May is Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month

I've been living for 25 years and I've never heard of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, but I have never been so excited to learn a new historical fact. On October 5, 1978, President Jimmy Carter put in place a law announcing Asian Pacific American Heritage Week. On October 23, 1992, community pioneers from around the nation saw more progress in Asian Pacific American history when President George Bush signed legislation designating May of each year as Asian Pacific American Heritage Month.

I didn't know that Asian Americans had such a pivotal hand in developing southern American society. There is a hidden history on the effect that Asian Americans had on the development of communities in Mississippi, and the Mississippi Delta specifically. Chinese immigrants moved to the southern United States soon after the Civil War to work on cotton plantations and farms. Later, during the Segregation Era (1900-1939), Chinese American families in the Mississippi Delta ran segregated grocery stores for both black and white customers, sometimes from shops located across the street from each other. The Chinese Americans themselves were ostracized and denied their civil rights while providing this essential service to their non-integrated local communities. They lived in quarters adjacent to their grocery stores because they were denied property ownership. For decades these Americans learned, worshiped, and socialized separately from the Delta’s mainstream population. After the Civil Rights Movement, education and career opportunities opened for following generations. For further history on the impact of Asian-Americans in Mississippi, three books you can check out from the Mississippi Library Commission are: Water Tossing Boulders: How a Family of Chinese Immigrants Led the First Fight to Desegregate Schools in the Jim Crow South by Adrienne Berard, The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White by James W. Loewen, and Lotus Among the Magnolias: the Mississippi Chinese by Robert Seto Quan. You can also visit the Mississippi Delta Chinese Heritage Museum at Delta State University in Cleveland.

Sources:

https://asianpacificheritage.gov/about/

https://www.npr.org/2017/03/18/519017287/the-legacy-of-the-mississippi-delta-chinese
http://mshistorynow.mdah.state.ms.us/articles/86/mississippi-chinese-an-ethnic-people-in-a-biracial-society