1914 Justice for the “Wilmington Three”

This curious deportation case arose in Wilmington, N. C. in which 3 adolescent Chinese boys won their right to remain in the U. S.  Even though they had apparently entered the country legally as sons of merchants,  each of them were found working in a Chinese laundry. An attempt was made to deport them on

Jung Wing, A Pre-Civil War Chinese Laundryman in Atlanta

Jung Wing, a Chinese who died at age 90 in 1944 in Atlanta, may well have been one of the first laundrymen not only in the South but anywhere in the U. S.  According to his obituary, he was washing clothes near Atlanta when it was still named Marthasville prior to the “War Between the

In Praise of Chinese Laundrymen (New York Times, 1901)

Journalistic articles of a century ago typically loved to describe Chinese in unflattering terms such as “slant-eyed, pig-tailed celestials” so it was a surprise to find a 1901 article in the New York Times that actually complimented Chinese laundrymen as  shown in the headline below . The article describes how Chinese laundrymen in New York’s