The Fight for Asian American Civil Rights (ePub)

From the early 1900s, liberal Protestants grafted social welfare work onto spiritual concerns on both sides of the Pacific. Their goal: to forge links between whites and Asians that countered anti-Asian discrimination in the United States. Their test: uprooting racial hatreds that, despite their efforts, led to the shameful incarceration of Japanese Americans in World War II. Sarah M. Griffith draws on the experiences of liberal Protestants, and the Young Men's Christian Association in particular, to reveal the intellectual, social, and political forces that powered this movement. Engaging a wealth of unexplored primary and secondary sources, Griffith explores how YMCA leaders and their partners in the academy and distinct Asian American communities labored to mitigate racism. The alliance's early work, based in mainstream ideas of assimilation and integration, ran aground on the Japanese exclusion law of 1924. Yet their vision of Christian internationalism and interracial cooperation maintained through the World War II internment trauma. As Griffith shows, liberal Protestants emerged from that dark time with a reenergized campaign to reshape Asian-white relations in the postwar era.|
Cover
TItle page
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. "We Must Fight for the Lord and Japan": Christian Internationalism in the Pacific
2. A Splendid Storehouse of Facts: Establishing the Survey of Race Relations on the Pacific Coast
3. Once I Was an American: Asian North American Resistance in the Interwar Period
4. A New Pacific Community: Debating Equality in the Interwar Period
5. "The Injustice of Internment": Expanding Coalitions in the Internment Era
6. The Legacies of a Movement
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index|Sarah M. Griffith is an associate professor of history at Queens University of Charlotte.