The history of Chinese and African Americans is a multifaceted narrative filled with cultural exchange, migration, solidarity, and racial tensions. Understanding this history requires acknowledging the unique experiences and challenges faced by both communities, as well as the moments of collaboration and conflict that have shaped their relationship.
Image Source: John Thomson, 1869 / Welcome Collection
Early Encounters and Immigration
China has a long and complex history that is full of cultural exchange and migration. While most people are aware of China’s rich history of interaction with other Asian cultures, few know about its history with African cultures. In fact, in recent years, historians have found more evidence about the rich history of the first Black people in China.
The first recorded presence of Black people in China dates back to the Tang dynasty (618-907 AD), according to Black Past. During this time, the Silk Road was a major trade route that connected China to the rest of the world. It was through this route that the first Black people, known as the “foreign blacks,” arrived in China.
The history of Chinese Americans or the history of ethnic Chinese in the United States includes three major waves of Chinese immigration to the United States, beginning in the 19th century. The first Chinese people of this wave arrived in the United States around 1815. Shortly after the American Revolutionary War, as the United States had recently begun transpacific maritime trade with Qing, Chinese came into contact with American sailors and merchants at the commercial port of Canton (Guangzhou). There, local individuals heard about opportunities and became curious about America.
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The main trade route between the United States and China then was between Canton and New England, where the first Chinese arrived via Cape Horn (the only route as the Panama Canal did not exist). These Chinese were mainly merchants, sailors, seamen, and students who wanted to see and acquaint themselves with a strange foreign land they had only heard about. American missionaries in China also sent small numbers of Chinese boys to the United States for schooling. From 1818 to 1825, five students stayed at the Foreign Mission School in Cornwall, Connecticut.
At first only a handful of Chinese came, mainly as merchants, former sailors, to America. Maritime trade began the history of Chinese Americans. In 1834, Afong Moy became the first female Chinese immigrant to the United States; she was brought to New York City from her home of Guangzhou by Nathaniel and Frederick Carne, who exhibited her as "the Chinese Lady".
The California Gold Rush and Labor
Chinese immigrants in the 19th century worked in the California Gold Rush of the 1850s and the Central Pacific Railroad in the 1860s. They also worked as laborers in Western mines. By 1852, there were 25,000; over 300,000 by 1880: a tenth of the Californian population-mostly from six districts of Canton (Guangdong) province-who wanted to make their fortune in the 1849-era California Gold Rush. From the outset, they were met with the distrust and overt racism of settled European populations, ranging from massacres to pressuring Chinese migrants into what became known as Chinatowns.
The money to fund their journey was mostly borrowed from relatives, district associations or commercial lenders. In addition, American employers of Chinese laborers sent hiring agencies to China to pay for the Pacific voyage of those who were unable to borrow money. The entry of the Chinese into the United States was, to begin with, legal and uncomplicated and even had a formal judicial basis in 1868 with the signing of the Burlingame Treaty between the United States and China.
Although the newcomers arrived in America after an already established small community of their compatriots, they experienced many culture shocks. The Chinese immigrants neither spoke nor understood English and were not familiar with Western culture and life; they often came from rural China and therefore had difficulty in adjusting to and finding their way around large towns such as San Francisco.
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Asian-Black Solidarity Movements for Liberation
Discrimination and Exclusion
They suffered racial discrimination at every level of White society. Many Americans were stirred to anger by the "Yellow Peril" rhetoric. Newspapers condemned employers who were initially pro-Chinese.
Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act prohibiting immigration from China for the following ten years. This law was then extended by the Geary Act in 1892. It was the first significant law ever to prevent immigration and naturalization on the basis of race. These laws not only prevented new immigration but also the reunion of the families of thousands of Chinese men already living in the United States who had left China without their wives and children. In 1924, the law barred further entries of Chinese. Those already in the United States had been ineligible for citizenship since the previous year. Also by 1924, all Asian immigrants (except people from the Philippines, which had been annexed by the United States in 1898) were utterly excluded by law, denied citizenship and naturalization, and prevented from owning land.
Key Legislation Affecting Chinese Immigration
| Legislation | Year | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Chinese Exclusion Act | 1882 | Prohibited immigration from China for ten years. |
| Geary Act | 1892 | Extended the Chinese Exclusion Act. |
| Chinese Exclusion Repeal Act | 1943 | Permitted Chinese immigration to the United States. |
| Immigration and Nationality Act | 1965 | Lifted national origin quotas, allowing large-scale Chinese immigration. |
Black and Asian Solidarity in American History
Asian and Black communities’ histories have always been intertwined, their struggles connected, and their collective liberation dependent on their unity. Asian and Black communities have been strongest when they’ve sought to dismantle White supremacy together. In fact, there have been countless examples of powerful and moving coalitions between Asian and Black communities in the last 200 years that have led to major leaps forward in racial justice.
- Frederick Douglass’s opposition to restrictions on Chinese immigration: In his 1869 “Composite Nation” speech, abolitionist Frederick Douglass argued on behalf of Chinese immigration to America, urging Americans not to fear Asian languages or cultures. He advocated for free migration and emphasized equality and human rights.
- Black support for the Filipino community during the Philippine-American War (1899-1913): Black leaders such as Ida B. Wells and Bishop Henry M. military positions to join the Filipino freedom fighters.
- Black opposition to the Vietnam War (1955-75): Recognizing the unjust nature of the war, African American leaders such as Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. openly denounced it.
- Asian American women activists’ work in abolition and Black liberation: Grace Lee Boggs and Yuri Kochiyama were heavily involved in activism surrounding abolition and liberation.
- The Third World Liberation Front: Together, BSU and the Third World Liberation Front battled the administration, demanding reforms such as the hiring of minority faculty members.
Frederick Douglass
The Mississippi Delta: A Unique Intersection
With slavery abolished in the reconstituted Union, and as newly enslaved populations began to migrate north, cotton, sugar, rice and tobacco planters in the Mississippi Delta lured Chinese contract laborers to their farms. In 1880, according to records surfaced by historian James Loewen in his book The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White, 51 Chinese residents lived in the Mississippi Delta. By 1960, the population had grown to 1,145, though numbers are believed to be higher (and do not count mixed Chinese and Black residents, who were almost always classified as Black).
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Plantation owners were “trying to get more cheap labor, because African Americans left the state,” says Joyce Dixon-Lawson, the former manager of research and genealogy at the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. Not recognized as white or Black, and barred from white neighborhoods or schools, Chinese men found homes in Black neighborhoods.
By the early 1900s, Loewen estimated that as many as 30 percent of Chinese men in Mississippi were married to or living with Black women. Once in Mississippi, Wong met Emma Clay, a Black woman born in 1865 on a plantation. The couple married in 1881, when Emma was 16, and together, they operated a grocery, Charlie’s Store. Within a year of marriage, Emma gave birth to their first son. They had 13 children together (four did not survive into adulthood). Rodell Sing Sr. was born in 1903.
Mississippi schools were still segregated, and Chinese students were barred from white schools. In Greenville, a one-room Chinese schoolhouse opened on a grassy knoll near the levee. On the outside, it looked like a single-story, shotgun-style home. Inside, a teacher offered lessons in English to grades 1-12. Rodell Sr., meanwhile, attended the Sacred Heart Catholic Parish and School, which opened in 1913 along with Greenville’s Black and mixed-race children. Rodell Jr. and his brother Victor would also attend Sacred Heart.
The Case of Gong Lum v. Rice
In 1927, the Supreme Court heard a case brought by Gong Lum, a Chinese immigrant father who sued the government to enroll his Chinese American daughter Martha into a white school in Rosedale, Mississippi, after the board of education decided she should attend a local Black school instead. The Court sided with Mississippi, declaring that excluding Chinese children from white schools was not a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Today, inside the Greenville History Museum, framed class photos hang on walls from Greenville High School. Amid the white faces, visitors can spot a few lone Chinese students. Sue Jean Wong, class of 1955. Frances Seu, class of 1962.
China and Black Internationalism
During the Cold War, several prominent African American radical activist-intellectuals - including W.E.B. and Shirley Graham Du Bois, journalist William Worthy, Marxist feminist Vicki Garvin, and freedom fighters Mabel and Robert Williams - traveled and lived in China. There, they used a variety of media to express their solidarity with Chinese communism and to redefine the relationship between Asian struggles against imperialism and black American movements against social, racial, and economic injustice.
A defining moment in the history of US radicalism’s Maoist turn remains Black Panther Party (BPP) founder Bobby Seale’s recollection of the role of Quotations from Chairman Mao in building the Panthers’ organization and ideology.
This book explores the close relationships between three of the most famous twentieth-century African Americans, W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Langston Hughes, and their little-known Chinese allies during World War II and the Cold War - journalist, musician, and Christian activist Liu Liangmo, and Sino-Caribbean dancer-choreographer Sylvia Si-lan Chen.
Mao Zedong meeting W.E.B. Du Bois
