Date of Award
2025
Document Type
Honors Thesis (Colby Access Only)
Department
Colby College. History Dept.
Advisor(s)
Arnout van der Meer
Second Advisor
Robert Weisbrot
Abstract
In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Hart-Celler Act into law, dismantling the national origins quota system and opening U.S. borders to increased immigration. Less than a decade later, in the 1974 Lau v. Nichols case, the Supreme Court ruled that San Francisco public schools had violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by failing to provide language support for students with limited English proficiency. In 1982, two white autoworkers, Ronald Ebens and Michael Nitz, murdered Vincent Chin, a Chinese American draftsman, in a racially motivated hate crime. Chinese Americans’ dynamic educational advocacy efforts throughout the 20th century offers a throughline to connect and reconstruct these flashpoints in American history. Drawing from the San Francisco Unified School District’s archival records, newspaper articles, and legislative records, this thesis focuses on Chinese Americans’ fight for educational advocacy in San Francisco public schools and universities from 1965 to the 1980s. Examining American history through Chinese Americans’ educational advocacy efforts reveals how education has, and continues to, function both as a tool of oppression and as a powerful mechanism to develop broader Asian American and racial minority identities, negotiating belonging, and redefine the meaning of an American identity.
Keywords
Asian American Education, Education Advocacy, Asian American Identity Formation, Asian American History, Chinese American Education, San Francisco
Recommended Citation
Sung, Malia, "Assimilation Through Education: Tracing the Development of Chinese American Education Advocacy in San Francisco, 1965-1980s" (2025). Honors Theses. Paper 1510.https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/honorstheses/1510