reported that “so acute had the situation become in the schools that South San Francisco’s school superintendent [told students to] ‘lay off the Southwood kids.’” When national mag- azines and the press misidentified South San Francisco as “south San Francisco” or simply “San Francisco,” the San Francisco Board of Su- pervisors considered a citizen’s request to demand that South San Francisco change its name. Meanwhile, mayoral secretary Max G. Funke assured angry but misinformed correspondents that “the in- cident to which you refer occurred in South San Francisco [which] is not even in our county.”42

Now shouted down themselves, the Southwooders protested that they were not traitors. Perhaps, some ventured, Sing Sheng was a communist sent to provoke an incident. Mrs. William Beam, a tract resident, warned that “these people who are calling us names [should] look a little deeper and find the true culprits who are behind all this.” Other neighbors recognized Sheng’s impeccable anti-communist credentials and his popularity with the public; they suggested that communist agents had manipulated both the South- wood voters and the Shengs to stir up trouble. “It seems to us,” com- mented one, “that Mr. Sing [sic] as well as we ourselves have been used as unwitting tools by subversive elements who want to create

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43. Anonymous Southwood resident to editor, San Francisco Examiner, Feb. 25, 1952, ibid.; “Southwood Residents Strike Back at Critics.”

44. Brooks, “Ascending California’s Racial Hierarchy,” 311–313, 347–348; “Warren Hits Decision,” San Francisco Examiner, Feb. 20, 1952, p. 3.

45. “Victims of Propaganda,” California Eagle, Feb. 28, 1952, p. 5.

dissension in America.” But Southwood had already lost the battle for public opinion.43

* * * Ironically, only those who had experienced residential discrim-

ination firsthand supported the Southwooders’ contention that the vote was simply about racial prejudice in the United States. Few Af- rican American activists in California regarded Southwood with any interest. The obstacles blacks encountered in gaining access to de- cent housing throughout the state dwarfed what the Shengs had ex- perienced in South San Francisco. Most California public housing projects segregated African Americans, and, in the years after World War II, blacks seeking homes in the state faced not just Southwood- style threats but actual violence and arson. The Rev. Frederick D. Haynes, a San Francisco civil rights leader, called for an official in- vestigation of what he termed “the campaign to intimidate citizens of South San Francisco” into rejecting the Shengs. But Haynes was an exception among African American activists. Even the local NAACP paid little attention to the Southwood incident and offered no official comment.44

The black press reacted similarly. While the New York Times fol- lowed Southwood for a week, the Los Angeles Sentinel, one of Califor- nia’s leading black newspapers, ignored the incident altogether. The black-owned California Eagle used what little space it devoted to Southwood to argue that the tract’s residents merely represented the white mainstream. In an editorial, the Eagle noted that:

We suspect that most of the people who voted for a lily white neighborhood are just average, everyday Americans who could be counted on to come to the aid of a distressed friend and who are good friends and good citizens. We don’t think they are Fascists or Klansmen. They are just badly informed.

The Eagle, which carried stories of violence against the state’s black homeowners almost weekly, reserved its criticism for Sing Sheng. Since he had the right to live in Southwood, concluded the Eagle, he should have exercised it.45

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46. William Byron Rumford interview by Joyce A. Henderson, Amelia Fry, and Edward France, 1970–1971, Earl Warren Oral History Program (files online, Berkeley, accessed Oct. 1, 2002), http://sunsite.berkeley.edu:2020/dynaweb/teiproj/oh/black alum/rumford/.

Many African American organizations and activists ignored Southwood for the same reasons that Tenney and his allies cheered the vote results. America Plus saw Southwood’s informal referen- dum as a harbinger of November. If the group managed to get “Freedom of Choice” on the ballot, members believed that whites throughout California would act as the Southwooders had. For their part, black activists pointedly avoided using California’s referendum system for the same reason. William Byron Rumford, a prominent African American activist who served in the state legislature and later in Congress, recalled that many black politicians had actually opposed putting the FEPC on the ballot in 1946. “Any time you put any rights issue on the ballot, it’s going to be defeated,” he argued.46

For many black Californians, Southwood seemed to foreshadow what would occur if “Freedom of Choice” became a ballot initiative. Sing Sheng, however well-intentioned, had actually imperiled all nonwhite residents; rights existed for the protection of minorities and not at the pleasure of majorities, but his vote proposal sug- gested otherwise.

If blacks remained largely silent about Southwood, Asian Americans worried for weeks about an incident many felt affected all of them, regardless of ethnicity. Chinese Americans were partic- ularly concerned. Since the late 1940s, Chinese American leaders had been working to change public perceptions of their commu- nity’s relationship with China. The Chinese Press counseled Chinese Americans to turn away from Chinatowns altogether. “Work and live among other Americans,” urged its editors. “They too will know you as Americans.” Chinese American Citizens Alliance president Y. C. Hong asserted that “many of us are third or fourth generation Americans [and] owe allegiance only to the Government of the United States.” The Chinese News featured a photo of a veterans’ color guard marching in a Chinese New Year parade, commenting that it was a “symbol of the new Chinatown which is all-American in heart and deeds.” By the mid-1950s even the conservative Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association was developing what mem- bers called “a continuing program of public relations for the . . .

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47. Zia, Asian American Dreams, 45; Chun, Of Orphans and Warriors, 76 –77; “The People Say . . . ,” Chinese Press, May 4, 1951, p. 1; Y. C. Hong, “A New Year’s Message to Chi- nese-Americans,” in ibid., Jan. 5, 1951, p. 1; Chinese News, Feb. 27, 1954, p. 2; Howard Free- man to Joseph A. Quan, June 11, 1956, p. 1, file 30, carton 3, Charles Leong Papers, Eth- nic Studies Library, University of California, Berkeley (hereafter Leong Papers).

48. See, for example, Laurenti, Property Values and Race, 18; Catherine Bauer Wurster, Housing and the Future of Cities in the San Francisco Bay Area (Berkeley, 1963), 13; Wilson Record, Minority Groups and Intergroup Relations in the San Francisco Bay Area (Berkeley, 1963), 13 –14; “The Sheng Story: Scientific Study Shows Property Loses No Value When Races Mix,” San Francisco Chronicle, Feb. 21, 1951, p. 4; Davis McEntire, “A Study of Racial Attitudes in Neighborhoods Infiltrated by Nonwhites: San Francisco, Oak-

Chinese community in the United States” to highlight that commu- nity’s loyalty and Americanness.47

Japanese Americans also paid close attention to the reactions the Southwood vote generated. Seven years after World War II, much of the white public had resumed referring to people of Asian ancestry as “Orientals,” regardless of ethnicity. Southwood residents knew that Sing Sheng was Chinese American; after all, he used his own life story to argue for tolerance in the tract. But such familiar- ity was not necessarily common in postwar California. White resi- dents and scholars usually spoke of integration involving “Orien- tals,” not “Chinese” or “Japanese.” Pondering Southwood, the New York Times wondered whether it was “indicative of a marked re- surgence of anti-Oriental feeling on the West Coast”—not anti- Chinese sentiment during the Korean War. Scholar Yen Le Espiritu has argued that Asian American community activists did not em- brace “panethnicity” until the mid-1960s. But Asian American lead- ers of the early 1950s certainly understood how the public perceived them. In 1953 Chinese News editor Charles Leong wrote to Japanese American journalist Harry Honda about “the Nisei group whose problems are more parallel to ours than any other racial group.” When the Japanese American magazine Scene discussed racial segre- gation, its articles often described the prejudices that Americans of “Oriental” or “Asiatic” descent faced. The Japanese American Citi- zens League newspaper Pacific Citizen occasionally referred to Chi- nese Americans as “Chinese Nisei.” By 1954 the Chinese News was praising the success of Korean American diving champion Sammy Lee as beneficial to “all Oriental minorities” in America. And some of the most detailed accounts and lengthy editorials about South- wood appeared in the Japanese American press, whose reporters understood the importance of the Sheng story to their readers.48

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land, and Berkeley” (1955), pp. 127–129, “Bay Area Real Estate Reporter” file, carton 43, NAACP-WC Papers; Lawrence E. Davies, “Case of the Sing Shengs Has Aroused West Coast,” New York Times, Feb. 24, 1952, Sheng Collection; Yen Le Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities (Philadelphia, 1994), 20–32; Charles Leong to Harry Honda, March 3, 1953, file 31, carton 3, Leong Papers. See also “Our Achilles Heel,” Scene, Oct. 1950, p. 26; editorial in ibid., July 1950, p. 26; “Anonymous Letter Ob- jects to Chinese Nisei Home Plans,” Pacific Citizen, July 24, 1953, p. 4; “New-Style Ambas- sadors,” Chinese News, April 10, 1954, p. 10; and “Chinese-Japanese Legion Auxiliary Formed in Denver,” in ibid., March 25, 1949, p. 1. Star Chinese American and Japanese American basketball teams also played an annual “Oriental championship” game during the 1950s.

49. Him Mark Lai, “The Chinese Press in the United States and Canada Since World War II: A Diversity of Voices,” Chinese America: History and Perspectives, 9 (1990), 111; “The Sing Shengs and Democracy,” Pacific Citizen, Feb. 23, 1952, p. 4; Jing Nan, “Suibi” (Essay), Taiping Yang Zhoubao, Feb. 23, 1952, p. 17; “Sheng an zhuanhao: lun zhongzu pianjian” [“Special Sheng case focus: a discussion of racial prejudice”], Shaonian Zhongguo Nongbao [Young China, San Francisco], Feb. 21, 1952, p. 3.

Japanese American and Chinese American journalists almost unanimously described the Southwood vote as a terrible idea. The Pacific Citizen warned about “the danger in establishing a precedent in a neighborhood vote to accept or reject a minority group.” The liberal Chinese-language Chinese-Pacific Weekly agreed. “[Our] fun- damental rights very much rely on freedom of residence,” noted ed- itor Gilbert Woo. “The Constitution bestows this right. It should not be given to other people to vote on and decide.” The conservative Nationalist Party organ Young China praised the Shengs but editori- alized that, “if we take a firm stand on morality and the law, we need not adopt a negative attitude of ‘meek acceptance,’ nor the negative attitude, ‘despite our numbers, we will let such things pass.’” Like their African American counterparts, these Asian American ob- servers sensed that Southwood’s real danger lay as much in the les- son it sent about rights to white America as in the one it sent about democracy to the world.49

Individual Asian Americans residents of the Bay Area also avoided making Southwood into an international incident. Churchill T. Chiu of San Francisco thanked the Shengs for making “a very good case for all of us who are of Chinese ancestry” but added that “for the next step, I would suggest you select a nice home at about the same price in another district of South San Francisco, and demonstrate to them that we can get along with our neighbors.” Al- fred B. Chan of San Francisco confessed that “I don’t think I will ever be able to understand [freedom and democracy] if this is part of the American way of life.” Lim P. Lee, a prominent Democrat who would

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50. Churchill T. Chiu to Editor, San Francisco Examiner, Feb. 25, 1952, Sheng Col- lection; Alfred B. Chan to editor, San Francisco Chronicle, Feb. 20. 1952; Lim P. Lee to ed- itor, ibid., Feb. 20, 1952.

51. “Chinese Welcomed to California Home,” New York Times, March 13, 1952, p. 3; “24 Against Nisei As Neighbor,” San Jose Mercury, Oct. 9, 1952, p. 1; “Neighbors Welcome Yoshihara,” ibid., Oct. 10, 1952, pp. 1– 4.

later become San Francisco’s first Chinese American postmaster, briefly acknowledged that Southwood could embarrass the United States in front of the world. But he noted that federal agencies bore the blame for sanctioning all-white communities in the first place. Lim Lee contended:

A benevolent government that makes it easy for the veterans and citizens to own their own homes through liberal provisions of underwriting by the VA [Veterans’ Administration], FHA [Federal Housing Adminitration] or Cali- fornia Vet. program, makes possible . . . ‘restricted residential districts.’ Our government should not be used to perpetuate a legal wrong.50

* * * If Asian American journalists and citizens worried about the

precedent Southwood might set, so did many white Californians, al- beit for different reasons. No town wanted to be the next South- wood. In March 1952 a Chinese American named Freddie Wing who had bought a home in an all-white neighborhood of Sonoma sent out 200 invitations to his housewarming party. According to the New York Times—which rarely covered Sonoma housewarmings—every- one Wing invited came, including the town’s mayor, the heads of both its banks, and the widow of famed wartime general Henry “Hap” Arnold. In October of that year, twenty-four residents of a San Jose neighborhood signed a petition objecting to a Japanese American family, the Yoshiharas, who had just bought a home there. Sam Yoshihara, a disabled World War II veteran, confessed to the San Jose Mercury that he worried about moving to such a hostile place. But when Yoshihara supporters announced that, “in these days when Democracy is under attack all over the world, such action as was taken against Sam Yoshihara is to be deplored,” the residents relented. They claimed that the first petition had been a “misun- derstanding” and quickly signed a second one welcoming the Yoshi- haras to the neighborhood.51

Long after Southwood, the Cold War continued to inform the way the press and much of the public viewed publicized incidents of housing discrimination against Asian Americans. During the South-

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52. “Sheng An de Zhongzhong” [“Straight talk on the Sheng case”], Taiping Yang Zhoubao, Feb. 23, 1952, p. 3; “Anonymous Letter,” Pacific Citizen, p. 4; “Anti-Chinese Atti- tude Not Popular Here,” Daily Palo Alto Times, June 28, 1954, p. 6; “Japanese Dentist Gets Dozens of Home Offers,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 19, 1955, pp. 1–13. The anony- mous caller who threatened Earl LaCount warned him against selling to “orientals.”

wood furor, the Chinese-Pacific Weekly predicted that, “after the up- roar is over, this new and unusual flavor will be gone. This rice can’t be stir-fried again.” But apparently it could. In 1953 a Chinese American couple building a home in a Watsonville subdivision received a threatening letter and forwarded it to the local paper. “Watsonville citizens will perhaps come to the same conclusion that citizens of South San Francisco did,” argued the Watsonville Register- Pajaronian. “It takes only a few crackpots to give a community a black eye [and] to do immeasurable damage to the cause of the United States.” When Palo Alto realtors backed out of a 1954 home deal with Dr. William Lee, a Stanford University research chemist, scores of people called the Lees to apologize and to offer them homes for sale. The following year Earl LaCount received a death threat when he sold his San Leandro home to Japanese American dentist Satoru Larry Aikawa. A veteran who canvassed the neighborhood to gather support for the Aikawas complained that such incidents squandered the “millions of dollars [America spends] all over the world to com- bat Communist propaganda.” Meanwhile, the Southern Alameda County Real Estate Board publicly denied encouraging such dis- crimination, while the Aikawas received dozens of home offers.52

The case of Sammy Lee overshadowed all these incidents, how- ever. A two-time Olympic gold medalist, Lee was also an Army ma- jor and doctor who had traveled across Asia promoting democracy for the State Department. In 1955 Lee made plans to leave the Army and set up a private practice in Orange County, California. But agents at two tracts in the county’s Garden Grove suburb refused to sell a home to his family. Friends of the Lees eventually leaked the story to the San Francisco Chronicle, which helped make it front-page news across the state. In its editorials, the Chronicle used language that could have come directly from its Southwood articles. “Here was an American of Oriental descent demonstrating to Asians that despite Communist propaganda the United States is a land of toler- ance and opportunity,” scolded the Chronicle. “The story of Major Lee’s reception in Garden Grove will embarrass our country in the

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53. “Not a Story to Hide,” San Francisco Chronicle, Aug. 19, 1955, p. 1; Michael Harris, “Diving Champ Gets Bias-Case Support,” in ibid., Aug. 20, 1955, p. 1, and “Nixon Shocked by Bias Against Dr. Sammy Lee,” in ibid., Aug. 21, 1955, pp. 1– 4; Robert Bland, “Report on Garden Grove,” circa 1957, pp. 1–3, file 6, box 30, American Civil Liberties Union- Southern California papers, Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles.

54. The situation of Mexican Americans, particularly in Southern California, was complex and involved factors such as skin color, income, and neighborhood. For this rea- son, I have not attempted to deal at length here with Mexican American housing issues.

eyes of the world.” Both tracts’ developers quickly announced their willingness to sell a home to the Lees, and the couple received scores of other home offers as well. Equally significant, the FHA’s lo- cal office stepped in to investigate the matter. Governor Goodwin Knight urged Garden Grove to “uphold the finest traditions of Americanism and freedom.” Even Vice President Nixon, a Califor- nia native, became involved, telling reporters he was “shocked” at the treatment the Lees had received. “I reflect the majority of my state when I say that I would be proud to have Sammy Lee as my neighbor,” said Nixon. The Lees eventually bought a home in an all- white neighborhood of nearby Anaheim.53

Numerous white Californians still saw Asian Americans as for- eigners, but with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan now allies, and the rest of Asia seemingly up for grabs, the signifi- cance of being “foreign” had changed since the early twentieth cen- tury. “Foreignness” set Asian Americans apart from African Ameri- cans, Mexican Americans, and other nonwhite Californians.54 This supposed foreignness, together with American foreign policy, changed the meaning and acceptability of discrimination against Asian Americans. In 1942 thousands of white Americans believed that all Japanese Americans were Japanese spies or saboteurs because of their ancestry and wholeheartedly supported their internment. By the 1950s thousands of white Americans believed—indeed, given the casualties of the Korean War, they had to believe—that Sing Sheng, the Yoshiharas, the Aikawas, Sammy Lee, and many other Asian Americans deserved a place among white Americans because of their shared values and because of what they symbolized abroad.

When reporters and officials criticized anti-Asian American discrimination as unpatriotic, however, they implied that accepting residential integration was a “sacrifice” whites sometimes had to make for the nation—not a right all citizens should enjoy, regard- less of color. By the early 1950s mainstream black groups, fearful of

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55. Von Eschen, Race Against Empire, 107; Plummer, Rising Wind, 211–212. 56. California State Assembly, House Resolution 33, March 19, 1952.

red-baiting, had largely stopped criticizing American foreign policy, but they still tried to use concern about America’s image abroad to push for greater civil rights at home.55 White Californians remained largely impervious to such African American arguments. Discrimi- nation against Asian Americans, many reasoned, might have real and direct consequences and thus require “sacrifices,” but America was barely involved in colonial Africa. Conveniently, this “logic” also happened to conform to prevailing white racial fears and racial as- sumptions in postwar California.

Many of the white Californians who eventually accepted Asian American neighbors thus continued to reject African American ones, often quite violently. Less than a month after the Sheng refer- endum, white vigilantes firebombed the home of a black teacher who had moved into a formerly all-white neighborhood of Los An- geles. When three state assemblyman submitted a resolution argu- ing that “such incidents are not in keeping with the American tradi- tion and way of life and furnish material to be used as propaganda by the Communists,” the measure died in committee. Its demise attracted little attention, nor did scores of editors, citizens, and elected officials across the nation rush to condemn the vigilantes of Los Angeles.56

Indeed, publicized incidents of anti-Asian American housing discrimination drew widespread condemnation throughout the 1950s while African Americans and many Mexican Americans who faced harsher prejudice received comparatively little sympathy. A little more than a year after Southwood, the Taylors, a black family, bought a home in another South San Francisco tract. The Wat- sonville Register-Pajaronian may have believed that South San Fran- cisco had learned its lesson, but close to 300 white neighbors quickly met to plan their response to the unwanted newcomers. While resi- dents acknowledged the Taylors’ legal right to move in, they prom- ised that “we’ll let them know we won’t serve them ice cream every night.” Despite such threats, the incident received little attention. The Palo Alto Times also erred when it claimed that the public outcry over the William Lee affair was “heartening evidence that this type of prejudice is on its way out.” A year later, realtors blockbusted the Belle Haven tract on the border of Menlo Park and Palo Alto; the

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57. “Neighbors Object to Negro Family,” San Francisco Chronicle, Dec. 11, 1953, p. 6; “Anti-Chinese Attitude Not Popular Here,” 6; Timothy Fong, The First Suburban Chinatown: The Remaking of Monterey Park, California (Philadelphia, 1994), 21–23.

58. Bland, “Report on Garden Grove,” 1–3; David Perlman, “Willie Mays Is Refused S.F. House—Negro,” San Francisco Chronicle, Nov. 14, 1957, pp. 1, 22; Steve W. LaBounty, “Willie Mays on Miraloma Drive,” in Streetwise [online journal] (San Francisco, 2000, ac- cessed May 2, 2003); available from http://www.outsidelands.org/sw5.html.

neighborhood became virtually all-black within two years. Perhaps the Palo Alto Times should have specified that anti-Asian American prejudice was on its way out. After all, white residents of the new Monterey Park subdivision of Los Angeles paid little attention to the Mexican Americans and Asian Americans moving to the tract. They began to protest only when blacks tried to buy homes there as well.57

The aftermath of the Sammy Lee case once again highlighted the divergent treatment of Asian Americans and African Americans. Two years after Sammy Lee moved to Anaheim, African American Army lieutenant Harold Bauduit purchased a home in Lee’s neigh- borhood. Many of the same residents who had welcomed Lee and his Chinese American wife now formed a committee to force out Bauduit, apparently little concerned about the message they were sending to the world. Nor did star power mean a great deal in such situations. When Willie Mays moved to San Francisco with the for- mer New York Giants, white neighbors in the posh St. Francis Wood district objected to the black baseball star’s attempts to buy a home there. The NAACP and Mayor George Christopher intervened, but Mays received little of the sympathy and none of the home offers that Lee had. No one suggested that Jim Crowing Willie Mays made America look bad overseas. Neither Vice President Nixon nor the FHA investigated the Mays case; the governor said nothing, and even Mayor Christopher admitted that he was powerless to do any- thing but try to negotiate. While Mays finally got his home, many of his neighbors never accepted his presence among them; vigilantes were still throwing bottles through his windows a year later.58

The Southwood affair ended better, creating publicity that de- stroyed America Plus. Until the tract vote became national news, the group’s organizers believed they could collect the necessary money and signatures to get their proposition on the California ballot in November 1952. But Southwood showed how “Freedom of Choice” might look in practice. Once Americans began attacking the South- wooders for creating communist propaganda, America Plus’s for-

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59. Notes, circa Feb. 1952, “Housing” file, carton 1, Civic Unity Papers. 60. “Editorials,” folder 567, “Discrimination—Racial— General—Housing 1940–

1950 clippings,” American Civil Liberties Union-Northern California papers, North Baker Library, California Historical Society, San Francisco; “Sad Story Has Happy End- ing,” San Francisco News, Jan. 11, 1954, Sheng Collection; Elaine D. Johnson, “Survey of Peninsula Realtors,” Nov. 6, 1957, p. 1, “Survey of Peninsula Realtors” file, carton 45, NAACP-WC Papers. In two September 1999 e-mails to the author, Richard Sheng noted that his family moved in 1955 and that he recalled no other nonwhite family living in his neighborhood up to that point. The 1960 U.S. Census (Washington, D.C., 1960), 56 –57, suggests that Asian Americans but not blacks were able to find homes on the Peninsula by 1960. “Other” races were evident in significant numbers in Menlo Park neighborhoods in which no African Americans lived, or in which only one or two lived. The same was the case for San Mateo, Redwood City, and similar towns. The 1950 census did not include breakdowns for the San Francisco Peninsula. However, the Chinese Press of June 30, 1950, featured articles on Chinese American life in Peninsula towns with few if any blacks.

tunes quickly faded. Widespread support for a Chinese American family thus crippled an organization formed largely to check Afri- can American civil rights gains. America Plus soon relocated to Tulsa, Oklahoma.59

The Sheng family also had a happy ending to their story. After baby Fred arrived, Sing and Grace Sheng started their home search anew and eventually purchased a house in an all-white section of the growing San Francisco Peninsula town of Menlo Park. The relative ease with which they bought their home highlighted once again the changing attitudes of white homeowners in 1950s California. Before the end of World War II, restrictive covenants had prevented all nonwhites except servants from living almost anywhere on the Pen- insula. Yet by the early 1950s, Asian Americans were moving into several Peninsula towns without incident, and no one protested the Shengs’ arrival in Menlo Park. Having outgrown their home, the Shengs moved on in 1955. So did many of their white neighbors, al- beit for a different reason: Their tract was very near Belle Haven, which white realtors were aggressively blockbusting. The Shengs had inadvertently joined the tide of white flight. And in the late 1950s residents and realtors in Menlo Park and neighboring com- munities were still fighting the black “influx” that they so feared.60

* * * Foreign policy concerns were obviously not the only factors

influencing white homeowners’ perceptions of other racial groups and their comparative desirability in 1950s California. Wartime mi- gration had changed the demographics of the urban state: African

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61. Mexican Americans were the largest minority group in the Los Angeles area at this time and had been the largest minority group in Los Angeles County (but not the city) before the war. However, census officials classified Mexican Americans as “white” be- tween 1930 and 1960, making their movements more difficult to track from census tract to census tract.

62. Brooks, “Ascending California’s Racial Hierarchy,” 207. 63. Quoted in Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 89.

Americans had become the largest minority group in many Califor- nia cities, especially in the Bay Area.61 And white homeowners, whether migrants or oldtimers, frequently came to believe the same ideas about racial values and comparative desirability so common elsewhere in the nation. Authorities often encouraged such feel- ings. Federal housing officials and their local agents segregated black migrants and oldtimers in public and subsidized private hous- ing during and after the war. The FHA endorsed redlining, restric- tive covenants, and similar housing practices in California’s boom- ing suburbs as well.62

Still, American foreign policy played a significant role in help- ing Asian Americans escape the segregation that trapped so many blacks in postwar California’s inner cities. During World War II, fed- eral officials reinforced white perceptions of Asian Americans as foreign through their treatment of both Japanese American “ene- mies” and Chinese American “allies.” After the war, as racial conflict over housing became widespread, the U.S. government endorsed positive ideas about the values and desirability of Asians by helping them fight communism. American policymakers wanted to contain communism more than promote democracy; their support for dic- tators such as South Korea’s Syngman Rhee and Taiwan’s Chiang Kai-shek demonstrated as much. But the millions of Americans whose friends and loved ones were fighting in Korea, who believed in President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s domino theory and who wor- ried about domestic communist influence, likely took America’s professed ideals very seriously.

As a result, the Cold War affected African American and Asian American opportunities quite differently. Conservative legislators, particularly Southerners, routinely red-baited black civil rights ac- tivists. During a debate about a permanent FEPC bill, Georgia Sen- ator Richard B. Russell even claimed that “we are told that we must pass the FEPC bill because the communists are in favor of it.” 63

Asian Americans did not face the same organized legislative resis-

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64. One notable exception was Southern white opposition to Hawaiian statehood. This opposition was based almost entirely on the racial diversity of the territory’s popula- tion, almost half of which was of Asian origin.

65. Von Eschen, Race Against Empire, 3.

tance as they sought increased rights.64 Western legislators had abandoned anti-Asian politics; California’s Senator Knowland did not stop supporting the Nationalist government in Taipei just be- cause political opponents dubbed him the “senator from Formosa.” Asian Americans also faced less hostility than blacks did from the ex- ecutive branch. Historian Penny Von Eschen has argued that after World War II the Truman administration sought “the systematic re- pression of . . . anti-colonial activists” and tried to make “the op- pression of Africans and people of African descent a secondary is- sue.” Presidents Truman and Eisenhower both had significantly different agendas for Asia.65

Asian Americans continued to view the connection between their rights and foreign policy with discomfort, however. White neighbors sometimes treated them with more consideration than African Americans or Mexican Americans. They found that their status as “different” nonwhites could help them get jobs in indus- tries hostile to other minorities. They bought homes in some dis- tricts where white vigilantes firebombed black neighbors. Yet Asian Americans, whether of Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Filipino, or In- dian descent, still rejected the perception that they were foreigners, even when that perception created unique opportunities for them. They knew all too well the dangers of shifting public opinion and political rhetoric. More importantly, they were U.S. citizens, and many were tired of waiting—as some had for several generations— for their fellow Americans to recognize that fact.

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