Hong Yen Chang came to San Francisco 125 years ago and applied for a license to practice law to help

Hong Yen Chang came to San Francisco 125 years ago and applied for a license to practice law to help his fellow immigrants, but the prevailing winds were against him — the federal Chinese Exclusion Act and a set of California laws denying citizenship and employment to Chinese Americans. In a unanimous two-page ruling in 1890, the state Supreme Court said Chang, despite his New York state law license, was “a person of Mongolian ancestry” ineligible for the California bar.On Monday, the court — which now includes three Asian Americans among its seven justices — did its best to right the historical wrong.Chang entered the United States in 1872, at age 13, under a Chinese educational program. He graduated from Columbia Law School in 1886 and, two years later, became the nation’s only Chinese lawyer after a judge in New York state, with legislative approval, granted him naturalized citizenship and a law license.His 1890 application to practice law in California cited state laws that granted licenses to attorneys of good character who had been approved for practice in other states. But the state’s high court relied instead on the Chinese Exclusion Act, passed by Congress in 1882, and on California’s own set of exclusionary laws, written into the state Constitution after a constitutional convention in 1879 and subsequently approved by the voters.The constitutional provisions denied the right to vote to any native of China and directed the Legislature to pass laws forbidding employment of “any Chinese or Mongolian,” and to do everything within its power to discourage Chinese immigration. Lawmakers passed those statutes in their next session.Denied a law license, Chang pursued a career in diplomacy and finance, becoming an adviser to the Chinese Consulate in San Francisco. He also held consular posts in Vancouver, British Columbia, and Washington, D.C., and worked as a banker and as director of Chinese naval students in Berkeley before his death in 1926.Congress repealed the federal Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943, nine years before Californians removed the anti-Chinese provisions from the state Constitution. -- source link

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