In San Francisco, Chinese children (even American-born) had long been denied access to public schools. In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned Chinese immigration for a period of 10 years and prevented all Chinese from becoming naturalized citizens. The Tapes’ rise from young immigrants to prosperous middle-class San Franciscans took place against a backdrop of growing anti-Chinese sentiment, and even violence. READ MORE: History of San Francisco's Chinatown The era of Chinese exclusion Mamie was born in 1876, followed by two more children, Frank and Emily. He and Mary settled in the Cow Hollow neighborhood of San Francisco (then called Black Point), an area with few other Chinese residents. Mary and Jeu Dip were married in a Christian ceremony he took the English name Joseph, and they both adopted the German surname Tape.īy the late 1870s, Joseph was operating a successful delivery business, along with other ventures, and had become a well-regarded businessman in both the white and Chinese communities. Renamed after the matron of the home, she had been thoroughly schooled in English and Westernized manners. After a few months in Chinatown, during which she may have been forced to work in a brothel, she had been taken in by the Ladies’ Protection and Relief Society and raised in a home for destitute girls. In 1875, Jeu Dip married Mary McGladery, a young woman who had immigrated from the Shanghai region in 1868, when she was 11. So Jeu Dip got a job working as a house servant for a dairy rancher, and later graduated to driving the milk-delivery wagon. By that time, 20 years after the Gold Rush began, jobs in the mining industry were hard to find, according to Mae Ngai, author of The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America, which chronicles the Tape family story. A tale of two immigrantsīorn Jeu Dip in Guangdong Province in southern China, Joe Tape had come to San Francisco around 1864, at the age of 12. The Tape family, including (L-R) Joseph Tape, Emily Tape, Mamie Tape, Frank Tape, and Mary Tape, crica 1884. READ MORE: Building the Transcontinental Railroad: How 20,000 Chinese Americans Made it Happen They filed a lawsuit on behalf of their daughter against both Hurley and the San Francisco Board of Education-and they won. Due to their appearance, customs and religious beliefs, people of Chinese descent were assumed at the time to be incapable of assimilating to mainstream American culture.įaced with this stubborn prejudice, Mamie’s parents, who had come to the United States as children and thoroughly Westernized themselves in language, dress and lifestyle, decided to fight back. When Joseph and Mary Tape, a prosperous middle-class Chinese American couple, tried to enroll their eldest daughter, Mamie, at the all-white Spring Valley Primary School in September 1884, Principal Jennie Hurley refused to admit her, citing the existing school-board policy against admitting Chinese children.Īt the time, anti-Chinese sentiment ran high in California, as many white Americans blamed Chinese immigrants for taking their jobs during tough economic times. Hurley, resulted in one of the most important civil rights decisions you’ve likely never heard of. Board of Education, 8-year-old Mamie Tape of San Francisco, and her persistent parents, did the same for Chinese-American students. Nearly 70 years before Topeka’s Linda Brown and others challenged restrictive school laws on behalf of African Americans, sparking the legal battle that resulted in the landmark Supreme Court decision Brown v.
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