Reckoning with the racist legacy of our Founding Fathers

Stephen Mallory White’s statue was originally located at the center of Los Angeles’ justice system in downtown Los Angeles for decades. First it was in front of the Red Sandstone Courthouse in downtown Los Angeles. Then it was moved to the lawn in front of the Hall of Records. Next it was located in front of what is now the Stanley Mosk Courthouse. Then finally, after more than 80 years and perhaps 60 years of off-and-on lobbying from San Pedro civic leaders, it was located at Cabrillo Beach overlooking the San Pedro breakwater on a street that bears his name. 

For several decades, the county refused the entreaties of Harbor Area civic leaders and representatives to move the statue to some place of prominence at the Port of Los Angeles. During a period when awareness of Los Angeles racial history was heightened — a time when an African American mayor was at its helm — three African American city councilmen and the most revered supervisor by the African American community, Kenneth Hahn, was on the county board, a bureaucratic decision was made to ship the statue to San Pedro. This happened at the same time civic leaders like “Mr. San Pedro” John Olguin and White’s great great granddaughter were advocating for the statue’s move to Cabrillo Beach. 

Judge Michael L. Stern, who presided in civil trial courts in Los Angeles County since his appointment in 2001, said that White’s legal work to uphold the Chinese Exclusion Act, “disqualifies him from continued recognition by a statue standing in his honor, let alone the continued use of his name on a Los Angeles public school.” He went on to call White an “outmoded relic of a bygone era,” and that, “it is time to retire the statue of Stephen M. White.”

The question now remains of what to do with this historic statue that presides over the Port of Los Angeles — a port dependent on Pacific Rim trade dominated by Asian nations. 

The Back Story

The San Francisco-born attorney and politician was a Democrat — the same party that was beaten into submission after seceding from the Union to form the Confederacy and causing the Civil War. White was most notable for his service as a U.S. senator from California, but is particularly recognized for his efforts in securing an improved harbor for Los Angeles, free of corporate monopoly and getting the federal breakwater built. This achievement erased any recollection of his participation in the Workingmen’s Party — an upstart political party that played a critical role in California’s racist history. 

In the mid-nineteenth century, the United States encouraged Chinese immigration. Anson Burlingame, President Abraham Lincoln’s minister to China, advocated an open door for Chinese immigrants when he negotiated an 1868 treaty bearing his name providing for unrestricted immigration between the United States and China. U.S. industry, rich in resources but deficient in labor, wanted cost-effective Chinese laborers to work in factories and mines and to construct the transcontinental railroad.

The situation in China also encouraged migration. The Qing government was in decline and after the Opium War of 1842, China was seen internationally as weak and pliable, and Western powers negotiated a series of unfavorable treaties. Domestic problems included inflation, famine, civil unrest, opium abuse, and local rebellions. Understandably, many Chinese sought their fortunes in the American West. Chinese Americans became an increasing percentage of the Californian workforce. But the increase in the Chinese labor force coincided with rising unemployment and a severe depression from 1873 to 1878 (one of several devastating 19th Century America), leading many white Americans to blame their economic problems on the Chinese.

It was in this context that the populist racist, Denis Kearney, formed the Workingmen’s Party in San Francisco.  The party won 11 seats in the California state Senate and 17 in the state Assembly by 1878 and then rewrote the state’s constitution, denying Chinese citizens voting rights in California. The most important part of the constitution included the formation of the California Railroad Commission that would oversee the activities of the Central and Pacific Railroad companies that were run by Crocker, Huntington, Hopkins and Stanford. White joined the Workingmen’s Party on his third run for Los Angeles District Attorney’s office. He was still a part of the Workingmen’s Party when he joined the state’s legislature as a state senator.

The party took particular aim against cheap Chinese immigrant labor and the Central Pacific Railroad which employed them. Their goal was to “rid the country of Chinese cheap labor.” Its famous slogan was “The Chinese must go!” Kearney’s attacks against the Chinese were of a particularly virulent and openly racist nature, and found considerable support among white Californians of the time. Not unlike what we are seeing today. This sentiment led eventually to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

President Chester Arthur vetoed an earlier version imposing a 20-year ban, concluding that it was inconsistent with the treaty. The act had a number of enforcement mechanisms. For example, shipmasters who brought in Chinese laborers would be guilty of a misdemeanor. Chinese present in the country in violation of the act were deportable. The act also, redundantly, prohibited state and federal courts from naturalizing Chinese persons, even though they were already prohibited under the general racial restriction of the naturalization law.

However, Chinese laborers already in the U.S. on Nov. 17, 1880, or who came within 90 days of passage of the act, were permitted to be in the United States. Furthermore, a Chinese laborer lawfully in the United States who wanted to travel abroad could obtain a certificate authorizing his re-entry. Exclusion did not apply to merchants and diplomats; those in the U.S. could remain and others could enter in the future. The Chinese widely resented the act and many evaded it. However, Congress strengthened it over time. 

In 1884, responding to conflicting lower court decisions, Congress made clear that exclusion was based on Chinese race, not Chinese citizenship, nationality, or birth. A few years later, the Scott Act of 1888 invalidated re-entry certificates held by any Chinese who had left the United States for overseas trips with the assurance that they could come back. The Supreme Court upheld this retroactive repudiation of a promise many had relied upon in the unanimous decision of Chae Chan Ping v. United States.

White, as California’s lieutenant governor, co-authored the appellate brief with John F. Swift before the United States Supreme Court. White’s position was the same as Southerners who would not accept the potential success of Reconstruction as he utilized the nativist language of the Workingmen’s platform. White contended that the Chinese were so racially and culturally inferior and different from the majority that they could never assimilate into the American mainstream. 

White represented a brand of populism that was common and particular to California at the time. It was carried out by the policies and programs of the Workingmen’s Party and the Southern Democrats, which subjected people who were here as workers.

If we can seek the removal of Confederate statues and statues of Confederate personalities and white supremacists in the south and east, then most certainly we can take down a statue so representative of anti-Chinese and anti-Asian sentiment in the State of California. 

San Pedro has many buried secrets. For a significant part of the 20th century those secrets as well as racially restrictive covenants have shaped the way San Pedro looks and sees itself today. And that’s in the lifetime of the people who represent the majority in San Pedro and their parents and grandparents. There were many Japanese Americans who attended San Pedro High School before being sent off to internment camps during World War II and there were many shipyard workers from the South who came for jobs during that war.  

Why didn’t they stay here and live on the properties that they were able to acquire; in the businesses that they had established and be able to survive as did others? Neighborhoods south of 6th Street and west of Gaffey were not always a welcoming place for Asian Americans or Blacks. Racial covenant restrictions and redlining were not outlawed in California until 1968. And the Chinese Exclusion Act was not repealed until 1943 with the Magnuson Act when China had become an ally of the U.S. against Japan in World War II. It was a moment the United States needed to look the part of fairness and justice incarnate.

From Robert E. Lee to Nathan Bedford Forrest, the fight has been on to remove names associated with infamy and terror from places of honor. Which side of history will San Pedro be on?