Tape v. Hurley
1 media/Tape_family_thumb.jpg 2022-04-01T14:08:00-07:00 Curtis Fletcher 3225f3b99ebb95ebd811595627293f68f680673e 38486 5 In 1884, Joseph and Mary Tape’s child Mamie was barred from attending Spring Valley School in San Francisco when Principal Jennie Hurley cited school board policy against admitting Chinese children. The Tapes took the case to court, and the resultant Supreme Court Case marks a starting point for Asian Americans challenging school segregation and educational inequality. plain 2022-04-12T22:20:39-07:00 Courtesy of Jack Kim. Accessed via the Smithsonian National Museum of American History May Song d1852eca3c2ef08d1b19452a97883c9d415c394bThis page is referenced by:
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History of Public Education for Chinese Americans in Los Angeles
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1851 marked the earliest law establishing public education — referred to as “Common Schools” — in California. It divided state funding by the “whole number of children in the State” between ages five to eighteen without any specification of race. An 1852 law repealed and replaced the 1851 law, but similarly lacked racial restrictions.
However, growing anti-Chinese sentiments ushered in racial restrictions in law — the 1855 Act for Common Schools reduced the school population to only white children, which was further amended in 1860 to specifically bar “Negroes, Mongolians, and Indians” from public schools. In 1866, the law was rewritten to establish “separate but equal” schools, requiring non-white children to be educated in segregated schools.
As a mark of California's attempted societal erasure of Chinese immigrants, the law was again rewritten in 1870 to drop the requirement of educating Chinese children entirely. Chinese immigrants were forced to turn to private schools to educate their children — some attended Chinese Language Schools, while others were educated in religious schools.
Tape v. Hurley was a landmark case in which the California Supreme Court found the exclusion of a Chinese American student from public school based on her ancestry to be unlawful. The case had mixed results; it permitted Chinese children into public schools, but the court also gave the education board the right to establish a segregated school in San Francisco. As such, it wasn’t until the mid-twentieth century that minorities in California were able to attain victories in school desegregation.
In 1965, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. However, it wasn’t until 1978 that the Los Angeles Unified School District actually began to mandate racial integration across public schools.
In 1974, the Lau v. Nichols case legally mandated school districts to establish bilingual education programs. The LAUSD had pilot programs in four elementary schools, with three in Spanish and one in Chinese at Castelar. Then in the 1980s, the LAUSD Board required school staff to be desegregated as well.
