But immigrant Chinese parents learned from painful experience that an American education—even public education—was not a right for their children, but a privilege that had to be fought for. As early as the mid-nineteenth century, state authorities tried to exclude Chinese American children from attending white public schools, over the protests and petitions of their parents.

In 1859, San Francisco school board members, making no secret of their contempt for the Chinese (referring to them even as “baboons” and “monkeys”), shut down a public school for Chinese children, even though their parents were required to pay school taxes along with other residents of the city. Under public pressure, authorities reopened the Chinese school but passed state laws in the 1860s to segregate Asians, American Indians, and blacks from the white public school system. Little more than a decade later, during Reconstruction, a new California state law granted separate public education for blacks and Indians, but not Asians, giving local school officials the legal right to close down even the segregated school they had established for Chinese American children. (Chang 175-176)