Vol. 73/No. 37      September 28, 2009

Sometimes considered New York’s third Chinatown—following lower Manhattan and the Flushing neighborhood of Queens—Sunset Park in Brooklyn is estimated to have the fourth largest Chinese community in the United States, according to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

Many Chinese immigrants who ended up in Brooklyn arrived first on the West Coast where they built transcontinental railroads, not migrating east until the 1870s. With the railroads completed, the U.S. rulers no longer deemed “coolie” labor necessary and began a propaganda campaign to stop Chinese entry into the United States, labeling Chinese as drug users, disease-ridden, and “American jobs” stealers.

Early Chinese in Brooklyn made a living running or working in laundries and restaurants, or as servants, seamen, or merchants.

One display in the exhibit featured an article from the Sept. 1, 1876, Brooklyn Eagle, entitled “Mongols: Brooklyn Invaded by the Celestials.” It described the opening of a Chinese laundry, and the threat of a vigilante committee to “seize the Chinamen by their pig tails” and drive them out of town.

On the pretext that many workers arriving from East Asia were convicts, in 1875 Congress passed the Page Act, under which an American consul had to approve all immigration from the “Orient.” Female applicants were often labeled “prostitutes,” preventing many husbands from reuniting with their wives.

Under the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the Chinese were prohibited from entering the United States altogether, with the exception of select students and merchants. It was not until 1965, following on the heels of the proletarian battles of the 1950s and 1960s that smashed Jim Crow segregation, that the United States took national origin quotas and racial restrictions off the books.

The exhibit also featured examples of how Chinese resistance to institutionalized racism helped establish legal precedents. One of the more notable cases was the attempt by customs officials in 1895 to deport Wong Kim Ark, a U.S.-born Chinese worker, upon returning to San Francisco from China. Unwilling to accept deportation and challenging it up to the Supreme Court, United States v. Wong Kim Ark established in 1898 that anyone born on U.S. soil is a citizen.

Another example was that of Augustus “Ahing” Frederick, a resident of the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn and a native of Trinidad, who applied for citizenship in 1930. After listing his father as Philip Ahing, a man of possible Chinese ancestry, his request was denied until his mother, still living in Trinidad, sent sworn testimony that she “never cohabited with any Chinese.”

One of the final panels notes the conditions Chinese workers face today in Brooklyn. For example, many new immigrants who work in the Sunset Park garment district often work as many as 17 hours in one day and earn less than minimum wage.

The curator of the exhibit was Andy Urban. Interviews with Chinese immigrants, done in collaboration with the Museum of Chinese in America and P.S. 94 in Sunset Park, are available at brooklynhistory.org. Willie Cotton contributed to this article.  
 
 
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