January 2, 2025: 2025 Anniversaries: Two 1875 Laws

[A New Year means another blog series dedicated to historic anniversaries we’ll be commemorating this year. Leading up to a special weekend post on five films celebrating their 50^th this year!]

The Page Act, the Civil Rights Act, and the worst and best of America.

I’ve written a good bit about the Page Act of 1875, the nation’s first federal immigration law, both in this space and in other projects like my Considering History column and my podcast (where the Page Act frustratingly foreshadowed the Chinese Exclusion era that so affected the Celestials). In researching for the podcast’s Fifth Inning in particular, I learned about just how blatant California Representative Horace Page was in his arguments for this law and its attempts to restrict (if not entirely exclude) Chinese arrivals overall and Chinese women in particular, which he claimed were intended “to end the danger of cheap Chinese labor and immoral Chinese women.” And, for that matter, how none other than President Ulysses Grant echoed some of those prejudiced and xenophobic sentiments, as in his December 7, 1875 annual message to Congress: “I invite the attention of Congress to another evil—the importation of Chinese women, but few of whom are brought to our shores to pursue honorable or useful occupations.”

Grant’s endorsement of this racist and exclusionary federal law was particularly frustrating given his crucial role in that same year in the support for and passage of a far more progressive and inclusive law: the Civil Rights Act of 1875. Drafted by Radical Republican Senator Charles Sumner in a direct response to the developing system of racial segregation that would become known as Jim Crow, this law prohibited discrimination in any public conveyances and accommodations (so not just public transportation, but also “inns, theaters, and other places of public amusement”). Although the increasingly awful Supreme Court would later strike down the law in its 1883 Civil Rights Cases decision, it’s important not to let that eventual history minimize how progressive and significant the 1875 law was—and, for that matter, how much of an influence it was on the more famous and more enduring (we hope, he added in early 2025) Civil Rights Act of 1964.

So how can we possibly commemorate the 150^th anniversary of these diametrically opposed federal laws without minimizing one or the other? Certainly the duality helps remind us that many of the late 19^th century’s most ardent advocates of African American rights and equality were frustratingly unable to extend that perspective to Chinese and Asian Americans, as apparently illustrated by Grant but also and far more clearly by Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan. But to my mind it’s also a reflection of just how difficult it can be, and concurrently and not coincidentally how crucial it is, to fight for solidarity and community as well as rights and progress—to truly imagine and work toward, that is, liberty and justice for all. Even in periods of progress that balance isn’t easy to maintain, and in our more fraught and fragile eras (like the late 19^th century, and like right freaking now) it’s far easier still to throw certain Americans overboard. Let’s commemorate 1875 by recommitting that we not make the same mistake in 2025.

Last anniversary tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?