Support also came for foreign nationals and their children from a great many social workers and teachers who looked upon the immigrants and especially their children as material to be molded into American citizens. Children of immigrants were preached to about the possibility of success, sometimes even when their parents followed the migrant path or lived in a slum barrio because progressive teachers were always anxious to participate in the Americanization of the children of immigrants. The best that the white teachers or social workers in the South who tried to help blacks could do was to encourage them to adapt to the system of racial caste. Blacks in the South who had wonderful, dedicated African-American teachers could expect success only within the segregated system of caste. Children might become teachers themselves someday, or ministers, or even in a few exceptional cases lawyers or doctors, but all the people for whom and with whom they would work would be black. Even in the North, white teachers often thought it unrealistic to try to encourage their black students. An often-repeated anecdote about Malcolm X probably was typical. When he told his high school English teacher in Lansing, Michigan, that he would like to be a lawyer, the instructor urged him to be realistic. He quoted him as saying, “A lawyer—that’s no realistic goal for a nigger. You need to think about something you can be.”64 American history had a different meaning for African-American children than for the children of immigrants. Blacks who heard teachers talk about the American ideal of equality and the American dream of success knew better than to believe them. One black woman, writing about an elementary school history lesson in North Philadelphia around 1930, remembered, “school was dreadful.… We heard that George Washington never told a lie, that the Indians were savages, that … slaves were happy, because they were brought here to be civilized.”65 How, she asked, could she believe books and teachers that told blatant lies?
The progressive haole teachers at McKinley High School in Honolulu, often called “Tokyo High” in the 1920s and 1930s, constantly pressed the American dream of success on their Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, and Korean students. For many of them the dream seemed real. In a survey of seventh- and eighth-grade pupils at seventeen plantation schools in 1929, 8 percent of the youngsters said they wanted to be engineers, 11 percent doctors, lawyers, or teachers, 8 percent farmers, 12 percent businessmen, and only 1.7 percent laborers. At Kauai High School, more than 60 percent Japanese-American and less than 5 percent haole, half of the male students said they wanted to become professionals and another 20 percent businessmen. One boy, hoping to become a teacher, wrote, “When my father came from Japan, he was handicapped in his work. I intend to go to school to get an education and lead a better life and live up to the ideals of an American.”66
Mexican-American Richard Rodriguez remembered that his nun teacher read from the biographies of early American presidents and that the red and white poster over the nun’s desk said, “Open the doors of your mind with books.”67 Rodriguez’s father had come as a sojourner (he really wanted to move on to Australia) and found unskilled work in San Francisco in a cannery and later in a warehouse. The supervisor hated Mexicans, and Chinese, too, and there was no union. Like the father of Jesus Luna, Rodriguez’s father put his son in a school where teachers stimulated his imagination and ambition, leading him eventually to a Ph.D. and success as a writer.
There were even exceptional teachers who tried to show respect for the cultural backgrounds of their young ethnic pupils, something that almost never happened for black children. Ernesto Galarza, who came to the U.S. during the Mexican Revolution in 1910, wrote that children in his school were marched from the playground to the principal’s office “for calling someone a Wop, a Chink, a Dago or a Greaser.” At Lincoln elementary school in San Francisco, “making us into Americans did not mean scrubbing away what made us originally foreign.” The teachers actually tried to pronounce the children’s names correctly in Spanish or Japanese, and at that school no one was scolded or punished for speaking in his native tongue on the playground.68
In many schools in Hawaii and on the mainland, however, children were made to feel ashamed of their backgrounds. At the other extreme from Galarza’s experience were schools and teachers that showed no respect for Mexican language and culture and who treated Mexican-American children as inherently inferior.69 In Starr and Duval counties in Texas on the Mexican border, Mexican-American children went to schools that probably were as segregated and otherwise impoverished as most of those in the South; and those children had the added handicap of coming from homes in which English was not commonly spoken. But many who stayed put long enough in any one school probably met at least one teacher along the way who told them that by trying hard they might become successful in a world beyond the confines of their barrios or colonias.
The children of immigrant sojourners also often were encouraged by social workers in the church or settlement houses. Priests and secular social workers warmed to the task of shaping the newcomers into Americans.70 Nothing comparable existed for African-Americans to the network of settlement houses and other organizations that participated in the Americanization movement in the first few decades of the twentieth century, and despite the relentless cry of “yellow peril” heard from whites during the three decades that preceded the Second World War, Japanese and Chinese in cities and towns sometimes were seen as fit material for Americanization. The International Institute in San Francisco organized a Japanese girls’ club and taught Japanese women about American politics. As early as 1927, its Japanese Center published a bulletin with columns in both English and Japanese to help immigrants and their children adapt to and succeed in American life; similar efforts were made to work with the Chinese, Mexican, and Filipino communities.71 The Japanese in San Francisco may have had available the citizenship pamphlet published by the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1920, which included a Japanese version, presumably for the nisei (already citizens by virtue of having been born in the U.S.), who were urged to vote, run for office, and serve as jurors.72
One of the most striking differences between the situation of sojourners and their children throughout the first half of the twentieth century and that of blacks in the South was the opportunity for sojourners to organize to demand better working conditions. In a striking phrase, the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 1900 reported that Chinese workers were becoming “Americanized to the extent of enforcing such demands in some cases through the medium of labor organization.”73 The immigrants struck against bad conditions and low pay, something unthinkable for the black sharecroppers and tenant farmers of the South. As soon as Japanese workers learned about the annexation of Hawaii and were made aware that they were covered by American laws, they organized strikes that compelled a general wage increase of about 10 percent.74
The relative powerlessness of black workers in the South was signified by a series of events in the first few years of the century. In 1903, when Jim Crow policies governed the AFL-CIO, Mexican workers joined Japanese laborers in a strike in Ventura, California. In 1905, the year after an outbreak of an epidemic of race riots, W. E. B. Du Bois met with a group of African-Americans in Niagara Falls, Canada, to draw up a platform to demand freedom of speech, recognition of the basic principles of human brotherhood, and respect for the black working man. In the same year, a group of Japanese actors in Hawaii wrote and produced three plays protesting the condition of workers there, one of which stressed the opulence of the plantation manager. Although the sheriff of Oahu arrested five of the seven actors in the company, audiences in Honolulu saw the dramas.75 It was a kind of demonstration of ethnic resistance and solidarity on the spot that was impossible for blacks in the South if they wanted to work (or even live).