SAN FRANCISCO (CN) – In its latest effort to reckon with its past, the city of San Francisco will change the name of a public playground that honors a former congressman who pushed to extend a notorious anti-Chinese immigration law.
Serving as San Francisco's congressman from 1899 to 1903 and 1905 to 1924, German-born Julius Kahn wrote legislation to make the Chinese Exclusion Act, originally set to expire in 1902, a permanent law of the land until its repeal in 1943. It was the first U.S. law to bar a specific ethnic group from entering the country.
Earlier this week, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to remove Kahn's name from the playground on the edge of the majestic Presidio park with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge.
"Former Congressman Julius Kahn's anti-Asian immigration policies during the early 1900s did not espouse the values that San Francisco stands for today," San Francisco Supervisor Norman Yee said before the vote Tuesday.
It is just the latest in a series of steps San Francisco has taken recently to address some of the uglier chapters in its history. The city also moved to rebrand Columbus Day as Indigenous People's Day, get rid of a monument that some say glorifies the conquest of Native Americans, and rename Justin Herman Plaza, which honored a former city planner who oversaw the demolition of a black neighborhood in the 1960s for a major redevelopment project.
San Francisco historian John Martini says re-examining historical figures, like the slave-owning founding fathers, sometimes requires a more nuanced analysis that weighs the good and bad contributions of those individuals. But when it comes to Kahn, Martini thinks it's not such a close call.
"He was a good example of being a stone racist," Martini said. "Even by the most generous standard, there's no reason to honor people like that."
Kahn's grandson, Julius "Sandy" Kahn III, disagrees. In a San Francisco Chronicle op-ed published in May, the junior Kahn argued that anti-Chinese legislation was "widely supported by the people of San Francisco and California" at that time. He noted his grandfather's role in bringing the World's Fair to San Francisco in 1915 and urged the board not to "dismiss his great works and good deeds for actions he endeavored to make amends."
A history of Chinese exclusion
Three miles east of the playground, a permanent exhibit at the Chinese Historical Society in San Francisco's Chinatown examines the impact of the Chinese Exclusion Act, passed in 1882, on Chinese American families and the nation's civil rights laws.
"For those families who date their American experience prior to 1965, there wasn't a single family in the Chinese community that was not touched by the Chinese Exclusion Act, both what came before and the subsequent reenactment and broadening of that act," said Douglas Chan, vice president of the Chinese Historical Society's board of directors.
U.S. laws barring Chinese workers from entering the country came after federal courts struck down a series of state and local laws that made it harder for Chinese-Americans to work and earn money in California.
In 1850, California imposed a $20 monthly tax on foreign miners, which was almost exclusively enforced against Chinese workers. The state also passed laws requiring shipmasters to post bond for alien passengers, prohibiting Chinese immigrants from setting foot on land, and imposing a tax on every Chinese adult who was not already taxed or engaged exclusively in producing rice, sugar, tea or coffee.
In 1863, the state invalidated all testimony of Chinese witnesses against white people. This allowed white people to attack or kill Chinese people with impunity unless another white person was willing to testify against them.